[Jochim]

The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.

It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.

The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.

[nness]

The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics.

The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold:

1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.

2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect.

What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.

[cycomanic]

The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds.

> 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.

Citation needed. I know of many patents that are side discoveries of R&D that was done anyway. It's a myth that others could easily undercut a company doing the research, the inertia of expertise of employees, processes etc. is typically much better at holding of the competition. None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting. The example of pharma is often brought up, but it's actually a very good counter-example, when pharma companies first developed, it was the Swiss and German companies which dominated and there was very little (Germany) or no (Switzerland) patent protection for pharmaceuticals.

Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

[marcinzm]

> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.

You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).

[michaelt]

Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description.

I can assure you that in practice they are neither.

There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.

[marcinzm]

> I can assure you that in practice they are neither.

Having written some patents that has not been my experience.

For example, this is one of the patents in the lawsuit:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/67/67/7c/1299b0c...

This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publication on this topic.

Like, seriously, it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details and not bland lawyer jargon:

>The second redirection mechanism, which is specified as a future extension of NDTP is having the server return an NDTP RDR RSP message in response to an NDTP request for which the NDTP server has no ownership of the supplied identifier string. Those skilled in the art will note that unlike the embedded redirection links mechanism, the NDTP RDR RSP mechanism applies to all NDTP requests, not just NDTP GET.

[pclmulqdq]

I didn't read this patent before making a sister comment, but looking through it, this one is actually really clear on exactly what is happening (which makes sense with everyone here saying "it's just DNS for data" - everything is obvious in hindsight) and relatively low on patent jargon.

A lot of patents give you a bunch of alternative implementations and component definitions, which can muddy the waters a bit. On the other hand, the figures can help you a lot.

[everforward]

Eh, this is like "first draft of a design document" level detailed.

The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient.

How are the mappings stored on disk? Does this entire protocol genuinely lack authentication? How is this meant to fail over when a server dies? If it's distributed, how do the nodes reach consensus?

You can't just jam stuff like this into a doc:

> Also, each update is preferably performed atomically > to avoid creating an inconsistent state in the string Store.

They're just handwaving away how the data gets stored. Y'know, the part of the patent that's actually useful and does something.

What's left over after you discount the parts they don't specify is basically just a wire protocol for a KV store that doesn't exist. They might as well try to patent a method for making imaginary mittens for imaginary friends, because that's basically what this is.

[michaelt]

> it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details

Yeah fantastic, like an entire page devoted to showing requests that have numerical identifiers. Groundbreaking stuff.

And it's all completely irrelevant noise because you can infringe on the patent even if your implementation in no way depends on any of those details

The only thing that matters is the claims, and they're written so broadly and interpreted by the courts so creatively that a subject matter expert cannot read the document and determine if something does or does not infringe on it.

Seriously, how does Claim 1 not cover 99% of HTTP requests ever made given that people were using reverse proxies and passing requests between backend servers for decades before this patent was filed?

[pclmulqdq]

In my past experience, this is only true because many people's eyes glaze over when they try to read patent-ese. If you can penetrate the obtuse form of English used, "in embodiments, ... may be ... to name a few" for example (and the weird ordering of paragraphs, etc.), it's actually not that hard to understand patents. There are a lot of people whose job it is to read patents, too.

[TimPC]

A very common pattern is to write a patent and a research paper after the initial patent filing. When the patent office doesn't do their job you can still usually learn the invention from the paper. They key thing is companies wouldn't let employees publish without the patent part.

[cycomanic]

> > Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.

> That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.

I have dealt with patents myself as well and in every instance the lawyers told me ok give me all the other ways of you can think of how to do things, no matter if it works or not. Also keep what you did sufficiently vague.

> You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).

This is actually a great example. Often the implementation will only work with a specific thickness and quality of silver and the substrate has to be prepared in a specific way to get the correct properties. None of these would be mentioned in the patent, and would typically require large amount of experimenting (costly) to find out what actually works.

[denton-scratch]

> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them

My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work.

This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.

[hasmanean]

Assassins are a step too far, but maybe advertising…let the public choose whether to buy the real deal instead of the parasitical imitators.

[mminer237]

The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops.

I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.

[Draiken]

It's almost like capitalism stifles innovation.

Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation!

It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram.

Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.

[bradjohnson]

And what exactly would stop an imitator from advertising that they're the "real deal"? Or maybe just that they're an "improved version"? There's extremely little regulation in advertising even now.

[rtkwe]

Patents IMO work better when it's a physically instantiated implementation of a very specific task. The big issue is where we've gone with software patents that are little more than "a server talks to another server and requests information from a database". Those implementations are extremely vague and cover way too much ground. Like the game patent that covered the entire idea of having a playable game during a loading screen or at least pretended to and the idea of fighting it was too expensive to bother trying to force the issue.

[nness]

> Discoveries of R&D that was done anyway

Not sure I agree — That's still investment. All that time spend doing research, even if for a completely different goal, doesn't come for free. Discovering two things in a process intended to discover one doesn't half the value of both things.

> None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting > written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering

I agree — software patents are ridiculous, too broad, and stifle the intent of IP rights. But parents protect other industries. My point is that a blanket "get rid of intellection property protections" statement is not realistic. It's nuanced.

[cycomanic]

FYI, I am in a hardware field and the companies I'm aware of (having had direct discussions with on CTO or senior engineer level) largely did patents to have something tangible to justify R&D to investors and financial analysts. They would never put know how that they considered crucial into a patent and considered patent litigation pretty worthless, especially against direct competitors, as they knew that everyone was violating everyone else's patents, because everyone working in the field comes up with the same solutions (so much for patents being non obvious to a subject expert).

[throw0101a]

> Citation needed.

* OECD: http://fs2.american.edu/wgp/www/park_lippoldt08.pdf

* Via: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/09/16/do-pa...

A review of the literature:

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664960/

[kiba]

It is a good idea to read the citation, at least in part. I am quoting from conclusion as that's the only part I am interested and read.

Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.

[geysersam]

This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.

[MRtecno98]

No, they are questioning the parent comment's argument that patents are against the basis for modern technological development itself, which is obviously false if patents where present well before this development

[oniony]

I did not read any such implication.

[master_crab]

The dash marks injecting the second part of the sentence does make a strong implication.

[yareal]

Having worked at Amazon, patents there were "if you can imagine that software might be able to do a thing, patent it now". Absolutely no research was necessary, or indeed requested. You simply had to state "I have an idea".

In exchange you got a plastic puzzle piece to put on your desk. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than seeing a large number of those puzzle pieces in someone's care. You stood in the way of progress in service of Jeff Bezos? Awful.

[kajumix]

The idea of "intellectual property" is anti-productive as well as immoral. Open source software is a very good evidence of the utilitarian benefits of doing away with software patents. And IP is immoral because it's impossible to grant and secure "intellectual property" rights without violating physical property rights. Please read Stephen Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" for a good treatment of both the utilitarian and the moral dimensions:

https://cdn.mises.org/15_2_1.pdf

[nness]

Open Source software is an awful example because by-and-large no one gets paid to do make it.

OSS doesn't exist to spite IP, it exists because of IP rights protect creators from others stealing their work.

[deepsun]

Yes, but the same can be said about non-compete agreements. Imagine a company invested a lot in research and infrastructure, only to get their key employees poached and bring most of it to a new company in their heads.

Yet, California forbids the non-competes, because it promotes competition and at least somewhat eases capital lock-ins (i.e. two dudes in a garage can start competing with "big ones"). I don't really see much difference with patents here.

Remember early Facebook infra looked very similar to Google, they had to get creative to make new names for internal projects clones of Google ones.

[nness]

If you are arguing that non-competes shouldn't exist therefore patents shouldn't exist — I think you're framing the issue too broadly.

If a professional joins an organisation, creates something novel and valuable, and then is poached to another organisation to do the same thing — that's exactly what patents are there to protect.

Say they spend 5 years developing a nice kind of lubricant — the company can patent that lubricant. Then if the professional goes and joins another company, even if they have that knowledge, they'd have to conduct new research to find a new approach which doesn't run afoul of the existing patent. That's the point — patent's don't protect your market dominance, they just protect against imitation/copying.

Now say the work of that professional is systems architecture for some Google project, and they leave and join Facebook to build the same systems architecture for Facebook's project — of course that shouldn't be patented (although sometimes it is, and that's a different issue.)

A "restraint of trade" agreement in your employment contract (a "non-compete") is intended protect companies from others copying their product when other IP rights don't exist — and I agree that it shouldn't exist. It quite literally prevents new invention and done through an imbalance of power. But, organisational already have plenty of mechanisms to mitigate that risk — pay the person more, better working conditions, or just pay them a long gardening period.

[fauigerzigerk]

>1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc.

I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.

[marcinzm]

Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.

[fauigerzigerk]

I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress.

We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.

[kiba]

We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.

That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry.

It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.

[nness]

Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors.

Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.

[marcinzm]

Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them.

edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.

[kiba]

Larger entities have lawyers and can afford more of them. It doesn't protect the little guys so much as allow larger entities monopoly power.

Patents are by themselves not a business model. They merely buy a seat at the negotiation table. Leverage is another matter entirely.

[Leherenn]

It feels like you could overcome this by awarding a patent to both, if they can prove the research was independent?

[fauigerzigerk]

Yes, but how do you prove that it was after one of the teams publishes their work? It seems nearly impossible.

[spion]

You can use the "dropping a hash" method (patio11 has used this). As you progress your work, you publish a hash of it using a service trusted by everyone to correctly identify the researchers and timestamp their hashes.

If someone publishes the paper, you can then publish the files that resulted with the dropped hash and therefore prove you had certain progress of the work at a certain time.

[arthurcolle]

4d merkle trees etched on a proton or something

[fauigerzigerk]

Yes you can provably document your progress, but it doesn't solve the problem that someone else may have published overlapping ideas earlier and you can't prove that you didn't read what they published.

[datascienced]

a use for blockchain at last?

[smsm42]

I've been working in the industry for decades, and most patents I've seen are either portfolio-inflating bullshit, or rent-seeking that blocks innovation for decades (like the infamous compression patents). I'm sure some people worked on their technology a lot, but pretending like software patents are necessary for people getting paid or for technology to advance is nonsense. They are much more frequently used to impede than promote innovation, and their overall impact is mostly negative.

[worksonmine]

> The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality.

The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church.

We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.

[mkl]

For the first 200,000 years of human existence, hardly any technological development happened at all relative to the last 600 years (though I am doubtful how much patents contributed to that development). The rate at which technological development has continued to speed up is part of what's causing problems here: patents last ~20 years, which is an eternity in IT. The other problem is granting patents on software at all - the USA is unusually permissive in this.

[graemep]

Most witch burnings happened in the last 600 years - there had been very few (at least in Europe) in the previous millennium and a half. I just pointed out in another comment that the first criminal blasphemy laws in England and Wales were also passed 600 years ago.

It is not easy to divide human progress into before and after. Technological progress very much depends on what has gone before. It accelerated when it reached a certain point of development.

I agree with you that patents are not a key cause of progress, and they often impede it by preventing people other than the patent holder further improving anything patented.

I also think they probably work pretty well for mechanical inventions, but they have been applied to everything - drugs, software, electronic devices, even business methods in some places.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented.

It would have implied a better, more developed society.

It would implied that there is a writing system.

It would have implied that there was a way to store records long term.

It would have implied that there was a long distance communication system.

It would have implied the existence of some state and rule of law.

It would have implied some type of justice system where you could get redress.

It would have implied a society with excess production of essential materials that it can support the division of labor involved in supporting this system.

[worksonmine]

Not really, it could also have implied cavemen killing everyone they see lighting a fire instead of spreading the knowledge.

[smabie]

And yet, it turns out last 600 years saw many orders of magnitude more innovation than the years prior.

[chongli]

We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence.

None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”

[wongarsu]

Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.

[worksonmine]

Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.

[mrguyorama]

Also, much more importantly, the invention of the scientific method and science as a philosophy of epistemology.

Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.

[_fat_santa]

IMHO patents are useful for things where you spend a ton of money researching something, but the implementation is rather straightforward. Think of the secret Coke or Pepsi recipes, I would imagine very hard and expensive to develop but easy to produce once you know what to do.

Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible.

Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully.

That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.

[LordKeren]

Coke’s recipe is protected by Trade Secret, not patents. If you can figure out how to reverse engineer Coke 1:1 on your own, you can sell the resulting product. Coke is only protected from people selling their recipe to competitors.

[kiba]

Patents are only useful if they are actually enforced, through lawsuits and lawyers. The amount of time and money spent on patent lawsuits as opposed to innovation is a form of deadweight cost and must be factored in any argument for or against patents.

What patents give is a seat at the negotiation table. It is not by itself a business model.

[ooterness]

As someone who holds several patents, I totally agree. Every time I interact with that system, it makes me want to burn the whole thing to the ground.

The legal definition of novelty and obviousness is nonsensical. The duration is far too long. The USPTO does a terrible job of screening for quality. The court enforcement is little more than a high-stakes game of chance.

[TrackerFF]

It would be an interesting experiment - a world where no patents exist, only production (though corporate espionage / theft is still illegal).

Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup all that cost, before their patent runs out.

Would it lead to more money spent on making reverse engineering difficult? Both the products, and the manufacturing process.

[runako]

The other aspect of patents that folks are omitting is that in order to get a patent, the applicant has to publish their recipe. In most cases, this will be strictly better than simple reverse engineering because more participants can then use the IP once it expires (as opposed to those with the means and desire to reverse engineer it).

Patents are a two-way street where society gets something in exchange for granting a limited-duration monopoly.

[lelanthran]

> Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering,

Reverse engineering is not needed - it's time-consuming, expensive and error-prone.

The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!

As much as some people hate to admit it, intellectual property laws have their place. Are they perfect? Not in my opinion! But, things would be worse without enforced intellectual property laws.

[derivagral]

> The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!

This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.

[lelanthran]

> This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.

What incentive could you possible offer them? If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's trade secrets, all they have to do is offer a key person $500k/year salary.

If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's patent, they are going to pay you for it.

And, as someone who's actually been in court more than a few times, no, they won't kill you via legal bills in a long protracted court case (say, by violating the IP) to get the IP - that happens so rarely you may as well hope for significant winnings at a casino.

And even if they pursue a protracted legal battle hoping to kill the company to acquire the IP, then they have to bid on the open market for it, against other FAANGs!

And even if they do kill the company, then they still have to deal with whoever gets the IP (which is why that strategy is almost never viable), because that IP doesn't become public domain simply because the company died, it will go to someone, somewhere.

[jampekka]

R&D can be done without profit motive. Most R is done in universities without profit motive.

Some argue that nothing gets done if somebody doesn't get capital gains for it. This is of course empirically flat out false.

[mrguyorama]

Everyone lionizes the 1900s as this massive period of innovation. Part of the way we got here is by INVALIDATING PATENTS

When the world beat Germany (twice), part of the reparations for the world wars was basically invalidating most of Germany's intellectual property. The second world war we went above that and basically claimed human beings who were working on that intellectual property.

When America was struggling to get useful radar to work, the British brought us the cavity magnetron, and the US was able to utterly industrialize that into a million allied radar systems. When the US thought jet engines were a dead end fuel hungry fad, the Brits showed us theirs, which was way more advanced and helped the US get on the right track for future development.

When everyone was basically inventing computers as a real thing, the allies benefited greatly from massive cross-pollination, including people who are now considered grandfathers of modern computing literally meeting in a train station and chatting about the computers they were building which helped them work together to build bigger and better machines.

You don't advance innovation and invention by limiting an idea to the six people working R&D on this specific concept in GE, you advance innovation by letting every smart person and their friend dick around with the concept in freedom.

The entirety of the modern internet is basically built on this fact, and moved so damn fast, yet people will STILL insist "no, to encourage innovation you have to not let people innovate!"

How much did Tim Berners-Lee make off of HTTP?

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Universities are incentivized to research things that will score grant money.

[jampekka]

Grant money is not profit.

[matwood]

Yes, it's more like VC. But, the point is university research is not some magically altruistic thing. It is driven by grants either from the government or someone who made a lot of money.

[jampekka]

University research is labor. Researchers get salary or stipend, usually relatively modest on the ridiculous white collar standards. Nobody gets rich from grants. Typical best case scenario for grant researchers is to stay employed. Tenured faculty don't get any money from the grants.

(Very) few do get rich by leeching publicly funded research for spin-off companies. High level admins can get relatively rich from obscene salaries, but they aren't the ones applying for the grants or doing the research.

Probably not altruistic, but not usually primarily for money either. If money is what you want, university is a very bad place for trying to get it. People do do things for other reasons than economic gain regardless of what the prevailing economics dogma and ideology claims.

[badwolf]

Not directly, but if it can save a university from having to use their endowment or other funds for something they would probably already do anyway, is there fundamentally a difference?

[jampekka]

Nobody gets access to the money privately. The grant is paid out in salaries for work instead of capital gains. There's no capital investment for the grant.

Of course grants are an economic incentive to do something. But not all economic incentives are profit.

Edit: To be clear, universities as such don't generally apply for research grants. Researchers in universities do, and for getting a grant they get the luxury of working for a salary for a few years, or getting somebody else to be paid for their work. Universities do take a cut (overheads) from the grants to nominally pay for infra and admin etc, but in reality a lot of it is spent on all kinds of non-related things like teaching and alumni dinners and chauffeurs for the provost.

[bartonfink]

The existence of one incentive does not preclude other relevant incentives, for fuck's sake.

[melagonster]

unfortunately, drug designing is special condition here. the experiment of drugs spend cray amounts of money.

[jampekka]

Military costs crazy amounts of money. Education and healthcare cost crazy amounts. And roads, public transport, water and sewage, social security, basic research, space programs, police, governance, firefighting etc.

[yareal]

You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine? Especially if that research focused not on "what's the most profitable medicine" but rather "what medicine would increase well being the most"?

You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?

[jandrewrogers]

Government investment in biomedical research has a history of following political fashion rather than optimizing for the best outcomes. Diseases that a politician cannot talk about in a press conference don’t get funded. The rise of private foundations funding a large percentage of all biomedical research was a response to government, and sometimes companies, reliably ignoring major medical research areas.

[jampekka]

[citation needed]

Research funding is allocated mostly by the academic community itself, via panels consisting of academics. This does have problems of its own, but they have little to do with politics as in elected politicians. Policians can have some influence on general directions, but it's quite limited.

What you say sounds very much based on the general anti-government and anti-democratic ideology rather than evaluation of history.

[kloop]

> You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine?

Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.

Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)

[jampekka]

Nobody should get or have 1 billion dollars. Not even close. I've fundamentally soured on that.

But even that would be better than the current system where people that have nothing to do with the research get obscene amounts of money solely on the merit of having obscene amounts of money.

[jampekka]

You probably do put quite a chunk of your taxes to fund research in the medicine, and pharma profits on top. Especially outside US drugs are typically bought with public funds. With the privatized drug development model we just get extra middlemen leeching off profits.

[lordnacho]

The drugs business is hard to use an an example, because it's precisely because things are covered by patents that it is worth spending a lot of money on. Not only that, regulation by the FDA and similar entities can be expensive because there are large businesses that can pay for the expense, because they were awarded a monopoly in the past for other drugs.

It's the snake that eats itself.

[gentleman11]

Then again, Amazon likes to take open source projects and monetize them so cheaply via aws at scale that it drives the creators out of business. And authors need ip protection to keep some random Amazon like printing press company from stealing almost all their revenue from books they write because they just have better distribution and marketing

(unless authors are supposed to make almost 100% of their incomes from touring and live shows, as the overwhelming sentiment on hn is towards musicians)

[qwytw]

> antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia

I'd argue the opposite. It has been one of the primary driving forces behind human progress for the past 300-400 years. The world today would be a much bleaker and more miserable place if IP rights never became a thing.

Imagine writing or any type of content creation without copyright. Even after the printing press was invented it was basically impossible to make a living only from writing without being independently wealthy, having some rich patron or a daytime job. Publishing any new content was risky and generally unprofitable, it would either flop or if it didn't other publishers would start printing it without giving you a dime.

Without IP rights innovating only makes sense if you're large corporation and have a moat or you're funded by someone else (state/universities/etc.). For any small to medium business it would mean that you would incur all of the costs and couldn't compete with others which would steal your tech as soon as it becomes public.

Of course there is a point where it might start stifling innovation and we might be already past it but that's a bit like calling for air travel to be banned because of the whole Boeing debacle etc.

[pas]

Books are fancy, but let's not mix up progress with being able to live off writing them.

We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.

That said, the startup selling IP model works somewhat in the pharma sector, but that's patents, and you mentioned books, where the whole IP regulation game got abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright).

[zaphirplane]

Human Progress is a lot more than open source software innovation.

[pas]

Yes, obviously. And more than books and pop songs and whatnot. Also more than medicine, though it's definitely up there on the list somewhere.

And all of that is thanks to finally some groups of people pulling out their heads from their asses, stopped trying to focus on trying to loot their neighbors, and instead started to trade.

[qwytw]

> Books are fancy, but let's not mix up progress with being able to live off writing them.

Ok you can substitute this with any type of R&D done by individual or small to large companies.

> We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.

Open source is only really successful in areas where it's a cost centre. Generally, companies mainly invest it into when using OS allows them to reduce their costs and they can focus on other ways of making money/differentiating their products. e.g. there would've been a lot less innovation in OS if Google/Meta/etc. didn't make billions from ads and other services.

> and you mentioned books,

Well yeah.. or any creative content.

> abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright

Yes, I also think that's excessive. To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content. In any case it's obviously preferable to not having any IP protection...

[pas]

Books are rarely written as solutions to overcome a specific pragmatic problem. (We need a blue LED, sure I'll write a novel series about it! We need walkaway-safe nuclear power plants, let me get my quill! We need to come up with a delivery mechanism for mRNA vaccines ... hm ... order the ink and warm up the presses!)

Sure, books are great at popularizing ideas, serve as a unit of discourse, like papers, journals, conferences and whatnot.

But when Dickens wanted to make money he wrote A Christmas Carol not A Teatrise On Socioeconomic Inequalities for Saturnalia. (And most likely he had a bigger impact this way.)

> To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content.

I think people somewhat rightfully feel that the social contract has been unfairly altered. The deal was that Mickey gets a temporary monopoly, and we respect it so we then get it for "free".

In a hypothetical bleak grey philosophical vacuum the first time someone draws a mouse what would be the fair thing? Respecting authorship (so no plagiarism), giving credit, sure, that's the minimum, but can others copy it, add some colors and pizzazz and become the new creative king/queen of the hill? (One one hand, maybe it would give society the best stuff, the most amazing variations of all the themes. On the other hand maybe artists would burn out in 2 seconds and nobody would ever even dare to try to come up with anything original, because the game is to derive better derivatives.)

... but I don't think so. If it would be that easy to turn anything up to 11 in a second, then we would see it all the time. (Instead what we see is conservative reboots/remakes/remixes that fit the current mainstream. With its pros and cons! It's important to note, that it's despite all the brutal forever plus zillion years copyright regime we do get these summer hits that are basically old song with a new spin. And it's fine. And sometimes we get Dune part I, II, and soon III, and hopefully more parts too! Bless the maker and his water!)

[qwytw]

> Books are rarely written as solution

Of course. I just used books as an easiest example of why IP was beneficial and created an environment where individuals could make a living independently by creating content. Indirectly this (amongst other things) create an environment where intellectual work actually became valued by the society.

Patents are probably a more straightforward example .e.g. why would've have Savery, Newcomen, Watt etc. have worked on created and improving the steam engine and how would've they attracted the investment necessary for that if they could in no way profit from their work?

[pas]

Well, why did anyone - before patents - invent anything? :) Fame, recognition, reputation, furthering the king's glory, and of course mad pussy (or whatever the correct terminus technicus is nowadays).

And as I (hopefully) implied before, it's good that we worked out a social contract that incentivizes these things (that we think are the cornerstones of the progress we want/need), but it seems there's quite a lot more work to be done on this, because it was very crude before, and now it's just ridiculously blunt.

And it's a hard problem, I don't want to say that most people today only really get the downsides (higher medicine prices), because the whole drug discovery and push to market pipeline is horribly inefficient, eats money like there's no tomorrow, and it's not just patents. The FDA can grant ~3 years of exclusivity with the marketing authorization, right?

But. We see that patents are already not good enough for medicine. (Or that the busy little lobby beavers built a huge fucking dam around the patent moat. Just to be sure.)

[Teever]

It would be interesting to see which generates more value for humanity -- closed source software or open source.

[MRtecno98]

If there were no patents most of them would just be kept as secrets, and you would, for the most part, get right back where you started(if not in a worse position)

[riskable]

What you're talking about is a very specific area of patent law: Patents on manufacturing processes. The assumption is that without the patent the knowledge necessary to reproduce the products made with the method would be extremely difficult or impossible. This is nonsense in this day and age.

Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process and underpaid employees who know the secrets can be easily poached. Therefore, the entire concept of patents existing for the sake of disclosure falls flat on its face.

[runako]

> Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process

This is in part because they are steeped in a society where essentially all innovations are published, and have been for hundreds of years. This would not be the case if each engineer could only draw on a single career's worth of exposure to actual practices.

[constantcrying]

The problems aren't patents. The alternative to patents are company secrets, which are much less conductive to innovation.

The point of a patent is that a company can share something without it being immediately used by their competition, who didn't have to do the RnD, and now obviously can undercut them.

The problem is that the patent system is largely gamed and exists to a significant extent to drag your opponents and random companies into multi million dollar lawsuits over the most flimsy excuse of a research result.

[foolofat00k]

This take just does not concord with reality. The rate at which innovation has happened since the first patent was issued in the 1400s is many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which it happened before.

I'm would not argue that patents are the cause of this rapid pace of innovation, but the data does not come anywhere close to supporting your claim.

[cool_dude85]

The rate at which innovation has happened since Constantinople fell is also many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which it happened before. More evidence is needed to assess how much each event contributed to this innovation rate.

[boplicity]

> It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape

This is a strong claim, without any evidence to support it.

In fact, a look at the historical record, as others have pointed out, very much shows an extremely strong correlation between intellectual property rights and technological development. Sure, this is merely correlation, but that's certainly better than a strong claim without any evidence.

I'm curious though, if intellectual property was no longer a thing, which industries would need to be completely restructured. Some rather important ones, I would say. Journalism, in my mind, being at the top of the list. Not that it would be impossible, but the implications would very much be profound. I'm not sure what such a world would look like, but the transition would likely be rather difficult. Maybe it would work out better in the end? Who knows!?

[mightybyte]

The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine has a decent overview of the arguments supporting this claim.

https://annas-archive.org/search?q=against+intellectual+mono...

[boplicity]

Thanks for the reference. I downloaded the book, and looked up the parts that talked about newspapers, in particular. I found the arguments to generally be counter to what the industry has figured out, in terms of actual survival.

From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be.

Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce.

From the book:

"The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal (and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to get the news?"

What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable."

Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still.

With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.

[TulliusCicero]

So if I make a game or write a book, someone can just copy+paste it onto another digital store and make money off of it, immediately?

[panick21_]

Well for many reasons. Also, what you could do is take an existing book, rewrite a few passages and then publish it. Almost like ... open source.

[Cheer2171]

The concept of human rights is also antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.

[graemep]

I disagree. Societies with better human rights (internally - not necessarily how they treated people outside their society) have tended to make more advances historically.

[troyvit]

AWS made 90.8 billion in 2023. I think a $525 million charge for using a smaller company's intellectual property reflects exactly what you're saying.

If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'

[namlem]

AWS didn't steal the technology. They re-invented it in a way that was similar to a patented technology. Imo this is a failure of the patent system. AWS should not have to pay anything in an ideal system.

[kick_in_the_dor]

...he comments on an article where the big rich tech company hands over money to the small guy he stole the idea from

[gdilla]

hardly. patents are also optional - if you wanna give away all your IP to the world, no one is stopping you.

[TimPC]

What is your alternative to IP that solves the secrecy problem? We've created an environment where companies can share most of what they are doing when it comes to AI. How much quicker has AI advanced because researchers at one company can learn progress and techniques from other companies?

IP doesn't feel great but it feels a lot better than having every bit of research be a trade secret.