| The number of patents owned by startups is greatly dwarfed by the number owned by large companies. Furthermore, the competition opportunity for small businesses to offer similar products at lower prices greatly outweighs the value of patent invention. Some people would say large businesses can make things cheap in a way that small businesses can't compete with. However, that turned out to not happen in practice as big companies chase huge profit margins, supported only by the government. China doesn't have this problem the US does because they have weaker patent laws. Patents need to be eradicated ASAP or we will not be globally competitive. We are also harming humanity as a whole as the inventive utility of patents simply doesn't scale in proportion to the harms, with the large populations we have now, they are clearly harmful on balance. The fundamental problem with patents is that the benefit has lower asymptotic complexity with respect to population size than than the harm does. When you exceed some population size, patents become harmful. The utility of copying is N^2 since you have O(N) copiers and O(N) inventions to copy from. The harm of patents is therefore O(N^2) since this is the copying that patents prevent. What we find is that the benefits of patents seem to scale at most around some O(N /log N) ish metric. Doubling the population size increases the number of inventors, but the chance an invention was already invented by someone else increases as population size increases. Hence the benefits of patents scale worse than O(N). Applying that to the harm and we still get O(N(N/logN)) for harm and O(N/logN) for benefits. Clearly patents do not scale. * Here I am using Log N as a substituite for the difficulty increase of finding an invention not already invented. This exact measure is difficult to estimate. |