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I think this illustrates one of the catch-22's of patents. If you hold the patent, other companies does not have incentive to make and market the invention, making it harder to create market awareness. But if you let go of the patent, unless you have the resources to compete, you're unlikely to benefit from your invention. You do have an early mover advantage, but if you don't have the means to invest, it doesn't help. I think the interface between IP markets and the goods/services markets is deeply broken. The core of the problem is that we have to create artificial scarcity to balance the IP economy against the "real" economy. For example: in theory, you could have access to every movie ever created for free. It doesn't cost anything to make a copy. This is unlike things like bread or haircuts, where having an infinite supply is a physical impossibility. But the people making the movies have to pay for bread and haircuts, so you have to pay them something. And to get you to pay for it, you have to balance your desire to watch movies against your need to buy bread and haircuts. Previously we achieved this only through artificial scarcity. Now, with Spotify, you have another model which is: someone decides that everyone should pay $50-$99 a month for music, and then you have access to all the music. The problem is that this is a pretty inelastic market. It's hard to create competing services with different prices. It's also undemocratic. And the default is still artificial scarcity. You could imagine an IP tax. Through a democratic process, we decide that X% of our incomes should be spent on developing IP. All IP is free, but you have IP credits that you spend on the IPs that have value for you, in whatever ratio you want. The number of credits the inventor/designer/creator receives in a month is then used to fairly divide the fund generated from the IP tax. IP developers also have to pay IP tax, and receive IP credits, so it would be natural for them to forward credits to the IP they depend upon. Since you can't spend the IP credits on yourself, you have no incentive to not support the IPs that you benefited from. This solutions is just a thought experiment. It might not be feasible, and it's a government-based solution. I'm not ideologically opposed to government solutions, but it is inelegant. The point is just to think about how we could interface the IP markets with the "real" markets in a more efficient way. There must be better solutions than what we have today. Another option may be to introduce basic income, have everything be free, and just rely on donations, crowdfunding and merchandise for extra funding. Patreon seems to show that people are actually willing to simply give money to the things they like, as long as they get credit. |
Potentially a bigger problem than any you cite is discoverability. So she has a patent... so what? No company out there is going to search over the patents looking for a good idea. If they manage to come up with an independent implementation of something that happens to hit the patent, and they happen to do a search, they're far more likely to modify the idea until it doesn't hit the patent than to go try to license it from an individual.
There really isn't any fixing the problem that there's no path that looks like "1. Have idea. 2. Patent idea. 3. Profit." Step three is going to have to look like a business. Even if you assume basic income and even if you somehow remove money from the situation entirely, which is to put it least incredibly idealistic, if you want to see "success" you're still going to have to hustle and build awareness. (And, apparently, do this on the same basic income as everybody else in that ideal world, which won't exactly make it easier to stand out.) Perfectly feasible with the right use of social media, but on average it won't happen just by putting up a post of your idea and waiting for the plaudits to roll in.