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.
> 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.