A small company (e.g., a startup) will never sue to enforce its patents because suing is too expensive. Because they won’t sue, they won’t be able to license the patents to anyone.

For a startup, however, patents can still have value in at least the following ways:

1. Patents on improvements can discourage established competitors who are using the same or similar improvements from suing the startup for infringing the competitors' patents.

2. A potential acquirer may want to acquire the company for its patents. The acquirer may be an established competitor who does have the resources to assert the patents against other competitors.

3. Patents encourage investors who see patents as residual assets that would be liquidated if the company fails.

Value (1) illustrates the absurdity of the patent system. Innovation, the thing the patent system ostensibly protects, is put at risk by..patents. And so the value of a patent for inventors is to protect their innovation from...patents.

Our patent system allows an inventor to patent an improvement to another's patented invention. Ideally, that should (1) encourage early inventors to continue to invest in improving their inventions before someone else does and (2) encourage new inventors to improve on existing, still-patented inventions by giving them ways to profit from their improvements.

There are very few places in law where you can legally stake a claim within someone else's territory and exploit it for profit.

To be clear, that anyone can improve upon anyone else’s invention and claim their improvement as their own, to the exclusion of the prior inventor, is what drives innovation.

>I honestly can't think of a single incidence of the patent system promoting innovation in the last 20 years.

Without patents pharmaceutical industry would be nearly impossible, i.e. it's very hard to come up with a compound but very easy to synthesize it as soon as it's known.

I'm not sure that making it harder for people to synthesize medicine is a good thing.

If it costs a billion dollars per medicine to develop someone needs to pay that cost. If you don't have some sort of government medicine research branch with a budget of tens of billions to develop medicines then private companies want a way to recoup their investment and then make a profit.

Is it impossible for government to directly fund research into needed medicines? It’s hard to see a value in this arbitrary middle layer between public interest and research. The amount of money people spend on drugs is staggering.

This is too big of a discussion to have in hacker news comments. But the decline in R&D spending, the amount of grants drug companies accept from the government, the amount of government funded research that goes into new medicines, the current state of healthcare spending in the US compared to other countries, the politics of it, the success of companies such as Cost Plus Drugs, and the amount of new medicines that come from countries that have much higher medical regulations all point to the fact that this is a bad system. I have worked on a few healthcare projects, and the general consensus is that it is unsustainable to have a system where health outcomes decline, even if profits are going up. It has been prevailing wisdom that patents help recoup the (admittedly enormous when you factor in clinical trials) cost of developing new drugs, but it has put the US especially into a really awful healthcare situation compared to other nations.

Long story short, there are enough sick people to provide medicine to and have a profitable business through a high volume of care, and governments are much better at providing long term financial stability than private corporations to burden the necessarily regulatory costs.

The pharmaceutical routinely pays companies not to produce generics of drugs that aren't patented, so I'm a bit confused by this statement.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforceme...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-companies-pay-...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/three-generic-pharmaceu...

Pharmaceutical research can be funded with public money. Bounty programs, grants, et cetera. A lot easier to manage those than the obtuse patent bureaucracy.

Patents aren't there to promote innovation, they usually do the opposite so the original inventor can make bank. There's no competition or incentive to perfect your product because you're a state enforced monopoly.

Take FDM 3D printers for example. Stratasys figured out and patented the first one almost 35 years ago and then proceeded to do fuck all with it, selling mediocre garbage for sky high prices. After it expired in 2009 3D printing rapidly became a whole industry with dirt cheap hardware, enabling millions to make things never before thought possible. We could've reached that point in the early 90s if it weren't for patents.

Sure one might say, it also forces the patentee to disclose the inns and outs of the invention, but frankly those patent descriptions are often as bare bones as possible and you'd get there reverse engineering any product far sooner than 20 years.