[mashpoe]

People like to say that without patents there will be no incentive to advance technology, but if you're the one to come up with an idea then you already have a huge head start. If you don't make use of that head start, then you don't deserve it, and this applies to patents as well.

Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their competitors. Giving one person a monopoly just restricts others from creating competing products and only gives the user a worse and more expensive product.

[varjag]

In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market. And a copied product will always be cheaper as they don't have to amortise development costs.

That's how technology worked before the patent systems, and the outcome was manufacturer secrecy - which generally sucked more than the patent system.

[joefourier]

The Chinese cloning threat is largely overrated unless your product is very simple and you have 0 branding.

A perfect counter-example to patents is FDM printers, which were incredibly expensive and inaccessible to the average hobbyist until the Stratasys patents started to expire. Now while it’s true there’s a lot of Chinese printers on the market, that hasn’t killed western companies - Pruša might be 2x-3x pricier than a Creality, but the 3D printing farms I know still went with the former, due to higher reliability and the fact that they need less fiddling to produce high quality outputs.

Meanwhile Stratasys is still selling $100k machines, and I highly doubt any of their customers would rather buy a cheap Chinese 3D printer instead.

[varjag]

The cloning threat is very real on high end systems. Things like electric train propulsion, water purification systems, tons of various industrial designs with enormous upfront R&D were copied wholesale.

Branding is completely irrelevant to the issue, you could well come up with say explosion-safe proportional valve design that is sold OEM worldwide and that an average consumer might not even know exists as a category.

[user3939382]

> The Chinese cloning threat is largely overrated unless your product is very simple and you have 0 branding

This is proven false by the amount of top-selling products that Amazon has ripped off, produced for less (sometimes by striking a deal with the original factory), and then labeled “Amazon Basics”

[joefourier]

Any examples of that where the product isn't commodity-grade? The AmazonBasics examples I see are things like household appliances, cables, cheap accessories, lightbulbs and batteries. If you're a small-to-medium sized business in the West, you should try to target market segments where the quality, branding and support of the product matters, as obviously you will lose in a race-to-the-bottom of undifferentiated low-quality commodities.

Look at how Raspberry Pi still manages to maintain a huge market presence despite the prevalence of cheap Chinese clones - even if the latter occasionally have superior specs on-paper, in practice I have yet to find one that isn't vastly inferior in terms of ecosystem and software.

[vkou]

It sucked in different ways, but its not clear that it sucked more.

The point of the patent system is that you share your invention in the world, in exchange for monopolizing it for a few years. The problem is that most software patents share absolutely nothing of value with the world.

[varjag]

I'm with you on software patents, but they are only a fraction of patents landscape and really pertinent only to North America. But naturally it's overemphasized here on HN.

[happyjack]

Way overemphasized here on HN. The USPTO is in a terrible spot right now. Your IP is not worth what it was before the AIA (America Invents Act). It essentially decimated the patent system. I won't go into specifics.

I think another misconception is the entire purpose of the USPTO. The USPTO wants EVERYTHING in the entire universe to be in the public domain. To achieve this, you give them your idea and in exchange they give you a monopoly for 20 years minus prosecution time. Even worse, anything you publish anywhere on earth after one year automatically gets in the public domain.

Anyways, enough ranting, but the system is very expensive and is actually not incentivizing the "inventor" anymore.

[cycomanic]

Can we do away with this myth that patenting something will somehow put knowledge into the open. Has anyone here actually read a patent? They absolutely will not tell you how to do something. In particular I know for fact that, the things that are actually valuable are either never patented or specifically omitted from the patents so that no one can actually reproduce a method technology from a patent because some crucial steps are missing.

[unishark]

> Can we do away with this myth that patenting something will somehow put knowledge into the open.

They said it's the purpose of the patent system, not the real-world effect. It's very important to remind people of this purpose. Because people (especially lawyers) keep pushing this concept that ownership on a patented idea is some kind of natural right being protected by law. Which is completely opposite to reality, and part of what leads to the system being warped in the way you complain about.

[varjag]

That's not the rule, patents have to be reproducible by a man of the trade. Not disclosing crucial steps in the claims, even if overlooked by an examiner, is also a handicap: someone can circumvent your patent if the actual substance is missing.

Have a look at the original Gore membrane patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4194041A/en

It's very clear, detailed and reproducible.

And since we are on HN, here a bit on the software side: IBM original arithmetic coding patent.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4905297A/en

Perhaps it something that should not have been patented, but it's fully disclosed and reproducible.

[rjzzleep]

I'd be very interested in a writeup. My gut feeling was always that it is in fact not incentivizing the "inventor" either. I do see people at big institution filing patent after patent, but it seems very inaccessible for a normal human being like me.

[novaRom]

Exactly. Patents protect only monopoly of large companies. Getting a patent in EU or in USA is very expensive ranging from tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands. Big part of this money goes to totally unproductive parasitic hands.

[conjectures]

> In practice you'll have a head start of maybe a year before a grifter in China replicates your three years of R&D and floods the market.

So, not much different then?

[varjag]

It's different in that you can prevent the imports of copies into the mature markets by suing the importers.

[toxik]

The fact of the matter is that countries with weak IP laws and/or enforcement see less innovation. It makes sense too, the calculus is easy: rip someone’s tested idea off for free, or invest huge piles of money just to get your foot in the door?

[bawolff]

Do you really believe that software patents represent anything close to an original idea? From my perspective, Software patents are on such stupid things utterly divorced from anything that could be considered innovative, that none of it incentivizes inovation.

The calculus also doesn't seem all that clear to me. A alternative calculus: Build something new on top of someone else's idea (stand on the shoulders of giants) or spend all your time and money reinventing a perfectly good wheel so that you can do it in a slightly different manner purely for legal reasons.

[charcircuit]

You are leaving out the option of just licensing the patent. If you are lucky they will license it to you for free.

[bawolff]

That's still a restraint on innovation. Money going to licensing can't be spent on salaries.

If we assume free licensing then you might as well cut out the middle man and abolish patents.

[dstick]

Can the license holder set any price they want? Essentially blocking access with an absurdly high paywall? Or is there some kind of standard?

[_qwfv]

Yes, or they can refuse to license it to you at all.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The causality probably goes in the opposite direction. Countries without IP don't care much about protecting it. Countries with IP care about protecting it.

A case in point is China. It used to just produce low-value-added manufactured products, and it had little IP protection to speak of. But as China has moved up the value chain, it has passed IP laws and built out a court system to enforce them. It has rapidly become one of the most active venues for IP litigation in the world. But if there were no Chinese R&D to protect, there would be little reason for China to build out this system.

[cycomanic]

Citation needed. Historically this has not been true (I pointed to a famous example with pharmaceuticals further up) and it is also not true for companies, i.e. companies that patent a lot do usually not have the highest R&D budgets relatively.

[mashpoe]

Assuming that statistic is true, how do you know countries with more innovation don't just end up producing big corporations that lobby for more control over ideas that they don't want to compete for?

[AmericanChopper]

Just because the patent system has some problems doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. These troll patents might contain a high number of ideas you might just casually come up with, but the actually valuable ones tend to be comprised of innovative ideas that usually require significant R&D investment to come up with. Without patents there’s very little incentive to invest in coming up with those ideas. A lot of the time the people who come up with the patent have no intention or capability to bring products to market, so unless you want 100% of research to be completely controlled by commercial interests, you probably want to have patents.

You’re also ignoring what the patent is actually awarded for. The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. Without patents you’d expect almost all commercial innovation to center around ideas that can be kept a trade secret, and to have a lot more budget devoted to protecting trade secrets. It would essentially be the exact opposite of what I expect you’d want to happen.

[crispyambulance]

  > The temporary monopoly is awarded in return for publicly disclosing your invention. 

Reading patents is perhaps one of the WORST and most inefficient ways to discover "new ideas". Even ignoring the turgid legal language, the actual central ideas of the patents are either so vague they're useless or they apply to utterly obsolete scenarios or they just poorly describe something that has already been in existence/usage before, during, and after the patent's existence.

We could do just fine WITHOUT the patent system. Maybe if instead of fretting about diligent Chinese copycats, the USA and its corporations actually built stuff instead of outsourcing everything, we would not need to worry so much about patent infringement.

[waterhouse]

Not to mention, it's my understanding that tech employees are generally instructed to avoid reading patents, because if the company ever gets found in court to have infringed on the patents, then them having read the patents will be used to show wilful infringement and therefore to award triple damages.

I suppose they could read expired patents, though.

[AmericanChopper]

You’re really just restating the claim that we don’t need intellectual property protections, without making any attempt to explain why.

Your suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model is frankly enough to dismiss your idea without much further scrutiny.

[crispyambulance]

> ...suggestion that the global economy could shift towards an isolationist model...

Not at all. There's "global isolationism" and then there's outsourcing everything to the point where all that's left is the C-suite and a few supply-chain jockeys.

It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

[depressedpanda]

The key word here is 'invention'. In practice we have lawyers specialized in crafting as vague and broad patents as possible, so that bogus infringements can be litigated in court.

[AmericanChopper]

There’s lots of problems with our current system. However the list of problems doesn’t include the existence of the system itself.