The specific problem that the US patent system enables is that patent rights can be assigned to anyone, just like any other property right.
That is what allows NPEs to exploit this manifest economic inefficiency.
Ending all patents very much throws the baby out with the bathwater.
The federal government can and should intervene to reform the laws that allow this.
[1], look at figures at end of paper. Figure one shows the percent of inventions in various industries that would not have been developed without patent protection, and it's 60% for pharm, >35% for chem, and significant for machinery, electrical. This chart is from 1986, so tech didn't exist as it does now. Many other charts, some much more recent, show that without patent protection a lot of current invention would not get done.
[2] is an interesting one, a recent paper studying the effect WWII had on innovation by making patents secret so enemies could not learn from them. The effect is that without patents making companies publish innovations, follow-on innovation was slowed significantly. So this provides evidence that patents add innovation by letting competitors learn more quickly.
[3] - patents in the UK : "We find evidence pointing to a positive association between patenting and innovative performance measured as turnover due to innovation, but not between patenting and subsequent employment growth."
[4] "We find that patent approvals help startups create jobs, grow their sales, innovate, and reward their investors. Exogenous delays in the patent examination process significantly reduce firm growth, job creation, and innovation, even when a firm’s patent application is eventually approved. Our results suggest that patents act as a catalyst that sets startups on a growth path by facilitating their access to capital. "
[5] "Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win the patent “lottery” by drawing lenient examiners have, on average, 55% higher employment growth and 80% higher sales growth five years later. Patent winners also pursue more, and higher quality, follow-on innovation. Winning a first patent boosts a startup’s subsequent growth and innovation by facilitating access to funding from VCs, banks, and public investors."
There's hundreds more papers - go to google scholar and search and learn about it.
Now, as to your statement, "Please provide some evidence, other than your intuition, that the patent system is necessary and useful, over no patent system. reply". Do you have any good survey papers or wide scale evidence to support that a patent system isn't necessary and useful? Anecdotes, blog posts, stories about this or that company are not solid evidence, since those all ignore the totality of evidence.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w25383
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul19/wwii-policy-kept-patents-s...
[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w19089
That said, several of the papers you cite don't show that the patent system itself is better than no patent system. They are all conditioned on there already being a patent system. So, they are in the form of "if you have a patent system, than 'x' situation/circumstance is better than 'y'.
For example, your #2 example says that when patents are secret, innovation drops compared to when they are open. What about when there are no patents at all? Secret is not even close to the same as 'no patents', because in a 'secret' patent system you have no idea if you are infringing on someone's patents and will be subsequently sued out of existence.
Similarly, in your #4 and #5 examples, that can be explained by how necessary having a patent is to securing yourself against lawsuits, but these fears wouldn't be relevant in a system without patents.
Sadly, IP, including patents, are forced on most countries by way of international trade agreements so it is hard to find real examples to discuss.
As for counter-literature, there is a significant amount as well, so this will likely end like every other 'sourced' internet debate. One of my favorite references is 'The Case Against Patents' [1] . Perhaps you will find it interesting.
[1] https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/wp/2012/2012-035.p...
When you make the first claim in a discussion, and your claim is counter to both economic theory (patents help) and the common arguments for a thing (patents help by adding disclosure and protecting small inventors), the burden on you is to prove why the economic theory or common understanding is wrong.
>several of the papers you cite don't show that the patent system itself is better than no patent system
All showed that the patent system provides benefits.
I'm already familiar with the St. Louis Fed paper. It's from 2012, and their opening sentence "The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless the latter is identified with the number of patents awarded – which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity." is directly refuted by the evidence I posted in papers from, respectively, 2018 (references your paper), 2019 (revised 2022), 2013, 2016 (directly addresses your paper, starting on page 1, again on page 5 - provides clear evidence that your paper has been superseded in the literature), and 2017.
So, 5 more recent papers against your favorite one? I think I'll choose the more recent work, especially since a few cite your work and provide direct and irrefutable evidence that there are benefits.
Most interestingly, if you read the Levine & Boldrin paper carefully, they fill it with anecdotes, but nearly zero actual broad data, since the broad data do not support their story. The strongest citations in their paper are back to their own papers, which, if you read those, are similarly anecdote based.
The proper way to do evidence is to take all evidence, not just the pieces and anecdotes one likes, and then analyze. Their paper simply doesn't do this. It's a collection of the stories they like, incredibly many, with extremely little other evidence, or new datasets, or new analysis, to make their case.
For example, my line [3] above shows exactly how to do research: they list the datasets they used, which are all known data for the respective question. They explain their methodology for analysis. They show the numerical outcomes. They explain the relevance.
There is not one anecdote in their paper. Now count how many anecdotes your paper makes to state their case (dozens? it's truly astounding).
You're welcome to show me where in their paper they provide analysis for such large scale, all encompassing data. It's well known in the literature this paper does not do so - it's a collection of anecdotes with a popular title. It doesn't prove the case it claims to by a long shot.
>One of my favorite references
The thing about favorite references is you need to follow up on later work, otherwise your favorite reference may well be invalidated by later work when you decide to pull it out.
I generally prefer more recent research, especially when it's numerous and they cite and address older research in question, to understand a topic.
>> That would mean only large companies would own patents. It would be the death of the independent inventor. No capital to make what you invented? Oh well…
> If you can't make what you invented, the whole world can't have your invention? That seems suboptimal for society.
Right now, a small independent inventor can use their patent rights to secure capital to produce their invention. If only "productive companies" can hold patents, instead of investing in small inventors, they'd just freeze them out until they lose their rights (or use that threat as leverage to buy the patents for less than they're worth).
The "whole world" won't get their invention, just the people rich enough to profit from it, and the inventor gets squat.
I'm trying to understand your point but it seems like you are saying that all people with sufficient capital would band together to prevent small inventors from getting funding for years?
Legal rights are often the only protections the little guy has. Take them away, and the big guys are better able to take advantage. The people with sufficient capital don't need to band together in a conspiracy, they just need to understand their advantage, and act accordingly.
And I don't know where you're getting "for years" from. If a small inventor/"[un]productive company" can hold a patent "for years," you're basically describing the current patent system, and the ancestor comment becomes a meaningless suggestion. If the ancestor comment isn't a meaningless suggestion, someone "with sufficient capital" should be able to sue an inventor's patent into nonexistence for being held by an "[un]productive company," which would be strong leverage to demand a lower price.
One of the biggest merits of the patent system is it gives independent small inventors a chance at seeing some success. A "reform" that undermines that is not a reform worth pursuing.
Also a lot of "reforms" proposed by internet commenters aren't very thought through. Often they're just narrow things aimed to stop some specific thing that's in the front of their mind, with little consideration of collateral damage.
I'm not sure whether today there are are many patents which are with small inventors and they are holding onto them till they gather enough funds to productionize them.
Not a perfect idea, but an idea to kick around on improving rather than just the blanket statments of "kill all patents" that are so trendy. Also, we don't have to say that all garage inventors are dead.
Annually around 1.5-2 millions patents are granted. How many episodes of Shark Tank has run till now and what subset of the participants had patents on their inventions?
And, how many of those inventors would not get any funding if there was no concept of patents.
Wrong. If you applied a tax to IP that increases relatively fast over time (say doubles each year), you could "easily" select the parameters so, that it makes cheap to hold your patent for a while after the invention ( assuming you have some revenue at least on sight), while making it too expensive to hoard patents for nothing, and make keeping the patents closed unnecessarily long for even the largest corporations.
You can't even just accept that the originating patent holder should be able to sue while anyone who buys the patent can't. Patent trolls would just hire the person who registered the patent or sue on their behalf.
There is no elegant solution to the patent troll problem. If someone can sue, then trolls can sue.
Should limit the extent of the damage caused by patent trolls.
EDIT: I accidentally included copyright in this. It is not.
If ARM stopped making CPU designs and decided to just live off of their ISA patents while doing little to no actual development, yeah, then they certainly shouldn't have the right to be milking that cow in perpetuity, in an ideal world.
This is the current system
Will it be enough to kill patents? Maybe
Afaik, there weren't any "huge corporations" around when the patent system was first devised, only what today would look like mid-size national companies. There is a good chance the initial legislators thought they were actually protecting the little guys. Alas, good intentions tend to pave roads to very hot places...
You can say patents relating to phones should be narrowed, but ending the patent system would be a hundred times more disastrous.
How would that work? So you are allowed to acquire legal rights, but if you try to enforce those rights, the federal government will take action against you? Seems like a bizarre and unnecessary trap to set.
If you really want to stop this kind of thing surely the more logical thing to do would just be to say that patent rights are personal, ie, they cannot be sold to third parties. Of course, that would lead to a significant devaluation of intellectual property, which (so the theory goes) would result in less innovation.
Other products have slow uptake. If you make a novel product with growing users, Google shouldn't be able to clone it at 3 years and push it to a billion of their users.