[zaphar]

    I do think that patents hold a valuable place in certain
    areas of research and development, but there are also
    areas in which patents are crippling development.

I hear people say this but they never give an example. Can you name an area of research and development where patents hold a valuable position? I myself have trouble coming up with any and I'm curious what others think.

[alain94040]

Conventional wisdom says that pharma qualifies. Labs wouldn't spend the resources if anyone could come up with generic drugs once the hard work of finding out which drug works is done.

[mbrubeck]

And yet even pharmaceutical companies are now facing problems caused by too many patents (though I'm sure none of them want to abolish patents completely the way many in software do). Michael Heller from Columbia Law School writes about new therapies that companies can't bring to market because they involve dozens or hundreds of different genes or compounds, each patented separately; he argues that this will become more common because of trends in medical science. He also cites some interesting examples like http://www.goldenrice.org/ which actually did get produced, but only because they formed a non-profit foundation and basically shamed companies into licensing their patents as charity for the developing world.

Many, many more details in Heller's book and in this Econtalk interview:

http://www.gridlockeconomy.com/

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/11/heller_on_gridl.htm...

[jhancock]

That is conventional wisdom. However, if we pulled the patents from pharmas, the demand for drugs would not go away. I suspect things would open up and researchers would share and open-source their work. The total research may actually increase, but just get distributed very differently, much like software changed from Enterprise to open source processes. Of course this won't happen any time soon as making such a change would destroy the market caps of pharma corps.

[danek]

i don't know if this is true, but i heard somewhere that drug companies don't really innovate anything.

it's the NIH and universities (via government funding) that actually discover the drugs, then they sell the exclusive rights to manufacture it to big pharma (who then spends a lot to get it approved and market it and such...)

(this is the book, i haven't read it) http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-Companies-Deceive/dp/...

so in this case (if true) patents fail again.

[mseebach]

I don't know if that's correct, but if it is, it's patents that make it possible for the universities and NIH to sell the right exclusively.

Since manufacturing, testing and marketing a drug is hysterically expensive, the patent seems to serve a purpose there -- even if pharma companies are more akin to specialized investment bankers than scientists.

[paraschopra]

Actually it will be unwise to generalize for all pharma companies but yes it is a standard practice to license rights from labs/univ

[amalcon]

Mechanical inventions are what patents were most obviously designed to deal with. There are still plenty of these being made today; they just don't make the waves they used to, because the new ones are mostly used in industrial settings.

[baguasquirrel]

The thing about mechanical inventions that made patenting important was that there was often a lot of hidden knowledge in their design.

If we take the familiar example of the ICE, simple dimensions like the bore and stroke of the cylinder aren't arbitrarily chosen. Altering the ratio of the bore and stroke changes the revving characteristics of the engine (a somewhat larger bore than stroke will cause the engine to have a higher rev limit, for example), and increasing the size of the bore requires disproportionately heavier cylinder heads (because cylinder heads have to have some depth and lateral reinforcement).

The size and weight of the cylinder heads, combined with the stroke effect the strength and dimensions required of the connecting rods and the crankshaft, so on and so forth.

Basically, a lot of mechanical "inventions" are big physics and engineering puzzles where the mere dimensions of each part was worked out through a lot of equation crunching (and probably a lot of plain old tinkering and testing as well). So for someone to just go and copy someone else's design, well that's kind of a big deal.

[akadien]

Rodent detention devices.

[csytan]

The new Google phone's lack of software support for multi-touch is something which has come up recently.

[cubicle67]

people often cite patents as the reason for this (lack of multi-touch) but I don't think it's the real reason. For starters almost everyone else is using multi-touch, and from what I understand (I haven't any dev experience with Android) multi-touch support is built into the OS, just that the default apps don't use it

[joshfinnie]

This is true. Dolphin Broswer on the Android opperating system supports multi-touch. Gives you the pinch zoom so covetted on the iPhone. It is just going to take time for the applications to catch up to where Android 2.0 is.

[Daniel_Newby]

"Can you name an area of research and development where patents hold a valuable position?"

Metallurgy, semiconductors, superconductors, ...