| > If Google pays a researcher to do some research, they own it, regardless of how much any individual shareholder paid of that amount... Do you assume you are Google rather than the shareholder that you get any say in what happens with that research? > Here's a recent paper on patents and innovation... I would take with a jarful of salt anything Boldrin and Levine say. This is a rehash of their "Against Intellectual Monopoly" book, and they do the same mischaracterizing of other research, mis-portraying of actual events and claiming outright falsehoods. Case in point, the myth that Watt's patents held up steam development (which you too repeated): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6865980. What's really egregious is they refused to admit the truth when called out on it. Another comment pointing more falsehoods on their part:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7890441 And before anyone else mentions it, the "Wright patent held up US aircraft industry" thing is a myth too:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673 The startup / patents paper indeed is interesting, thanks, but the results are more nuanced than the quote you selected: patents do help startups with financing and making successful exits, but they cannot be leveraged effectively because enforcing them is more expensive. That is something that can be fixed if people focused on it rather than the "patent troll" bogeyman. The "Cumulative Innovation" paper is new to me, but a quick glance suggests some problems with it right away: 1. They derive a model to evaluate their claims, and unless backed up by solid empirical proof, this can be made to support arbitrary hypotheses (see this exchange on an unrelated field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082932). 2. Their final data set is very small (1200 or so patents out of millions) and highly biased, since they relate only to litigated patents, and even then, on those they deem to be the "stronger" ones. Indeed, they admit that most other patents being invalidated has no effect whatsoever on their metric for downstream innovation. Even if valid, it is impossible to generalize these results to all patents as a whole. On the other hand, there are many, many papers that point out the benefits of patent systems that you may not have considered. Yet another comment of mine mentioning some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8155043 The number of links to my own comments should give you a hint as to how often I debate this topic on HN :-) As usual, I'll wrap up by saying it's a complex and nuanced topic, and point to a meta-study that looks at a large number of other studies that explore both the pros and cons of current patent systems: "Recent Research on the Economics of Patents" - Bronwyn H. Hall, Dietmar Harhoff, (Google for PDF.) |
Thanks for the links. A couple of new papers to read there.
FWIW, my assertion that Watt held up development of the high-pressure steam engine and thus the locomotive came from Mokyr, not from Boldrin and Levine. I hold Mokyr in pretty high esteem, so I trust his interpretation, but I have not read the primary sources myself. It's interesting that the paper you mention has had almost no cites...even though it mentions that Mokyr et al commented on it. If they believed it threatened their views, you would think they would respond.
I tried to be evenhanded with the last paper by cutting to a neutral quote. I agree with your interpretation, but what that says to me is that patents are, on average, neither good nor bad for a startup. The plethora of papers arguing one way or the other, almost all with some flawed methodology (c.f. "do patents cause more patents to be filed?" or "why doesn't stronger patent law cause more patents to be filed?", etc.) says to me that there is not yet an answer to this question. This is a problem because patent law consumes a ton of resources, so there should be a rather more definitive answer about its efficacy. (It also seems eminently answerable, albeit with a lot more work defining and collecting metrics; I think, given that academics generally despise "business" questions, that simply counting patents is about all the work they are willing to do. That last paper I cited is the most actual roll-up-your-sleeves work I have seen addressing the question.)
My slant comes from 30+ years in the computer industry, 20 of it backing startups. My general rule of thumb is that if a founder's pitch puts a ton of emphasis on their patents, I pass. Patents have simply proved an ineffective way to defend a new business, in my experience.
Of course, if I were in a discovery-based business, like pharma, rather than an engineering-based business, I would have seen a different sequence of events and so have a different opinion.