[mbreese]

Patents have been around for centuries and they exist to provide incentive for people to advance society. Sure innovation might continue without them, but likely at a much slower rate.

I'm not a fan of the current state of the patent system, but patents do have their place.

[slowpoke]

False. Innovation would speed up by magnitudes because we'd finally be able to do incremental development off each other's discoveries. It would foster a society where exchange of information would be a given, instead of suing each other over what amounts to a piece of paper.

Oh, and if you'd take a look at the history of patents, then you'd realize that since their inception, they have done all but progressed innovation. One of the most famous examples would be the steam engine, which - "thanks" to Watt's patent on it - remained basically unimproved for three decades, despite the existence of obvious solutions (which also were patented, by other people). After the patent expired, innovation on the steam engine surged, and its efficiency improved by factors of 10 over the following years.

[mbreese]

You're thinking too short term. The question isn't whether or not Watt's patent hindered steam engines for three decades, but whether or not the steam engine would have been developed at all in those three decades. The benefit for society is delayed so that inventors can be compensated. The only mechanism that is available to gov't to compensate an inventor is to grant a temporary monopoly. That was the market can decide on the value of the invention.

Here's another example. Imagine a miracle drug was discovered to cure disease X. $100M went into the development for this drug. Now imagine that it took 10 years of development but would have taken 30 years for public sponsored research to develop otherwise. Now, the public gets a new drug 20 years earlier than they otherwise would have. The pharma company gets 10 years to recoup its $100M investment, but at the end of the patent term, there is now a low cost generic version available.

So with public funding, the new drug appears at t+30 years. With private/patent incentive based funding the public gets access at t+10 years and generic/cheap access at t+20 years. I think that strikes a fair balance.

Where the patent system starts to break down is when the monopoly length is grossly over the amount of time it would take an independent person to also develop the invention (software for example moves too quickly for this to be effective).

[slowpoke]

>software for example moves too quickly for this to be effective.

It's not just software. Progress as a whole is moving way too fast to justify ANY temporal monopolies over inventions. The curve of technological advancement is probably roughly exponential. The more we discover, the faster we can discover more things. We're sacrificing the advancement of the entirety of mankind for the profit of a few corporations.

>The only mechanism that is available to gov't to compensate an inventor is to grant a temporary monopoly.

Utterly wrong. A lot of research (including the worst example, the pharma industry) is funded directly or indirectly by the government, full or in part. Quite a lot of research is done by universities in cooperation with the industry. It's nonsense to imply that patents are the only viable solutions. They aren't, and they are probably the worst solution anybody could come up with. They are a crutch and an impediment to mankind as a whole.

On your miracle drug: highly contrived example. Most pharma research is, at least in good part, funded by the public through the government. In addition, a very large part of the cost of a drug is marketing. Yes, that's right - the pharma industry spends billions on ads.

In addition, this model is fundamentally flawed. It's a lot more profitable to develop treatments (for symptoms etc) than it is to develop cures. I'd wager that without this nonsensical system, we could already have a solution to AIDS and severely reduced the lethality of cancer.

Also, I do not care how many billions went into the development of a drug. A human life is infinitely worth more than that. I get sick when I see corporations whining about their "intellectual property getting stolen" when developing countries decide to produce generic clones to save human lives, like recently the case in India.

Again, I simply reject the notion that there needs to (and in fact, that there can) be any sort of artificial monopolies or other forms of ownership over inventions and technologies. By getting rid of this paradoxical and, frankly, unethical system, we would gain a monumental speed-up in technological progress. I postulate we could be colonizing the solar system by now if we'd never allowed this system to emerge.

As a final note, it's funny how you accuse me of thinking in the short term - that couldn't be any more wrong. If anything, I fight for the prolonged future of humanity, decades and centuries from now. The patent system is utterly unsustainable in light of this.

People will eventually look back at this system and ask themselves how we could ever allow ownership over abstract concepts. They will shake their heads at the notion of intellectual property while freely accessing, using and improving upon the shared heritage of all mankind. I hope this day isn't far away - it can't come fast enough.