| I really don't Innovation seems to come from - Academics, who would be doing the same thing regardless of patent revenue - Entrepreneurs (and people working for small companies), who are hurt much more by the existence of the patent system than the potential revenue from it. - People working for big companies, who would almost always be building the exact same product if the patent system didn't exist, except they wouldn't have to worry about working around competitors patents. Certainly the patent system makes some people money, but it mostly seems to be - Lawyers (for obvious reasons) - Owners of already very large and no longer very innovative big companies, who had the time to build up a war chest of patents. I don't particularly believe that giving extra money to either of those groups encourages innovation, and I certainly don't believe it encourages innovation enough to make up the harm it does to people attempting to be entrepreneurs, people having to work around patents, and so on. --- One potential exception to this is bio related industries, which are different in that patents are often the primary product a company produces, instead of a byproduct produced by engineering work that happens for other reasons. Without patents you would need to find another way to fund that work, if you want it to happen. I wouldn't call most of that work particularly innovative though, it's mostly just very expensive mind numbing work like "trying a million different possible drugs" and "running huge human trials" and so on. I would generally prefer that the bio work be funded by a different system, because I don't think the patent system produces good outcomes for society. It creates perverted incentives to always be creating new drugs, instead of finding new ways to use old ones. It creates perverted incentives to not build on each others work. It means that drug companies have the ability to charge substantially more than the cost of production for drugs they produce, meaning people who could be treated cheaply in an optimal system go untreated (note: The marginal cost of treating more people is really small since the expensive part is the R&D that already happened). Moreover it forces drug companies to do that if they want to recoup their R&D costs. Something like direct government subsidies to companies who discover drugs that people end up using (for medical purposes) seems like a better solution. There are a million variations on that, but I'd claim that basically any variation on that is probably better than patents. |