The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold:
1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect.
What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.
> 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
Citation needed. I know of many patents that are side discoveries of R&D that was done anyway. It's a myth that others could easily undercut a company doing the research, the inertia of expertise of employees, processes etc. is typically much better at holding of the competition. None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting. The example of pharma is often brought up, but it's actually a very good counter-example, when pharma companies first developed, it was the Swiss and German companies which dominated and there was very little (Germany) or no (Switzerland) patent protection for pharmaceuticals.
Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.
My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work.
This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.
I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.
Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation!
It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram.
Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.
Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point, your argument is designed to deceive:
> It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation.
Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
> It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
It's pretty obvious that a system created for a purpose can initially fulfill that purpose very well and then be corrupted by humans over time, with no implication of being initially unsuitable.
Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
>Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point
That has basically nothing to compare against it. The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism. Maybe those attempts would not succeed even without the sabotage but regardless, of course it's better than feudalism and its predecessors. The key question for me is: is that the best we can do?
Capitalism did sprout innovation, but that does not mean it's the best way to do so. Ignoring the inherent flaws around the profit motive doesn't help anyone.
>Strawman argument
I don't think so, honestly. The reality is that a lot of research is done with the question of "how can we make money solving this problem?", rather than "how can we solve this problem?". You can't deny that.
Maybe categorizing that as pure/non-pure innovation is not a good way to put it, but the incentives of research do change with profit seeking. It's undeniable.
>corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital. It's a circular system.
Many do believe that democratically elect people should have more power than private institutions with zero transparency or checks. Not sure exactly how that "decreases the quality of human life". Where did that come from?
Isn't that the same thing that happened in every socialist attempt in the modern era? Isn't the cause the fact of original sin not the particular economic structures? To put it another way, how do you propose to solve the issue of "[sabotage] by capitalism" the line between good and evil that runs, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "right through every human heart"
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/notable-quotations#:~:tex....
As for a solution... I don't know. I truly wish I had a ready answer to something as big as this, but I don't. The best I can come up with are multiple systems with checks, and we have some governments that attempt this, but inevitably someone ends up with unchecked power.
Today the power that goes unchecked is capital. It can corrupt other systems that don't account for it. Lobbying, donations, media time, etc. It's all affected by it, as systems like democracy were not designed to deal with external influence that is then used to consolidate itself.
That's why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Right, and if you'd done any research into alternative economic systems at all, you'd realize that free market systems are the only feasible economic system because it best addresses corruption. Socialism, communism, fascism, and other systems are more vulnerable to corruption than free market systems.
> I truly wish I had a ready answer to something as big as this, but I don't
If you don't, then don't suggest that people experiment with other economic systems when the cumulative toll of those experiment to date weighs in at over a hundred million lives.
> The best I can come up with are multiple systems with checks
That is what we have right now. In America, Canada, the EU, and many, many other "capitalist" systems. Why are you proposing it, when we have it right now?
> Today the power that goes unchecked is capital
This is objectively false. Laughably so. "Capital", whatever that means (as anti-capitalists regularly shift their use of it to avoid being caught in logical fallacies), is not an unchecked power in any of the top dozen current world powers - especially not the US, where there are literally dozens[1] of government agencies tasked with monitoring and controlling money and business in the country.
> Lobbying, donations, media time, etc. It's all affected by it
Everything is also affected by the pride of human beings - yet that has no bearing on the equivalent claim that "the power that goes unchecked is ego" - both that statement and yours are equally false.
> systems like democracy were not designed to deal with external influence that is then used to consolidate itself
"Democracy" is meaningless. You have to pick out a specific implementation of it - like the US, whose political system is designed to deal with external influences. The fact that it fails is because of corruption of individuals elected in office by the people - not because "democracy" somehow can't handle existing in a free-market system.
[1] The Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office, various agencies in the Department of Agriculture, basically everything in the Department of Commerce, the Secret Service, large swaths of the Department of Justice (especially the antitrust division) and the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs in the Department of State, parts of the Department of Transportation and the Department of Treasury, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communication Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and many, many more. The claim that "the power that goes unchecked is capital" is objectively. Wrong.
Free market systems are not feasible, and capitalism (a system defined around description of a real, at the time existing, system) is not a “free market” system (an infeasible abstraction invented as a post-hoc rationalization for capitalism.)
We may have a terminological difference. When I said "free market", I don't mean a lasseiz faire market/capitalist system - I mean something similar to what the US has now, where money is a Thing and producers sell to consumers, but the government steps in to regulate around negative externalities, prevent harm to consumers, and keep the economy stable.
What are your definitions of "free market systems" and "capitalism"?
My account is three and a half years old, has more karma than your account, and has an equal amount of personal information (zero). Calling it a "throwaway" is inaccurate, saying that I'm "hiding" is manipulative, and your further statement
> but sure, I'll bite
...is further evidence of emotional manipulation instead of reason and intellect.
> The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism
Given the many non-free-market states (almost all of which were communist, but the point generalizes), every single one of which has failed, the overwhelmingly most likely cause is simply that they don't work. Any claims otherwise require a massive amount of evidence.
> Capitalism did sprout innovation, but that does not mean it's the best way to do so. Ignoring the inherent flaws around the profit motive doesn't help anyone.
Nobody, including in this thread, is "ignoring" anything. Sane people look at the free market system, realize that it needs some amount of regulation to remain stable, and apply that. Insane people suggest that communism is a plausible alternative to free markets - and nobody has been able to come up with another system other than those two.
> I don't think so, honestly.
You're incorrect, then. The point that you made was "[Capitalism] actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation" - and nobody claimed that capitalism incentivizes "pure innovation", so that's the very definition of a strawman argument.
> The reality is that a lot of research is done with the question of "how can we make money solving this problem?", rather than "how can we solve this problem?"
Again, nobody claimed otherwise - if you had read the comment you're responding to, you would have also seen:
>> the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work
> Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital. It's a circular system.
This is both incorrect and irrelevant. Incorrect, because regulators are corrupted in search of money and power, not because of capital. Irrelevant, because those factors are present in every other alternate system. Free market systems are not unique in this matter, and so this is an irrelevant point to bring up because no alternative system will change this.
> Many do believe that democratically elect people should have more power than private institutions with zero transparency or checks. Not sure exactly how that "decreases the quality of human life". Where did that come from?
Again - you should read comments before you respond to them:
>> corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life
Putting corrupt regulators into greater positions of power is what "decreases the quality of human life".
This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.
> Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
This is a whole lot of words that says precious little. Also, you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions. Tons of the massive tech companies we have today that feel older than time itself were products of university and government grants, notable in that they didn't have to make money. Huge innovations like GPS that basically any product can use for damn near free started life as ways for the military to track deployed assets. Flat panel LCD screens, lithium batteries, like I said, it's hard to find a product so ubiquitous now on this level that ISN'T in some way funded by the Government.
The corporations role in turn is to take those expensive new technologies and make them cheap, and in THAT regard, they are very good at their jobs. But it doesn't translate well to every product.
> It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
Horseshit. The entire open source community disagrees with you. Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you. Food pantries disagree with you. Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation. If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
> Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
Would love a citation on this.
This is false - we've had many attempts at alternative systems to free markets - all of which have failed because they don't work.
Also, bringing "colonialism" into this shows that you're not interested in seeking out the truth - just pushing your own political agenda onto other people.
> This is a whole lot of words that says precious little.
Funny, I thought the same about most of your comment.
> you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions
Turns out that a decent number of technologies had their fundamental research funded by "defense projects, grant money, other such institutions" - which doesn't mean anything, because (1) many innovations are not funded in those ways (2) the vast majority of modern technology's commercialization was done exclusively by "capitalism" and (3) as we've seen with communist countries, the government can fund as much research as it wants, and it doesn't matter for any purpose except weapons development if the private sector doesn't go through the process of refining it and making it cheap enough that consumers can buy it.
> Horseshit.
That perfectly describes your next paragraph:
> The entire open source community disagrees with you
No, they don't. The open-source community does not encourage innovation in any way. It encourages free clones of successful products whose innovation was performed by another entity (literally a parasite on the economy) and ego projects. A large number of successful open source projects (e.g. Netscape/Firefox, OpenOffice, Llama, Inkscape, Blender, Eclipse) are reactionary projects that were started several years after a piece of proprietary software started to become popular, and often copy the UI, features, and workflow of those programs - the literal opposite of innovation.
> Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you
No, they don't. The internet archive does barely any innovation at all - in fact, they perform significantly more theft and copyright infringement than "innovation".
> Food pantries disagree with you
No, they don't. Food pantries are not models of innovation.
> Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation
I never claimed otherwise - but only someone speaking from a position of extreme ignorance would claim that anything except money has been responsible for the vast majority of innovation across all of human history (and especially over the past several hundred years).
> If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
Strawman argument - I never claimed this. Quite a silly strawman, too.
> Would love a citation on this
Software and genetics are patentable in the US, purely as a result of corrupt regulators - there you go.
That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.
You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).
I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.
Having written some patents that has not been my experience.
For example, this is one of the patents in the lawsuit:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/67/67/7c/1299b0c...
This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publication on this topic.
Like, seriously, it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details and not bland lawyer jargon:
>The second redirection mechanism, which is specified as a future extension of NDTP is having the server return an NDTP RDR RSP message in response to an NDTP request for which the NDTP server has no ownership of the supplied identifier string. Those skilled in the art will note that unlike the embedded redirection links mechanism, the NDTP RDR RSP mechanism applies to all NDTP requests, not just NDTP GET.
The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient.
How are the mappings stored on disk? Does this entire protocol genuinely lack authentication? How is this meant to fail over when a server dies? If it's distributed, how do the nodes reach consensus?
You can't just jam stuff like this into a doc:
> Also, each update is preferably performed atomically > to avoid creating an inconsistent state in the string Store.
They're just handwaving away how the data gets stored. Y'know, the part of the patent that's actually useful and does something.
What's left over after you discount the parts they don't specify is basically just a wire protocol for a KV store that doesn't exist. They might as well try to patent a method for making imaginary mittens for imaginary friends, because that's basically what this is.
A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a specific thing like a protocol or a storage format and then say something along the lines of "bolt this onto Redis" before presenting their data.
> The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.
Why specify a protocol at all then? Im sure a person of ordinary skill in the art can also come up with a protocol without an implementation. Takes like 15 minutes if you don’t have to worry about pesky details like having a working implementation.
There is no benefit, obvious or not, because there is no implementation. Whether it is safer or faster or whatever would be defined by an implementation. They’ve patented the digital equivalent of letterhead while positing that it will make mail more efficient.
That's why protocols like TCP are designed by huge collaborations of engineering teams across companies, while an individual who knows the protocol spec can implement TCP in a couple of days.
Yeah fantastic, like an entire page devoted to showing requests that have numerical identifiers. Groundbreaking stuff.
And it's all completely irrelevant noise because you can infringe on the patent even if your implementation in no way depends on any of those details
The only thing that matters is the claims, and they're written so broadly and interpreted by the courts so creatively that a subject matter expert cannot read the document and determine if something does or does not infringe on it.
Seriously, how does Claim 1 not cover 99% of HTTP requests ever made given that people were using reverse proxies and passing requests between backend servers for decades before this patent was filed?
>...and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
I provided a counter-example. I'm going to take the the fact you're not responding to the counter-example but rather changing the argument as acceptable that you were wrong.
> >...and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
> I provided a counter-example. I'm going to take the the fact you're not responding to the counter-example but rather changing the argument as acceptable that you were wrong.
You ignored the fact that the "innovation" is really embodied in the claims not the rest, because that is what will be covered in the end.
Apart from the fact that even this somewhat better written example makes claims much broader than what was actually done, giving one example does not invalidate the fact that many (and I argue most by a large margin) patents are much more vague.
If you eventually sue someone, the claims are used, but they will often be challenged if they go beyond the scope of the spec.
A lot of patents give you a bunch of alternative implementations and component definitions, which can muddy the waters a bit. On the other hand, the figures can help you a lot.
> That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.
I have dealt with patents myself as well and in every instance the lawyers told me ok give me all the other ways of you can think of how to do things, no matter if it works or not. Also keep what you did sufficiently vague.
> You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).
This is actually a great example. Often the implementation will only work with a specific thickness and quality of silver and the substrate has to be prepared in a specific way to get the correct properties. None of these would be mentioned in the patent, and would typically require large amount of experimenting (costly) to find out what actually works.
Not sure I agree — That's still investment. All that time spend doing research, even if for a completely different goal, doesn't come for free. Discovering two things in a process intended to discover one doesn't half the value of both things.
> None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting > written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering
I agree — software patents are ridiculous, too broad, and stifle the intent of IP rights. But parents protect other industries. My point is that a blanket "get rid of intellection property protections" statement is not realistic. It's nuanced.
* OECD: http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf
* Via: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-pa...
A review of the literature:
Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.
OSS doesn't exist to spite IP, it exists because of IP rights protect creators from others stealing their work.
Yet, California forbids the non-competes, because it promotes competition and at least somewhat eases capital lock-ins (i.e. two dudes in a garage can start competing with "big ones"). I don't really see much difference with patents here.
Remember early Facebook infra looked very similar to Google, they had to get creative to make new names for internal projects clones of Google ones.
If a professional joins an organisation, creates something novel and valuable, and then is poached to another organisation to do the same thing — that's exactly what patents are there to protect.
Say they spend 5 years developing a nice kind of lubricant — the company can patent that lubricant. Then if the professional goes and joins another company, even if they have that knowledge, they'd have to conduct new research to find a new approach which doesn't run afoul of the existing patent. That's the point — patent's don't protect your market dominance, they just protect against imitation/copying.
Now say the work of that professional is systems architecture for some Google project, and they leave and join Facebook to build the same systems architecture for Facebook's project — of course that shouldn't be patented (although sometimes it is, and that's a different issue.)
A "restraint of trade" agreement in your employment contract (a "non-compete") is intended protect companies from others copying their product when other IP rights don't exist — and I agree that it shouldn't exist. It quite literally prevents new invention and done through an imbalance of power. But, organisational already have plenty of mechanisms to mitigate that risk — pay the person more, better working conditions, or just pay them a long gardening period.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.
We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.
That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry.
It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.
Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.
edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.
Patents are by themselves not a business model. They merely buy a seat at the negotiation table. Leverage is another matter entirely.
If someone publishes the paper, you can then publish the files that resulted with the dropped hash and therefore prove you had certain progress of the work at a certain time.
Basically, if you could show that you had already made significant progress before the publication date, then you might be granted the patent as well.
The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church.
We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.
None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”
Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.
It would have implied a better, more developed society.
It would implied that there is a writing system.
It would have implied that there was a way to store records long term.
It would have implied that there was a long distance communication system.
It would have implied the existence of some state and rule of law.
It would have implied some type of justice system where you could get redress.
It would have implied a society with excess production of essential materials that it can support the division of labor involved in supporting this system.
It is not easy to divide human progress into before and after. Technological progress very much depends on what has gone before. It accelerated when it reached a certain point of development.
I agree with you that patents are not a key cause of progress, and they often impede it by preventing people other than the patent holder further improving anything patented.
I also think they probably work pretty well for mechanical inventions, but they have been applied to everything - drugs, software, electronic devices, even business methods in some places.
In exchange you got a plastic puzzle piece to put on your desk. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than seeing a large number of those puzzle pieces in someone's care. You stood in the way of progress in service of Jeff Bezos? Awful.
Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible.
Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully.
That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.
What patents give is a seat at the negotiation table. It is not by itself a business model.
I'd argue the opposite. It has been one of the primary driving forces behind human progress for the past 300-400 years. The world today would be a much bleaker and more miserable place if IP rights never became a thing.
Imagine writing or any type of content creation without copyright. Even after the printing press was invented it was basically impossible to make a living only from writing without being independently wealthy, having some rich patron or a daytime job. Publishing any new content was risky and generally unprofitable, it would either flop or if it didn't other publishers would start printing it without giving you a dime.
Without IP rights innovating only makes sense if you're large corporation and have a moat or you're funded by someone else (state/universities/etc.). For any small to medium business it would mean that you would incur all of the costs and couldn't compete with others which would steal your tech as soon as it becomes public.
Of course there is a point where it might start stifling innovation and we might be already past it but that's a bit like calling for air travel to be banned because of the whole Boeing debacle etc.
We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.
That said, the startup selling IP model works somewhat in the pharma sector, but that's patents, and you mentioned books, where the whole IP regulation game got abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright).
And all of that is thanks to finally some groups of people pulling out their heads from their asses, stopped trying to focus on trying to loot their neighbors, and instead started to trade.
Ok you can substitute this with any type of R&D done by individual or small to large companies.
> We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.
Open source is only really successful in areas where it's a cost centre. Generally, companies mainly invest it into when using OS allows them to reduce their costs and they can focus on other ways of making money/differentiating their products. e.g. there would've been a lot less innovation in OS if Google/Meta/etc. didn't make billions from ads and other services.
> and you mentioned books,
Well yeah.. or any creative content.
> abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright
Yes, I also think that's excessive. To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content. In any case it's obviously preferable to not having any IP protection...
Sure, books are great at popularizing ideas, serve as a unit of discourse, like papers, journals, conferences and whatnot.
But when Dickens wanted to make money he wrote A Christmas Carol not A Teatrise On Socioeconomic Inequalities for Saturnalia. (And most likely he had a bigger impact this way.)
> To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content.
I think people somewhat rightfully feel that the social contract has been unfairly altered. The deal was that Mickey gets a temporary monopoly, and we respect it so we then get it for "free".
In a hypothetical bleak grey philosophical vacuum the first time someone draws a mouse what would be the fair thing? Respecting authorship (so no plagiarism), giving credit, sure, that's the minimum, but can others copy it, add some colors and pizzazz and become the new creative king/queen of the hill? (One one hand, maybe it would give society the best stuff, the most amazing variations of all the themes. On the other hand maybe artists would burn out in 2 seconds and nobody would ever even dare to try to come up with anything original, because the game is to derive better derivatives.)
... but I don't think so. If it would be that easy to turn anything up to 11 in a second, then we would see it all the time. (Instead what we see is conservative reboots/remakes/remixes that fit the current mainstream. )
Of course. I just used books as an easiest example of why IP was beneficial and created an environment where individuals could make a living independently by creating content. Indirectly this (amongst other things) create an environment where intellectual work actually became valued by the society.
Patents are probably a more straightforward example .e.g. why would've have Savery, Newcomen, Watt etc. have worked on created and improving the steam engine and how would've they attracted the investment necessary for that if they could in no way profit from their work?
And as I (hopefully) implied before, it's good that we worked out a social contract that incentivizes these things (that we think are the cornerstones of the progress we want/need), but it seems there's quite a lot more work to be done on this, because it was very crude before, and now it's just ridiculously blunt.
And it's a hard problem, I don't want to say that most people today only really get the downsides (higher medicine prices), because the whole drug discovery and push to market pipeline is horribly inefficient, eats money like there's no tomorrow, and it's not just patents. The FDA can grant ~3 years of exclusivity with the marketing authorization, right?
But. We see that patents are already not good enough for medicine. (Or that the busy little lobby beavers built a huge fucking dam around the patent moat. Just to be sure.)
Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup all that cost, before their patent runs out.
Would it lead to more money spent on making reverse engineering difficult? Both the products, and the manufacturing process.
Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.
You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?
Research funding is allocated mostly by the academic community itself, via panels consisting of academics. This does have problems of its own, but they have little to do with politics as in elected politicians. Policians can have some influence on general directions, but it's quite limited.
What you say sounds very much based on the general anti-government and anti-democratic ideology rather than evaluation of history.
The large increase in non-traditional funding orgs for biomedical research over the last several decades has been driven by a widespread perception that the traditional government funding has been increasingly captured by a academic cliques with low ROI priorities.
I've worked in government science orgs, the capture of funding control by ideological academic cliques is very common. It has unfortunately infested the biomedical research funding, which reduces realized ROI from the money allocated to those orgs. In the US government, some of the best medical R&D ROI dollar-for-dollar right now is found in the military, but that really shouldn't be their job outside of traditional areas like trauma medicine.
Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.
Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)
But even that would be better than the current system where people that have nothing to do with the research get obscene amounts of money solely on the merit of having obscene amounts of money.
It's the snake that eats itself.
(Very) few do get rich by leeching publicly funded research for spin-off companies. High level admins can get relatively rich from obscene salaries, but they aren't the ones applying for the grants or doing the research.
Probably not altruistic, but not usually primarily for money either. If money is what you want, university is a very bad place for trying to get it. People do do things for other reasons than economic gain regardless of what the prevailing economics dogma and ideology claims.
Of course grants are an economic incentive to do something. But not all economic incentives are profit.
Edit: To be clear, universities as such don't generally apply for research grants. Researchers in universities do, and for getting a grant they get the luxury of working for a salary for a few years, or getting somebody else to be paid for their work. Universities do take a cut (overheads) from the grants to nominally pay for infra and admin etc, but in reality a lot of it is spent on all kinds of non-related things like teaching and alumni dinners and chauffeurs for the provost.
When the world beat Germany (twice), part of the reparations for the world wars was basically invalidating most of Germany's intellectual property. The second world war we went above that and basically claimed human beings who were working on that intellectual property.
When America was struggling to get useful radar to work, the British brought us the cavity magnetron, and the US was able to utterly industrialize that into a million allied radar systems. When the US thought jet engines were a dead end fuel hungry fad, the Brits showed us theirs, which was way more advanced and helped the US get on the right track for future development.
When everyone was basically inventing computers as a real thing, the allies benefited greatly from massive cross-pollination, including people who are now considered grandfathers of modern computing literally meeting in a train station and chatting about the computers they were building which helped them work together to build bigger and better machines.
You don't advance innovation and invention by limiting an idea to the six people working R&D on this specific concept in GE, you advance innovation by letting every smart person and their friend dick around with the concept in freedom.
The entirety of the modern internet is basically built on this fact, and moved so damn fast, yet people will STILL insist "no, to encourage innovation you have to not let people innovate!"
How much did Tim Berners-Lee make off of HTTP?
Reverse engineering is not needed - it's time-consuming, expensive and error-prone.
The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!
As much as some people hate to admit it, intellectual property laws have their place. Are they perfect? Not in my opinion! But, things would be worse without enforced intellectual property laws.
This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.
What incentive could you possible offer them? If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's trade secrets, all they have to do is offer a key person $500k/year salary.
If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's patent, they are going to pay you for it.
And, as someone who's actually been in court more than a few times, no, they won't kill you via legal bills in a long protracted court case (say, by violating the IP) to get the IP - that happens so rarely you may as well hope for significant winnings at a casino.
And even if they pursue a protracted legal battle hoping to kill the company to acquire the IP, then they have to bid on the open market for it, against other FAANGs!
And even if they do kill the company, then they still have to deal with whoever gets the IP (which is why that strategy is almost never viable), because that IP doesn't become public domain simply because the company died, it will go to someone, somewhere.
Patents are a two-way street where society gets something in exchange for granting a limited-duration monopoly.
I'm would not argue that patents are the cause of this rapid pace of innovation, but the data does not come anywhere close to supporting your claim.
Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process and underpaid employees who know the secrets can be easily poached. Therefore, the entire concept of patents existing for the sake of disclosure falls flat on its face.
This is in part because they are steeped in a society where essentially all innovations are published, and have been for hundreds of years. This would not be the case if each engineer could only draw on a single career's worth of exposure to actual practices.
IP doesn't feel great but it feels a lot better than having every bit of research be a trade secret.
This is a strong claim, without any evidence to support it.
In fact, a look at the historical record, as others have pointed out, very much shows an extremely strong correlation between intellectual property rights and technological development. Sure, this is merely correlation, but that's certainly better than a strong claim without any evidence.
I'm curious though, if intellectual property was no longer a thing, which industries would need to be completely restructured. Some rather important ones, I would say. Journalism, in my mind, being at the top of the list. Not that it would be impossible, but the implications would very much be profound. I'm not sure what such a world would look like, but the transition would likely be rather difficult. Maybe it would work out better in the end? Who knows!?
https://annas-archive.org/search?q=against+intellectual+mono...
From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be.
Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce.
From the book:
"The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal (and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to get the news?"
What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable."
Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still.
With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.
The legal definition of novelty and obviousness is nonsensical. The duration is far too long. The USPTO does a terrible job of screening for quality. The court enforcement is little more than a high-stakes game of chance.
If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'
(unless authors are supposed to make almost 100% of their incomes from touring and live shows, as the overwhelming sentiment on hn is towards musicians)
The point of a patent is that a company can share something without it being immediately used by their competition, who didn't have to do the RnD, and now obviously can undercut them.
The problem is that the patent system is largely gamed and exists to a significant extent to drag your opponents and random companies into multi million dollar lawsuits over the most flimsy excuse of a research result.
It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.
The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.