Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AnthonyMouse 3660 days ago
> The claims define what a patent covers.

And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works.

And you're confusing the value of the market with control over it. It's possible to have a total monopoly on some useless junk nobody wants.
1 comments
dragonwriter 3660 days ago
In the antitrust sense, the standard set upthread, market power requires pricing power, which inn turn requires that there is both some market demand and inefficient competition from market substitutes (which need not be identical) to constrain the monopolists ability to set prices and extract rents.
link
AnthonyMouse 3660 days ago
Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.
link
dragonwriter 3660 days ago
Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.
link
AnthonyMouse 3657 days ago
> Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

In theory that's the test, but it doesn't actually work. In practice market power isn't binary. There is always a substitute for anything if you jack the price up high enough. And a monopolist would jack the price right up to that point, so that increasing it any more would cost sales.

But the zero volume case is the divide by zero case anyway. A test isn't going to give you a yes or no, it's going to give you NaN. That doesn't mean there is no market power, it only means you can't tell without a buyer. And in the patent case, as soon as there is a buyer there is market power.

link