[D13Fd]

I strongly disagree about patents. This is the patent system working as designed. It incentivized a company to invent a new thing, and gave them a monopoly for a reasonable amount of time (20 years). When it ends, others can operate in the space.

I agree about copyright, though. Copyright has been expanded to cover software and even APIs. Copyright is a giant drag on innovation. A single company can tie up a space for life of the author plus 70 years, which is absurd. Copyright should never have applied to most forms of software, which clearly fall into the exceptions of 17 USC § 102(b). But we are where we are.

[throwaway189262]

Facebook is only 16 years old. Think about that. 20 years ago everyone was using 56k modems and JS barely existed.

20 years is an absurdly long time in tech

[baybal2]

22 years ago, I had a 8mbps DSL connection, and a significant part of urban Japan already had 100mbps.

On other hand, America had more fibre than any other nation, but its hyperregulated telecom industry only managed to cross 10mbps averages 10-8 years ago.

[ajsnigrutin]

20 years is not a reasonable amount of time for technological products in current times.

[bryanrasmussen]

I think 20 years might be a reasonable amount of time for hardware, which requires a heavy outlay in money to produce and which does not have almost zero cost to replicate, but not for software which can generally be copied for nothing and does not cost much to produce.

[ajsnigrutin]

Hardware, 20 years?

20 years ago, Nokia 3310 was released.

For consumer hardware, that's still a very very long time to hold a patent on something.

Specialized scientific/industrial hardware, maybe... consumer goods... way too long.

But that's just my personal opinion.

[bryanrasmussen]

Did the Nokia 3310 have any hardware patents related to its release?

[ajsnigrutin]

I was just saying that 20 years ago is "old".

Nokia probably had a gajillion GSM patents that they used to make the phone, and a bunch of other companies had to pay them money for many years to build 2g/GSM phones.

Qualcomm and a few other companies have a bunch of patent for 4g tech, so even now (when we're rolling out 5G), it's practically impossible to make a modern...ish modem without giving atleast some money to one of those companies, and 4G is "old tech" already.

[syshum]

One thing that has allowed 4G to expand radily is the fact that those Qualcomm patents are under a FRAND agreement in exchange for them being including in the 4G standard.

FRAND is not with out its own problems, but it is alot better than the situation with eINK or 3-d Printers where there is not FRAND agreement

[syshum]

Clearly it is not, e-Ink, 3d printing, VR, and hosts of other technology has been held back not advanced because of patents

Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent

Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not

I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)

[vikramkr]

Held back might be the tradeoff we have to pay for letting them exist in the first place. Developing new technologies is not cheap or trivial- especially hardware innovations. I'd rather have a delayed 20 year start to fast e ink innovation than have e ink never get the r&d funding needed to get past the valley of death and make it to market in the first place.

[TeMPOraL]

These companies didn't make money on patent licenses, they made money on selling the stuff. More money than they should, because they used patents to limit competition.

Patents can be useful as an incentive, but their length need to correspond with the pace of progress in a given field. Otherwise, they end up slowing down everyone.

[syshum]

Other than the false equivalency of your argument, you would also have to prove the technology would not have been completed with out the patent, I think that is a hard conclusion to draw given the amount of other progress we have made with out such consideration (i.e see FOSS )

Once you have proven the need for an exclusivity grant, You also need to prove that 5, 10, 15 years of exclusivity via a patent would be unable provide enough incentive, that it had to be 20 years to strike the proper balance

In today's fast moving society, I think 5 years would provide more than enough incentive even for expensive technology that requires lots of capital investment though I would favor a shorter exclusivity grant, and then may be longer required licensing grant. like 2-3 years of exclusive use, and then 10 years of licensing but the patent holder is required to treat all uses of the patent in the same manner with fair and non-discriminatory pricing.