“Patent monopolies prevent innovation. It is a system that works against innovations, to protect the current corporations against competition from aggressive, innovative, and competitive upstarts. It allows the big corporations to crush competitive upstarts in the courtroom, rather than having to compete with their products and services.” …which happens to be exactly why the old boys’ club of computer technology (Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) wants to keep it this way. This is not a system for the people, it’s a system for huge corporations.
Here’s a software engineer’s first hand experience dealing with software patents:
http://ploum.net/post/working-with-patents
It’s not pretty, and this is a European scenario, I can only imagine what level the insanity must reach in the US.
http://ploum.net/post/working-with-patents is an interesting take on one man’s experience. But, please take it with a huge grain of salt. There are a lot of statements in there that are not quite correct from a legal standpoint.
As for the main article. I might take issue with some of the numbers and assumptions. But, I think the general premise isn’t far off — patents are a game of large corporations. Also, I think there is a very strong argument that in many, if not all, industries patents do not aid innovation and more likely have the opposite effect.
With that said, I think there might be a few industries that would not exist without patent protection. The pharmaceutical industry in particular comes to mind. The amount of money spent to develop, clinically test, and obtain FDA approval is astronomical. However, the ability to copy this work after the fact, while not trivial, is still several orders of magnitude less costly. Without some sort of exclusivity, it would be foolish for any company to spend the dollars needed to develop pharmaceuticals as they would never get their investment back out as others copied for less and saturate the market.
For other industries (e.g. software and electronics in particular), I think a good case can be made that innovation would continue at the present rate and possibly a greater rate, if there were no patents. I think part of the problem is tradition. People know the system that is presently in place and may appreciate that it has flaws. But, they are known flaws. You get rid of the current patent system. It “might” result in better world. Then again, there might be huge unforeseen problems that cause mass economic harm. No one wants to be the cause of such a downfall. Thus, what patent reform that takes place tends to be on the nature of baby steps instead of sweeping changes.
Hi,
I wonder if there isn’t a better way. I wonder if the pharmaceutical industry should be split into “research” and “manufacture”.
The research should be a cooperative effort, where scientists worldwide have incentives to help each other and don’t have any incentive to impede the progress of other researchers (via. patents, trade secrets, etc). Research could/would be funded by governments, academia, health insurance, etc. The manufacturing should be competitive, but manufacturers should compete on quality and price alone.
– Brendan
Yes, especially since the current system encourage to release new medicine that are not necessarily an improvement over existing medicine, since patented medicine means huge profit, while unpatented medicine means a lot of “generic”, and low profit. So it is better for companies to replace medicine whose patent are expiring, with new patented medicine.
As far as “all of this anti-IP idealism does not apply to the pharma industry” type arguments go, i refer you to this :
levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/imbookfinal09.pdf
It has me convinced.
Highlights the historical precedent for drugs-without-IP and the massive growth in the broader chemical industry in europe which was then lacking IP protection ( compared to the protected american industry )
Edited 2012-03-13 10:59 UTC
It would work in a different way. Those who are interested in the potential of new medicines would probably fund the research. Patients and their families would more often be stockholders. There would be many kinds of contracts, for instance with a floor salary for researchers and a bonus for actual achievements.
Or maybe the research would be funded by health insurance companies, who knows. In general we can’t predict how future (free) markets will develop, but we can predict that they will clear.
It’s a little presumptuous to assume a society should be obsessed with innovation. People care much more about stable employment, security, leisure time…
Do patent monopolies prevent innovation? Sure, why not. Let’s grant that. But I’ll tell you this. Microsoft employs nearly 90,000 people. IBM employs over 400,000 people. Big companies are full of slack… and a lot of that slack is about jobs for people. I’m under no illusion that these big companies are all about profit… and that is something that needs to be addressed on its own. But I also know how big companies work and they employ a lot more people than small start ups. And its not like innovation stops at all. At best it is slowed. Google still managed to one up Microsoft… so did Apple.
Efficiency and innovation are great. But let’s not be ideological about it. Professions like doctors and lawyers have their protections to keep wages up. They restrict their trade. They build ‘training’ into their profession via residency and such programs. They protect themselves from foreign competition. Other parts of life monopolize entire industries like public education…
Quite frankly, R&D is globally competitive and patents are such a small restrictions to slow the race the bottom somewhat. Maybe innovation slows down by 20 years. Whoop de do in the grand scheme of things.
I’m not fan of the patent system, but I’m also not a fan of exposing our industry to unbridled competition when no one else plays by those rules.
Sure get rid of patents, when the government starts paying engineers/scientists wage to keep them employed over the long time… like Germany is doing now with its manufacturing workers in these bad economic times.
Get rid of patents when engineering is a licensed profession, so installing a home router requires a licensed EE.
Get rid of patents when the world become s a libertarian paradise.
…
And if anyone mentions the broken window fallacy… I don’t care. If everyone else is breaking windows… I’ll break some too
Edited 2012-03-12 20:06 UTC
I wouldn’t look at either the medical field *or* the law fields as shining examples of what to do. Both those fields are very tired and frankly very corrupt and self serving. They are in dramatic need of reform. The one thing I *do* know is if government is involved in this *reform* that it would only make things dramatically worse.
Wealth in any society is measured by efficiency: providing appropriate goods and services using the least resources possible. The more efficiency there is in an economy the more people are freed up to find new ways to further increase the efficiency.
This idea of “maintaining employment” throws a wrench in the increasing efficiency cycle, frankly it even stalls it and may in fact lead to negative effiency.
Part of what made the US so successful at one point was that people were allowed, and enabled and encouraged to improve themselves and their lot in life. This idea that people should be guaranteed the ability to keep on repeating over and over whatever they’ve always done…I view that as a type of uninteresting slavery.
Ok. But what does any of that have to do with patents? I’m not being snarky, I just don’t understand what patent law has to do with those other things – laws have rationales and employment security is not and never was a rationale for the patent system…
That is crazy talk. Its like saying “Does health insurance regulation increase premiums? Sure, why not. Let’s grant that.” Do you not see the problem there? If something the government does has the opposite effect it was intended to have… well, um, its kind of broken and we should be talking about how to fix it.
Are you implying that software patents are designed to protect wasteful employment at IBM? Because that isn’t what they are for…
You are basically advocating inefficiency for the sake of jobs… How does that help us, when IBM’s real competition won’t be small US startups in 15 years – it will be India and China, both countries which have very different baselines for measuring success (as in per capita income). They don’t play by our rules, you said it yourself – and they have a tendency to be anything but inefficient…
Do they? I hate to tell you but surgery centers in India, Mexico, and Puerto Rico are growing in popularity quite rapidly with US consumers…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism
Protectionism simply doesn’t work in the long run – eventually it will always bite you in the ass.
So we should slow the race to the bottom, instead of trying to not participate in a race to the bottom (i.e. innovating). Gotcha.
Edited 2012-03-12 22:14 UTC
That sounds like the talk most of my former Indian colleagues engaged in(a happy former IBM’er). So don’t assume that Indians are the way forward, if their wages rise above a certain level. ~40’000 inefficient and under-educated ex-colleagues at both IBM India branches care only for one thing – job stability. No innovation. No professional growth. Just banging on the keyboard for 60hrs per week. Work hard, not smart – is seen all too often there.
(Not to say that there aren’t any smart and extremely valuable ppl in India, just most are plain code monkeys)
Innovation is actually a race to the bottom, it’s just the race that pushes the bottom margin higher by pushing the reference frame up.
That misguided person thinks that 20 years of stalled innovation is OK. But would he tell that to an African child that will have to walk 5km every day for clean water for most of his/her teen years? Because it’s not only IT that has this problem now, process patents are starting to creep up as well.
I think the problem is, patents have been created to stimulate innovation.
So if patents don’t serve their goal (anymore or in certain fields) then they shouldn’t exist anymore.
Well if you’re going to be fatalistic about it, then why did you even write a long comment?
You do know that there is such a thing called copyright, don’t you?
Hi,
Jobs/employment should never be the goal of an economy – it’s only a means to an end. The goal should be maximising the affordability and availability of goods and services.
A system where everyone earns $1000 for working 10 hours per week is much better than a system where everyone earns $1000 for working 60 hours per week to produce the same goods and services.
– Brendan
The more unemployment you have, the more your economy stalls. The more unemployment you have, the less affordable products & services become.
An economy is like a complex engine. Employment is a vital component that should not be downplayed. Suggesting otherwise is like saying gas isn’t as important as oil in keeping the engine running.
Hi,
Imagine if there’s only enough useful work for 50% of people to work 40 hours per week. Would you create useless work so that everyone can waste their lives for no reason, or make everyone work 20 hours per week?
The goal should be maximising the availability of goods and services; while also minimising the amount of work that needs to be done to achieve that (or improving efficiency); while also ensuring that the work is shared in a fair/equal way (e.g. no “wage hogs” working 80 hours per week and screwing unemployed people).
If you think people should work simply for the sake of working, I’ll pay you a wage of $1 per year to spent all of your free time shifting sand from A to B and back again.
– Brendan
Brendan,
“The goal should be maximising the availability of goods and services; while also minimising the amount of work that needs to be done to achieve that (or improving efficiency)”
+1 if I could.
People don’t always get that, and everyone keeps working more and more hours for diminishing returns.
In a way, it’s a “tragedy of the commons”. Everyone wants a little bit more relative to the next guy, but it becomes necessary for everyone to do it to get their fair share. We all end up working like lunatics for a standard of living that we all could have had with half the work.
I find it hard to believe that some people would think in terms of what the neighbour has rather than what they need.
I mean… To me, jobs seem like a highly personal choice. There’s what you can’t live enjoyably without, and there’s what you simply like to have around. The former determines what job you get, the latter is determined by the job you get. It’s hard to differentiate between both sometimes, but I would expect everyone to try to.
Hm? It’s not at all uncommon for people to judge their ~prosperity relative to others, relative to status (yup, that’s a zero-sum game); not to the absolute standard of living…
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ratrace.html
…which probably also adds to the popularity of ~”half a century ago it was sooo good” myths (I believe they’re even popular, paradoxically, largely among the “right” or more ~traditionalist parts of societies – paradoxically because “you can use the fact that people did not feel poor in the 1950s as an argument for a more radical egalitarianism than even most leftists would be willing to espouse.”)
Or: people are often taken by admiration of positional or even veblen goods …generally they don’t seem to try very hard to differentiate between those and what they need.
(aren’t you in France, IIRC? Isn’t that, like, the capital of fashion? …so really of a bit frivolous displays, deep down in the style of peacock tail)
Thanks for that paper, nice read !
I think we might be discussing different things, though. The paper which you link considers a vision of social status that is based on relative income (debatable, but that’s not the point), whereas I was discussing something closer to the notion of being successful in life at an individual scale.
To better show the difference, let’s picture ourselves the stereotypical Wall Street trader, who makes dozens of millions each month by playing casino with other people’s lives and money. His house is a small palace with a large park around it, any kind of home duty is done by an army of well-paid workers, and he goes at work in a beautiful car that he doesn’t drive himself. I think we will agree that this person ranks pretty high on a scale of social status.
But now, let’s assume that our stereotypical trader never wanted to win absurd amounts of money. Maybe he wanted to dedicate his life to art, maybe he wanted to be a scientist, anyhow he wanted to serve a cause that benefited humanity as a whole, beyond himself and his employers. He only ended up in the world of large-scale gambling because his family more or less forced him to, or something similar.
If this person failed at acquiring what actually mattered to him, then I guess we can agree that he has a messed up life, even if that doesn’t make him less of an obscenely rich person that represents the top of the food chain. This is where the notion of having a satisfying life (which is what I was talking about) and the notion of social status (which you seem to be talking about) differ. I would like to believe that people try to choose their jobs based on the former, rather than the latter, but I may be too much of an idealist.
(Note : Both are not incompatible, of course, if wealth and status are high on one person’s vision of a good life)
Again, I don’t know if this is a generalized phenomenon. Take Apple stuff as an example. It is commonly believed that a significant portion of the user base buys these things in order to look cool. But while I see lots of people who buy that stuff based on misinformation (Such as “iPhones/Macs are just easier to use than anything else” or “They don’t need maintenance and never crash”), I don’t see so many people above high school buying stuff for that reason (or at least publicly admitting it).
From my point of view at least, while we produce lots of extravagant clothing and related stuff for rich people here, we are hardly more crazy about fashion than people from other countries in everyday life
But I’m really not into that kind of things, which may bend my judgement.
Well that paper very much talks about the kind of rat race that Alfman mentioned (even also the myth, because “the standard of living”, that he thinks about, might be possibly partly in the realm of “good old times” myths).
Besides, it also very much talks about what determines a satisfying life.
So I’m not sure if those things are so different… they probably complement and interweave each other, in most cases. And keep in mind, I wasn’t strictly offering the entirety of the premise of that paper (it was a fine and decently related link that I know was in my IM archive, so I could find it easily), just an example of how, yes, we very much do the “people would think in terms of what the neighbour has rather than what they need” – what people think they “need” is to a large part shaped by what their neighbors have.
We aren’t particularly rational creatures, generally (go through a list of cognitive biases)
Yes, it does seem you are a bit of an idealist
Apple stuff is merely one expression of it. Others would be… yeah, fashion, but also houses, cars, prestige of holiday locations, or even how big the TV is in comparison to those owned by extended family who visits sometimes.
Oh and I didn’t really mean to imply your place is particuarly more crazy about fashion and such, just that, yes, it is a visibly condensed production area – as you say, largely into exporting that chic glamour.
Edited 2012-03-20 00:06 UTC
…while remembering their externalities, real & full costs. Our economies tend to hardly do that yet, and it might very well bite us in the rear.
For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_welfare_and_ecological_foot…
“Efficiency” (that you also mention nearby) isn’t exactly the best word to describe what we do in practice… Largely thanks to taking resources from the past and spoiling the future ones (which could be also described as finding new ways to exploit; or, adding human factor, to take new advantage of already existing imbalances)
Those costs hardly figure in GDP and similar.
Edited 2012-03-20 00:17 UTC
Don’t make it sound like that… large part of it is also, say, to stop quacks from taking over and harming people, about protecting desperate (easy to prey on) people from them.
Also don’t go towards equating installation of home router with decisions about lives – people generally don’t want to wager with the latter, that’s why we want some rules here.
I’m familiar with one loud ~libertarian (well, one of quite a few rallying under that label – but also one of quite a few who isn’t able to see anything contradictory when he directly & willingly applies for & benefits from, say, EU subsidies) who often laments how veterinarian services are so much more efficient and cheaper …yeah, only he always (despite this being usually pointed out – after which he drops his laments for a short time, hm) omits that people don’t care so much about their pets or farm animals as about themselves.
If it gets too expensive, they’ll just euthanise the pet so it won’t suffer, and get a new one for their kids; or send the farm animal to a slaughterhouse (I know that is often the case with many pets, when veterinarian care would require some expensive procedures – sure, some people are a bit crazy about keeping seriously sick pet alive, but those seem to be rare); mortality after veterinarian surgeries (even just from anesthesias) is also quite high.
We would need to have similarly low standards with human health care, for comparable “efficiency” and prices.
And it’s already hard enough as is to mostly dissuade people from quackery (still plenty of that around), or from expecting and pushing for dubious treatments (even something so plainly ridiculous as demands of antibiotics for common flu, a viral condition – and if they won’t get it, they’ll seek it out; guess which places of those http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EARSS_MRSA_2008.svg manage to be cautious about frivolous usage of antibiotics)
Public education similarly, any sane place doesn’t want masses of (too) stupid people running around; that would be… harmful, long term.
Edited 2012-03-19 22:05 UTC
Now that corporations are people too, we must be careful to avoid the inflammatory language of the anti-corporites. We must respect all people, regardless of their race, creed or market capitalization.
“This is not a system for the people, it’s a system for huge corporations.”
Typical politics. As the saying goes “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”. Corporations can secure meetings with legislators (try doing that, Mr. Citizen tax-payer) and urge them to push through laws to make their corporations ‘competitive’ by stifling potential competition. They do this by giving the justice department the ammunition they need to defend the patent holder from the patent ‘pirates’.
All of this is done in the name of IP but it really just protects profits and keeps consumer prices up.
I think I went on a tangent there.
You need determination for that. But you can actually become an “insider” if you wish. That takes brains and will to get through some serious dirt. That is how it works in EU countries.
I can see people’s concerns but…when I look out of the window at the real world what I actually see is an insane rate of innovation and change in the world of technology.
Innovation appears to be speeding up. The rate and scale of change caused by innovation seems to be increasing. Whole industries change in just a few years, sometimes months. The world of computing and technology is once again being transformed by another great wave of innovation and the waves seem to be arriving closer together.
So I understand the concern but it is possible to not see the wood for the trees, to get worked up about bad things that may not be actually having much impact. To be worried and angry about things that will become just an obscure footnote in history, Can anyone remember or list all the various legal conflicts associated with arrival of the PC? Did they have any real lasting effect? Did they slow down or block the PC revolution?
It seems to me that innovation is so deeply engrained in the very fabric of the international technology business, so widespread, so persistent, so powerful, that the idea that it could be seriously slowed down, or even more absurdly stopped, by mere lawyers seems a bit overblown, possibly silly.
Those that want to stop innovation should probably heed one of Stalin’s blunter aphorism’s: “He who lays down in front of the train of history ends getting his legs cut off”
In this instance, I think it is the U.S. that is lying on the tracks. Unless we are successful at exporting our Software Patents and I.P. protection racket to the rest of the world, the world may just move right on by us.
The EU and the Germans in particular seem right up there with the US.
Personally I think one of the key indicators of whether China is truly becoming a “normal” modern democratic and law abiding nation will be how seriously it takes IP protection.
In sense that adding copyrighted content blocking rules submitted by big multinationals to the Great Firewall of China would make the country a shiny beacon of democracy and free speech ?
I really don’t think that IP laws are that relevant to how democratic a country is. It seems to me that they rather tend to enforce a weak form of megacorp-driven dictatorship, if ill-designed.
Edited 2012-03-13 19:04 UTC
Tony Swash,
“Personally I think one of the key indicators of whether China is truly becoming a ‘normal’ modern democratic and law abiding nation will be how seriously it takes IP protection.”
I honestly don’t see the connection between China’s democratic process and it’s treatment of patents. However just the notion brings up a good question: would a highly democratic society favor or reject western style patent systems? It could be said that western patents are a reflection of corporate ties rather than the result of a democratic processes.
Edit: I assumed “IP Protection” was referring to patents in the context of this article, but I see Neolander assumed copyright. Hmm, maybe you meant both? I don’t like the term “IP” because it’s so ambiguous.
Edited 2012-03-13 19:14 UTC
Last I heard, it was I.P Freely.
Relatively short spurs of progress is what actually typically happens, historically always did.
And naively extrapolating them into the future always gave silly predictions.
The rate itself will slow down. I can sort of see it for some time, my computing experience didn’t really change qualitatively for almost a decade…
…what will now really matter is bringing this to as many people as possible. Patents can be an obstacle to that one.
…but then, you cherish (“I write to defend Apple”, those are your words) a company with stated goal of limiting that (with two major clearly stated goals – that of blocking others of their supposed innovation and not being interested about selling to “lesser” people – which, when seen together, have the goal, the aim to limit access to innovation)
Edited 2012-03-20 00:19 UTC
Here’s how monopolies are enforced and new players are kept out:
http://opensource.com/law/12/3/how-patents-hinder-innovation?sc_cid…