[ethanbond]

I didn’t know this was a thing! Fascinating. It doesn’t seem like the economics always work similarly though. It’s fairly easy for millions of dollars of R&D to be put into a single invention, for it to be worth millions/billions on the market, and for someone else to copy it identically.

I.e. presumably Congress wouldn’t protect someone literally stripping the name off someone else’s song and publishing it and earning money from it?

Fee per patent claim is definitely interesting, just pricing it seems harder than in the song case.

[asmithmd1]

No, I can't republish a song and call it mine, and I can't use someone else's recording of a song without their permission. What I can do is record my version of their song and sell it and I can publicly play their song and charge people - but I have to cut them author of the song in for 9.1 cents for each instance.

Yeah, devil is in the details. Currently a patent gives exclusive use for 20 years and music copyright gives control for 100 years, but anyone can license it. The trick is to strike a balance that gets the most economic benefit. Set the claim fee high at first and tinker with it. I would think companies that innovate would be happy to know there is a ceiling to their liabilities instead of being at the mercy of a jury. And do we really want an inventor to be able to lock up any use of a technology for 20 years. Imagine a solo inventor cracks low-temperature fusion and sells their patent to Saudi Arabia for $1B - who sits on it for 20 years and sues anyone who tries to use it. Here is the public framing: "We need to pass the 'Freedom to Innovate' act passed to stop evil foreign companies from locking up American inventions that would benefit all hard-working Americans!"

Music is not as easy as it seems. How much should an artist get for a ring tone? For a stream? How much should artists get paid for longer songs? There is a 3 judge panel that adjudicates all these things: https://www.crb.gov/index.html

[pclmulqdq]

Your nightmare scenario actually sounds pretty good to me. Solo inventor is forced to publish the details of how to crack a 50-year-old problem, and even if the guy is a complete dick (refusing to license) and the rest of the world can't figure out a way to engineer around the patent claims, the world gets the technology a measly 20 years later. Many fields don't advance very much in 20 years - computers are the recent exception to this, but as the field matures, innovation will slow down (see what happened with Moore's law).

Said solo inventor gets rich and (in)famous in the process, but this is a person who solved a problem that the world has been working on for the last 50 years with no significant indications of progress, so maybe that inventor deserves to get rich and famous for coming up with the solution.

In contrast, without the $1 billion pot of gold sitting at the end of the rainbow for the solo inventor, there is a very good chance that person would never have tried to innovate on something like low-temperature fusion, and if they did, the details would be kept under lock and key rather than disclosed. The existence of the patent system both provides the incentive for someone who isn't a megacorp to innovate, and forces disclosure.

[asmithmd1]

With my proposal there is still the exact same $1B pot of gold for the inventor, the difference is everyone gets the benefit of their invention now. The trick is to set the claim license fee so that the value of the patent is exactly equal to the value of a current patent.

[pclmulqdq]

Great, now figure out how to discern the value of a patent without negotiating it. Also, for many patents (drugs, for example), a lot of the value comes from the exclusivity of it, and losing that also decimates the value of the patent.

This isn't copyright where 100000 plays of someone's cover is worth $1 and doesn't hurt the original artist at all. This is a hundred million dollar asset offering exclusive access to a competitive product. This is fundamentally different.

[asmithmd1]

> a lot of the value comes from the exclusivity of it

I think you are confusing value and price. Auctions precisely determine something's value. Companies sometimes can use scarcity to capture more money in price than they deliver in value - but that is a bug in our economic system, not a desired feature

[pclmulqdq]

Implied in your comment is that scarcity does not confer value, which is just not true. Scarcity, particularly when controlled by one entity, creates tremendous value for that entity because it creates a power imbalance with other entities. Otherwise, the secret coca-cola formula would have no reason to stay secret. Patents actually get their entire value from the artificial scarcity they create - you don't need a patent to confer an invention to someone else, only to stop other people from using it. Scarcity also greatly improves your ability to capture value, but it creates value to be in the club.

Another possible misunderstanding you may have about the concept of "value" is that you may be conflating value (in general) with societal value. One is a subset of the other - you can get value, companies can get value, and society can get value. People and companies can get a lot of value out of things that are not directly valuable to society, and society tolerates these things because society, on the whole, gets more value from having those people and companies in it than not. This is why you can drink, and also why most countries have patent systems despite that patent owners may not make optimal societal use of their patents during the term of their limited monopoly.

Also, if you have ever sold a patent before, you will know that it frequently takes the form of an auction process. Even if not explicitly structured as an auction, these negotiations have auction-like qualities with buyers bidding against each other and actually a lot of information-sharing.