For companies, patents represent weapons in an arsenal, in which MAD prevents offensive action, as you've said.
For countries, the reverse holds: a country that jettisons its patent architecture, or never evolved a restrictive one to begin with, will be a bastion for innovators. The stable equilibrium is no bad patents - a lack of shallow protectionism - and the only reason patent law in the US has remained constant for so long is because of the other advantages that have given it technological and scientific primacy.
As those advantages erode, patent law will loosen to stimulate competition. Perhaps there is an upside to the perception of decline?
The realist in me bets that innovation has only a weak relationship to IP laws, and rather a strong relationship to a certain world-view that fosters innovation since childhood (go USA!)
In the USA, we often hear about how our (USA) school systems are too easy/relaxed compared to foreign countries.
In Thailand, it's the opposite, in the most terrible way possible. Everything is about test scores, and thus "thinking outside the box" is severely penalized.
People in the USA might not have the raw-academics, but the applied problem solving and team collaboration skills absolutely crushes the competition (Though of course that doesn't help manual labor jobs much)
The US economy has been an extreme bastion of innovation for 200 years, while also having a robust patent system (one that has only recently become particularly stifling). In fact I'd argue there has hardly been a greater bastion of innovation in world history than the US economy from 1800 to 2000 or so, very few countries compete for that title.
I'm very much not a fan of how the US patent system works today, but I'm finding it difficult to prove your claim based on historical evidence.
How do you even know that the US has not been innovative despite the patent system. That if the patent system did not exist, it would have progressed even further than it has.
In no way was Adventured arguing that because of the patent system, the US became a bastion of innovation.
As the original comment pointed out, the US has been successful, but it could be for many confounding reasons.
One of the points of patent law is to distribute the rewards of invention, so individual inventors - not corporations - benefit from their creativity.
Patent protections aren't the only element in this, but they're one element, and a lot of 20th century products would never have appeared otherwise.
It's simply not historical to argue otherwise.
The 21st century works differently, but with the irony that the FOSS people claim their way is absolutely correct, and no other system is workable.
Sharing certainly works if you have a day job that pays your bills. But innovation is not invention. Patents were originally designed for creative inventors, not commercial packaging operations like [insert corporate giant here], or freeware mash-up/YetAnotherFramework projects.
In the US at least, the system has become a joke. But just because it's broken doesn't mean that inventors shouldn't be rewarded and protected somehow.
For products where development costs dwarf manufacturing costs, patents provide the incentive to do stuff. Would anyone invest a few billion into a drug if anyone with access to a few million bucks could go manufacture it?
There is a whole 'nother world out there where people make real, actual things.
When the authors of [1] called out Boldrin and Levine on this, the latter responded by fabricating new myths rather than admit that the truth undermined their narrative [2].
The very chapter you cite itself has such inaccuracies. I did not track down all the stuff they cite, but I did find an instance of mischaracterizing references to suit their view points. For instance, when they discuss the German dyestuff industry, they cite a study by Murmann to support their narrative that Germany dominated in that industry due to the lack of patents. But if you look at the actual study itself, Murmann paints (heh) a much more nuanced picture. German dominance in that industry was fueled by close ties with academic research, and later by R&D labs encouraged by, of all things, the newly introduced patent laws:
>When in 1877 German patent law protected dye innovations, a few German firms such as Hoechst, BASF, and AGFA saw the advantage of hiring organic chemists whose sole task was to synthesize new dyes. After these research chemists turned out economically successful dyes, firms hired more and more chemists and pioneered an entirely new corporate function, formally organized research. The birth of corporate research and development (R&D), which today is a standard activity in high-tech industries ... can be traced to the German synthetic dye firms in 1880s. By the 1890s the vast majority of dyes were being discovered in the R&D laboratories of Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF.
> Whereas in the early days of the industry a firm could exist by copying dyes invented somewhere else, patent laws made the systematic application of science within the boundaries of the firm a critical dimension of remaining a leader in the industry.
And elsewhere:
> The most important institution in the early success of the German dye industry was the university system, but patent laws were a second key factor that allowed the German firms to capture a dominant position.
With that many assertions in the study that refute their view, they cherry-pick a few comments and actually cite the study as one that supports their view.
With so many mischaracterizations in there, I find it hard to take anything else they say in that book at their word.
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1589712
2. http://econpapers.repec.org/article/bpjrlecon/v_3a5_3ay_3a20...
3. Murmann JP, 2003, "Knowledge and Competitive Advantage – The Coevolution of Firms, Technologies and National Institutions." - http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam041/2003043048.pdf
Like, say, Somalia? Your hypothesis is trivially disproved.
On the other hand, to defend patents, you have to show that there are things on the market that we can buy that would not have been made available to us if not for patent rights. Nobody can claim that patents have saved us from a catastrophic world war by forcing our leaders to find less destructive ways to disagree. About the most you can say is that without patents, some lifesaving medications for some relatively uncommon conditions wouldn't have been economically feasible to develop.
Musk's comparison of patents to land mines is much more apt than comparing them to nukes. Only a psychopath (or a land mine manufacturer) would argue that humanity is better off because land mines exist. Nuclear weapons are a genuine gray area in comparison.
First, you might want to clarify in the first paragraph that you're talking about the existence of nukes, as opposed to the use of nukes. It's clear from reading your entire comment, but I find it's good to play it safe with that sort of topic! ;)
Second, to play devil's advocate, is it possible that landmines could have a net positive impact if they could somehow be properly, globally regulated? For and extreme example, say that only the UN had access to landmines, and they were only deployed as a last resort to enforce DMZs. (Also measures would be taken so that they could be safely removed.) Seems like they could be a positive thing if used correctly. I expect patents are much the same. Certainly overused and abused currently, but not necessarily negative if they could be used 'correctly'.
Kind of like copyleft- but for patents.
For example, in the smartphone industry, where a product is old in a year and obsolete in three, it doesn't make sense to me for patents to last decades. On the other hand, it does seem reasonable to reward significant innovation by granting a patent for a long enough time period to establish a strong market position, before opening things up to competition. The tricky thing is, that ideal time period would be highly variable based on the industry and even the specific idea being patented. Still, surely there's room for improvement there.
Mmm, no, I'm pretty sure that's not possible. It would be possible to have some kind of super-low-casualty 'world war' with fewer deaths than those, but not a knock-down, drag out world war.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-...
"Birds around Chernobyl have significantly smaller brains that those living in non-radiation poisoned areas; trees there grow slower; and fewer spiders and insects—including bees, butterflies and grasshoppers—live there. Additionally, game animals such as wild boar caught outside of the exclusion zone—including some bagged as far away as Germany—continue to show abnormal and dangerous levels of radiation."
And there are likely plenty more terrible results we don't yet know about.
I didn't say it's all roses, but the wildlife there is thriving because of severe lack of humans. Sure those near the sarcophagus are dangerously mutated, but the scientist in me wonders how the animals will adapt to heightened radiation.
As for fires, there is that, but then again the exclusion zone will spread and there will be more free space for wildlife. People will have to reallocate but on the plus side, more refuge for animals.
The ambient levels of radioactivity are very "livable" in the surroundings of Chernobyl nowadays, plus you have to consider that it's not because radioactivity is detrimental that it prevents animals from breeding and surviving. Only very high levels of radioactivity are known to be fast killers, moderate levels will likely cause more cancers, and low levels are heavily debated (some people saying it causes harm, some others saying it has protective effects on the body as it kills a number of microorganisms).
It will be interesting to see if we get the same result at the company level as we did at the country level.
relevant xkcd --> http://xkcd.com/1095/
1) Nuclear weapons are not even relatively cheap. (Certainly not for the Soviet Union.) ~$640B over the next 10y, and this is during a draw-down in weapons.
http://www.ploughshares.org/what-nuclear-weapons-cost-us
2) It's pretty ridiculous to suggest that nuclear powers covertly threatened smaller countries with the threat of their nuclear arsenals, let alone actually attacked smaller powers (unless you count the US bombing of Japan).
Using patents doesn't lead to Mutually Assured Destruction, and there are many cases of large organizations using patents to damage or defeat other smaller (or even large) organizations.
3) Many of the patent trolls are surrogates of big players who simply give them plausible deniability. Again, there's no analogy of a big power giving nuclear weapons to terrorists to conduct attacks on its rivals because the downsides are so immense. With surrogate patent trolls it's merely a matter of some bad P.R.
If humans had the power to amend the laws of physics to make nuclear weapons impossible and yet nuclear physicists lobbied against it, then they would be in the same position as patent lawyers.
Patent lawyers just make money. Go to trial? Pay up (even if you loose) Need a new patent? Pay up. Want to enforce your existing patent? Pay up. Want to check to see if someone is infringing on your patents? Pay up. The lawyers, more or less are neutral benefactors of the patent wars.
Really, it's just the inequalities of large markets. In general, it's a bad idea to start up a company in a field that a $100 billion company is expending a lot of effort in. Because they are established, they have the ability to create barriers to entry for you in a lot of different ways (marketing, supply chain, and yes, patents). If patents are no longer a problem, there are still plenty of ways that Google or Apple can keep you from playing in their backyard.
If you're talking big companies vs big companies, they're just trying everything they can to make their competition spend more money on lawyers, etc. to reduce their margins even further. Apple has huge margins, Samsung does not, so it hurts Apple less to spend $100 million on patent lawyers than it does Samsung.
The patent trolls are a new problem, and one that probably needs a regulatory solution. Technology patents in general are a problem, but solving the patent problem won't instantly change the landscape for smaller companies. They'll still be at a distinct disadvantage in a number of ways to larger companies, and need to pick their battles carefully.
Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire.
The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for either party to act offensively. However, the implied power behind the arsenals gave them a lot of power when dealing with smaller actors. The superpowers benefit greatly from acquiring these arsenals. Even without using them publicly, the threat can always be used behind closed doors (as Jobs has been shown to do).
But there's a third actor; the most universally feared actor: terrorists/patent trolls. These actors behave only offensively because they have nothing to defend. These actors are best poised to benefit from nukes and patents and can send an otherwise orderly system into chaos.
Anyway, just a fun but flawed analogy to play with in your noodle. :)