| Great, let's see what the fine article has to say about these things. 1) "In less than 30 years, the flow of patents more than quadrupled. By contrast, neither innovation nor research and development expenditure nor factor productivity have exhibited any particular upward trend." In other words, more patents does not appear to encourage people to splurge on fundamental research in aggregate. But it gets worse, "The cost of litigating patents is not insubstantial either. Bessen and Meurer (2008) used stock market event studies to estimate the cost of patent litigation: they estimate that during the 1990s such costs rose substantially until, at the end of the period, they constituted nearly 14 percent of total research and development costs." So at least we've identified where some of the money being brought in from all of these monopolies is going (it isn't to the scientists and engineers). 2) It also enables business models that allow taking money from people without contributing anything at all. "On the other hand if a patentholder does not produce a marketable product and hence cannot be countersued---like Microsoft in the phone market or other patent trolls in other markets---then patents become a mechanism for sharing the profits without doing the work. In this scenario, not only do patents discourage innovation, but they are also a pure waste from a social standpoint." 3) "The downstream blocking effect of existing monopoly grants on incentives for future innovation has greatly increased in recent decades because modern products are made up of so many different components. The recent---and largely successful---efforts of Microsoft to impose a licensing fee on the large and expanding Android phone market is but one case in point. ... Microsoft is attempting to charge a licensing fee solely over a patent involving the scheduling of meetings---a rarely used feature of modern smartphones. ... Hence, the main dynamic general equilibrium effect of a patent system is to subject future inventions to a gigantic hold-up problem: with many licenses to be purchased and uncertainty about the ultimate value of the new innovation, each patent holder, in raising the price of his "component," imposes an externality on other patent holders and so charges a higher than efficient licensing fee." The externality isn't just on patent holders. Later, quoting Bill Gates: "A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose." Having participated in these kinds of technology sharing efforts, I can assure you that the value extracted is basically unrelated to the actual value of the innovation, and mostly defined by the (current or expected) network effects of the technology in question and the political clout of its proponents in convincing other people to require its use. I.e., you're not paying for an invention, you're paying for a standard, and making standards is not something that requires external incentives. As for monetization: "At the opposite extreme we have, again among many, the example of the Cornish steam engine discussed in Nuvolari (2004, 2006). Here engineers exchanged nonpatented ideas for decades in a collaborative effort to improve efficiency." I don't think they monetized it via advertising. |
You're not trying to minimize litigation costs, but rather maximize R&D investment net of litigation costs. So the question is, if competitors could quickly copy the results of R&D efforts, would R&D investment be more or less than 14% lower? Also, it's not like litigation costs under those alternative regimes would be zero. At the end of the day, the free-rider problem is a real economic problem and permitting it undermines market efficiency. One can imagine alternative models for addressing it, but those frameworks will have a cost too.
> It also enables business models that allow taking money from people without contributing anything at all.
That incorrectly assumes that the only "contribution" is producing an end-user product. ARM, for example, doesn't produce end-user products. You can't go to ARM and buy Cortex A72 CPUs. When MediaTek produces an SoC integrating an ARM core, is the license fee an example of ARM simply "sharing profits without doing the work?"
> The downstream blocking effect of existing monopoly grants on incentives for future innovation has greatly increased in recent decades because modern products are made up of so many different components.
Hold-up problems are real, and there is a real question of how to properly value all the technologies that go into a modern product.
> I.e., you're not paying for an invention, you're paying for a standard, and making standards is not something that requires external incentives.
If standards don't embody important technical contributions, then why don't implementers rush to create alternative, unpatented standards? 802.11 has been out for more than two decades. Why do implementer companies continue to pay for each new generation of 802.11, instead of developing their own? If the choices truly are arbitrary, it should be trivial to avoid the relevant patents (indeed, everything in 802.11a should be out of patent by now, or close to it).
The idea that alternative monetization strategies are workable in the large scale is almost self-refuting. Patents don't preclude you from developing technology and releasing it into the public domain, so long as you get there first. But it seems like companies motivated by patent protection consistently "get there first." That is itself a validation of the incentive structure created by patents.