I can't view the link because it's expired, so I'll just post my rant here.
The entire point of patents, as delineated in the U.S. Constitution, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So patents are a means, of securing an end, which is "the progress of science and useful arts". Is anyone actually arguing at this point that our current patent regime is accomplishing this end? Would the world be a better place if git and github did not exist, and the only entity that could use the technologies in these patents were the patent holders?
I think it should be obvious by now for anyone that we are well past the point where the system is fixable, the only solution is to abolish it or it will again become captured by trolls, oligopolies and lawyers and used to crush anyone doing anything innovative and useful.
Nice sentiment. I share it. It's also a waste of breath.
> trolls, oligopolies and lawyers
Every member of that group is well funded, highly connected, and very aggressive.
They are ready to devote untold resources to crush your sentiment and should that fail, to redirect your reform efforts into a more palatable outcome.
Every piece of legislation is a compromise between competing interests and their competing interest guarantees that the system will never be abolished.
A far more successful strategy would be to chip away at the fringes. Add restrictions and more bureaucracy until the system becomes cumbersome for even the most resourceful player to use. Bit by bit, piece by piece. Add complexity until it collapses on its own.
Apple -a beloved public fetish - and its patent wins have paved the way for the attack of the patent empires and rogue states, in broader public opinion. Forget abolishing patents, I would expect more litigations and monetization attempts from software patent holders and a more proprietary, closed world for a decade or so; till the heritage of the "new Apple" erodes.
++@betterth Because Apple is more positively perceived by media, lawmakers and general public in comparison to unnamed companies which are quickly named as "trolls", Apple's patent wins created more sympathy towards patents. By "paved the way" I just mean that, in public opinion, patents are justified, because people think "Apple deserves to sue others, so patents must be good".
BS. Patent trolls have been around for a very long time, and companies like IBM represent the lionshare of patent applications.
Apple themselves files one of the lowest numbers of offensive patent lawsuits -- it's just a confirmation bias mixed with the massive publicity that Apple gets.
Just because you hear about EVERY one of Apple's lawsuits doesn't mean that Apple is "paving the way"!
I hate the knee-jerk "blame Apple" nonsense that is so pervasive! What is Apple doing that is so groundbreaking to patents?
I argue that the weaponization of patents, something APPLE TAKES NO PART IN, is a far worse problem. Google buying up Motorola for their patent portfolio and loaning them out to partners like dirty nukes... and APPLE is the leader of patent nonsense?
I hate the knee-jerk "blame Apple" nonsense that is so pervasive! What is Apple doing that is so groundbreaking to patents?
You know, I've looked all through the Constitution, and while there's some stuff about promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, I don't see anything about starting thermonuclear wars against competitors. Can you help me out?
A far more successful strategy would be to chip away at the fringes
Why would that be so? Wouldn't all the groups continually fix what you chip away and then some?
Bit by bit, piece by piece. Add complexity until it collapses on its own.
Do you have a more detailed description of how to break the patent system by adding more regulations to it, such that the special interests do not, or can not remove them to continue the system?
> Wouldn't all the groups continually fix what you chip away and then some?
Ah. Divide and conquer. Lawyers love rules/regulations/complexity because it usually means more $$$ for compliance efforts. You exploit a conflict of interest between the patent holder and their legal representation.
They will be fighting each other, while you weigh in for the most onerous changes.
> Do you have a more detailed description of how to break the patent system by adding more regulations to it
The problem with the patent system is that it works. You apply for a patent, you get a patent, you bash somebody's head in with the patent.
What you need is to insert many, many pain points along the way. Enough pain points and complexity that the system as whole, no longer functions.
The path to that is to find allies for each particular pain point. There will always be some group that will benefit through additional regulation. If that weren't the case, there would never be any regulations. All regulations are meant to make somebody's life better.
For example, the regulation for seatbelts in cars made seatbelt manufacturers happy. Etc, etc. Somebody always gets a cut, somebody always benefits.
So you systematically support and push regulation and promote the benefactors of said regulation. Your only challenge would be to come up with some beneficial reasoning for said regulation, to cover up the naked interest of the particular benefiting party.
I agree, historically, big 180 shifts in legislation didn't happen because one interest group had a more.compelling argument. Change happens when the economics shift, such that there is now a stronger economic and political (or sometimes military) power in favor of change.
Forexample, slavery didn't end because one side convinced the other. Slavery ended because capitalism changed the economic power balance such that there was more money siding with the end of slavery.
The same will happen to IP. Patents will only end when there's a clear stronger economic power more interested in the end of patents.
re: the abolition of slavery and your economic argument - do you believe this to be the case in all instances where slavery was abolished? or just in the US? Spain abolished slavery circa 1550. Great Britain abolished slave trade circa 1810. Did the US just lag these economies (and GB lag Spain) a lot at this point?
Things are already complex enough to the point where even a very good lawyer barely grasps how things work. The latest example is the Redhat scenario. They hit Redhat, Redhat swings pack with a GPL violation. I guarantee you that the GPL never came up in conversation when they were considering suing Redhat.
We just need to make things even more complex until lawyers absolutely cannot predict the outcome of litigation. At that point enforcing patents can become a dangerous proposition.
Complexity is an advantage for the existing elite. The more complex you make patent law, the harder it will be to defend against if you're a small fish with limited resources.
IMO complexity through abstraction enables most of the evil in the world.
> Complexity is an advantage for the existing elite.
This is true, but until a point. Eventually if a system becomes complex enough, it must collapse. The elite are still human and they still have limitations. Even now, no lawyer is capable of committing the entire body of law responsible for the patent system to memory, nevermind actually grasping all of it.
> The more complex you make patent law, the harder it will be to defend against
The more complex the system, the more contradictions it contains. The more contradictions for you to exploit.
On the contrary, if we had an extremely simplistic system, the small fish would just be told NO with no recourse. Today, they can find reason after reason to counter-sue, appeal, file forms, etc.
Mind you, I'm only a fan of bureaucracy when I'm trying to destroy a particular system.
Patents cover areas of technology where developing a solution that can be commercialized at scale is much, much more expensive than software. Without patents, how is a pharma company expected to pay the enormous cost of research, development, and FDA approval of new drugs? Let's not let obvious flaws in software IP protection condemn the concept of patents in general.
Most pharma research is already done by universities and other government subsidized organizations.
Most of the drug development costs come from the byzantine approval and regulatory process.
And for the government to pay for it by going around granting monopolies to private institutions is a very inefficient and plain insidious way of doing things, as can be seen with how new drugs are just old drugs with the smallest possible change to grant a new patent which come out exactly when the old patent expires, and many other ways big pharma exploits the system to create a oligopoly.
And this is not any grand conspiracy, is the natural result of regulatory capture and the incentives created by the patent system.
Pharmaceuticals definitely seem to be an exception, since the time + cost of developing a drug (years + billions of dollars) is so staggeringly large compared to the cost of manufacturing / copying. So maybe there needs to be a special type of patent that only applies to drugs and treatments for medical conditions.
Going up one level though - how much has society truly benefitted from the billions (trillions?) of dollars that have been spent on developing new drugs? This is admittedly a field I know very little about, but to what extent are improvements in quality of life / life expectancy in the U.S. in the past 40 years due to new drugs, vs better diet, exercise, reductions in smoking, better emergency medicine, occupational safety regulations, safer cars, etc?
Without patents, how is a pharma company expected to pay the enormous cost of research, development, and FDA approval of new drugs?
Well the obvious answer would be through some form of tax based scheme that then plows the money into research primarily based on clinical need, which funnily enough is how a hell of a lot of the drugs that are actually useful get developed currently. But expanding these kind of solutions is very unpopular in the states from what I gather, apart from in the case of weaponry, so how about some form of kickstarter for medical research? People throw loads of money at products that don't and may never exist on there, so you should be able to get tonnes of cash by just repeating the word "cancer" a lot.
[edit] I went off and found some figures on this:
"In 1999 the National Cancer Policy Board conducted a survey of federal and nonfederal sources of cancer research funding [ 11]. The board found, for the fiscal year 1996/1997, that the total amount spent on cancer research funding was US$5.165 billion. The three major contributors were (1) federal funding, US$3.060 billion (almost entirely from National Cancer Institute); (2) industry funding, US$1.6 billion; and (3) funding by nonprofit organisations (e.g., Howard Hughes Medical Institute, American Cancer Society, Komen Foundation), US$305 million."
A lot of these arguments skip the obvious fact that the FDA could provide its own form of commercial exclusivity without needing patents at all.
You can't sell medication without FDA approval. Right now patents don't factor in to it, but if patents were eliminated the FDA could implement a similar scheme exclusively for medication.
I also suspect that the high cost of FDA approval is not treated as a negative by many in the medical industry, as it provides a nice high barrier to entry which helps reduce competition. This seems to be especially true of some of the producers of medical devices.
While this is a valid issue, it does demonstrate how strict a gate-keeper the FDA is. You can't sell anything with a purely medical purpose to anyone without the right certifications. I'm sure there's a lock on something as simple as tongue-depressors that can't be broken because getting your product certified is non-trivial. There isn't even an invention involved here.
>Without patents, how is a pharma company expected to pay the enormous cost of research, development, and FDA approval of new drugs?
How about taxes? Drugs that are useful for millions of people can be subsidized --internationally even.
It will make the system even less commercialized (i.e prone to go for quick bucks and BS drugs instead of proper medicine).
Most of the more expensive drugs are of marginal utility anyway. Basic sanitation, running water, staple vaccination and such have much more to do with the general health and long living than even much touted breakthroughs like "heart surgery".
Not to mention that billions have been spent for BS like Viagra and ADD (non)drugs, while 60% of the world's population doesn't even have basic food and vaccines.
This is exactly right. The problem with the "patents foster innovation" argument is that they don't direct the research money into the areas where they're most needed. Then, because patents initiate a race to recoup research costs before the patent expires, a tremendous amount of money that could be going to research for new drugs instead gets poured into marketing.
That last fact is particularly disturbing when you consider that many doctor end up learning most of what they know about new drugs entering the market from the marketing literature sent to them by pharmaceutical companies. That literature is regulated, and in most cases accurate, but it is also biased.
You are essentially arguing for a central planning approach, and we have ample evidence from the 20th century that this does not produce better outcomes than a market-based approach.
>You are essentially arguing for a central planning approach, and we have ample evidence from the 20th century that this does not produce better outcomes than a market-based approach.
What "ample evidence"? The USSR? For one, they had a mighty fine space program.
Second, one example of central planning, that also carried other kinds of rubbish with it (cutthroat politics at the top level, being enforced on a backwards, non adequately industrialized country, dogmatic ideology, and having to fight a foreign superpower) does not "ample evidence" constitute.
Central planning != 20th century communism. We have much better examples of central planning, successful ones, in the western world.
I don't think software patents in the US will be abolished any time soon. The affected parties that have the most clout with the lawmakers (large software companies) chose to hoard up billions in patent portfolios for themselves, instead of lobbying for a patent reform. I can't imagine them writing off those huge assets; it's a deadlock now.
Would the world be a better place if git and github did not exist
No, but certain people think they would be richer. Unfortunately the idea of increasing general wealth through the expansion of the commons is one that also makes the same people scared shitless, even if they themselves benefit. If you view the economy as a zero sum game, which might hold true, but only if you include the entire universe in your economic model, then you can only do better if others do worse. So those who hold that as a principle cannot even conceive of the idea that things like git being available might just be better for everyone as they genuinely believe that a gain by the majority is a loss to themselves.
Thank you. :) Was from thinking what "any non-zero-sum game for n players can be reduced to a zero-sum game for n + 1 players" actually meant, when applied to the physical world.
The entire point of patents, as delineated in the U.S. Constitution, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So patents are a means, of securing an end, which is "the progress of science and useful arts". Is anyone actually arguing at this point that our current patent regime is accomplishing this end? Would the world be a better place if git and github did not exist, and the only entity that could use the technologies in these patents were the patent holders?