What about drug discovery? The road to approval is a long, risky, and amazingly expensive one. Without patent protection, there wouldn't be a lot of incentive to develop new drugs.
I think, as software people, we tend to generalize the ridiculousness of software patents, and we decide that all patents are ridiculous. There are industries where innovation is the result of serious risk and serious investment, and it is in everyone's best interest to encourage that. The rub is figuring out which industries and which classes of innovation should be protected, and which should not be protected.
Even with patent protection, there's only direct incentive to develop new drugs for rich people, who can pay for them---which is why you don't see as much research on medicines for malaria as, say, erectile dysfunction.
Is that true? Is there really less research on medicines for malaria than erectile dysfunction? I've met a whole bunch of malaria researchers, but never an erectile dysfunction researcher.
I would also argue that a lot of people invest in finding a solution to problems that affect themselves or loved ones without any thought to the possible financial return. The cure is what they want and its worth spending money to obtain.
I'm working on a medical device, so can't say I am only thinking about software patents.
I would suggest the bounty system as a way to deal with the need for CURES to disease. Or treatments if cures are not possible.
There is a cost to innovating and a cost of dealing with the government. Yes, dealing with the government is a very expensive process.
Ensuring safety is important. Does the current approach accomplish this? Some would question that it does.
Still, whoever pays that bill and takes the risk of never being paid back should get a fair return if successful.
If one feels that the government has the right to create this enormous regulatory burden, than it can certainly assign the benefits of going through all of that to the one paying the bills for a sufficient time to recover those costs.
I qualify that because I don't quite agree the government should be involved or that coercion is necessary, but that is a whole other can of worms.
If there is a benefit to be had, there is a price worth paying. I just don't automatically assume government is the way to make that happen.
We are quite used to seeing government or coercion as the method, but I think other mechanisms can make the same beneficial occur. For the most part, I think government is a far greater impediment to many good things than most people realize.
But I give your comment a point. Its a valid concern.
Everyone who is invested in patents has massive incentive to fund such research, especially in cases like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Is the patent office really going to fund or support research to the effect that the patent office should be abolished?
The usual arguement is William Smellie's forceps.
He was a doctor in the 1700s that invented the forceps used to deliver babies, but because if he publicized them anybody else would have copied the idea he kept them secret.
They were independantly rediscovered about a century later - but how many lives were lost in those 100years!
Regardless of the validity of this or other arguments against the current patent system, how viable would an effort to reform the system be? I think it would take a tremendous force to do so. Something on the order of a developed (not even imminent) and undeniable disadvantage relative to other countries who have a different system.
An analogy would be that you'll never be able to remove government entitlements unless the nation faces bankruptcy because the recipients will fight tooth and nail to keep them.
Yes I will. HTML5 (and thus HTML5 video codecs) are still very young in the grand scheme of things. It's pretty innovative stuff and it's evidence that patents slow down innovation via collaboration.
I thought this was an elegant defence of open source:
> This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
Nope. Without some sort of patent, each participant in a collaborate effort gets nothing and whomever is most successful in marketing the result gets everything.
Don't get me wrong... I used to totally buy the open source idealistic worldview. Then I actually got involved in business.
You don't understand what a brawl business can be. People almost never collaborate to sell! You want the customers, you want the leverage!
Heh... collaborate to sell... how cute...
Marketing is more winner-take-all than anything else.
Nice happy idealism sounds really great until you end up in the real world with people competing over money when they have kids, mortgages to pay, etc.
You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier.
If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers.
You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again.
Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world.
But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.
You still assume they collaborate to sell. My point is that people develop things not to sell them.
If you just want to develop something to solve some problem you have, and the choices are either putting in the full resources yourself or to collaborate with someone else who has complementary expertise, then you have no reason to not collaborate. You put in a fraction of the resources but still get the full benefits of having your problem solved.
Only in some extremely paranoid view of the world where every piece of knowledge you have should be leveraged does what you say make general sense. If you are Apple, for example, say you compete on design and functionality of your apps. How would it not benefit you to collaborate with other companies to develop some library or parts of the OS or whatever? Your competitive position is not damaged because you help Microsoft or whoever get the same functionality, because you're not competing on that.
Do I ever hate the SSRN web site. Damned thing never actually produces the file for me.
Thanks for the link to the author's site. He has a non SSRN link to the paper on the following page; the link text is the "(PDF)" that follows the SSRN link he first cites.
In reality there's a spectrum. If the patent office would actually enforce the non-obvious clause rather than running as a cash cow then a lot of problems would be solved off the bat.
I think of drug companies and software companies as the two extreme examples. Drug development is basically a money-losing proposition without patents, because it takes millions to get to anything useful, and once you do it's distilled down into something that's almost trivially easy to copy.
With software on the other hand, innovation happens in tiny steps. Often patents are granted to ideas that took someone a few days to come up with. As software is built, hundreds or thousands of these ideas come together to (hopefully) create a high value application. Once you have a high value application as long as you don't release the source code it's not easy to copy. The patents don't help someone recreate it. They have to pour blood and sweat into the codebase to come up with something that actually replicates the value. In other words the patent helps no one but the trolls.
Of course this is obvious to any software developer which is why we reflexively assume patents are bad. However in between software and drugs, in the space real physical inventions, things are quite a bit grayer. In the case of physical things, the "obviousness" test is a little easier to apply because everyone has some familiarity with tools and objects, and R&D can be fairly expensive for a lot of simple end products. It seems to me that the underlying theory of patents is fundamentally sound, but just has absolutely no applicability to software.
Why do you think software business model can't be applied to drug development?
On of the biggest problem with drug research is that it's highly regulated by government, so it's too costly for a small startup. Remove this regulations and you'll get a software-like situation with thousands of startups and new drugs.
That depends on whether you prefer to die from taking an untested drug or die because the drug isn't invented yet. A severely ill person would probably prefer a chance of the former to the certainty of the latter. Also you have to account for the odds of both these events: which one do you think will happen more?
That's something of a straw man though. Because the vast majority of people taking drugs aren't dying. If new drugs created in the deregulated industry were only given to terminal cases as a last resort it might work; otherwise it is just endangering everyone else (taking drugs).
And how do you objectively decide which ones are safe and which have been tested sufficiently to your requirements?
As an individual deciding a drug is safe to use should not require you to read all the relevant research etc. - you need a safe, objective marker. i.e. law and regulation.
I measure "trust" by actions, not words. When you buy a product, you aren't just saying you trust it, you are trusting it. Trust is a verb, not a state of being.
Unless you are very unusual and are completely off the grid, you've probably solved the question of how you personally decide how to trust a wide variety of commercial agencies of highly varying degrees of regulation and highly varying degrees of life-threateningness. Possibly without realizing it. In theory it may be unsolvable, in practice it doesn't seem to be.
It should be pointed out that this isn't theoretical, either. People die because the FDA forces them to not take drugs, even when death is essentially assured in the short-term anyhow. It's a well-known problem. If the FDA was more advisory, I suspect it would be a net good. I really can't imagine people en masse running down to WalMart and buying Dangerousol (now with twice the danger!) any more than they manage to now. (Which you can't ignore either, the FDA is not perfect.)
I think ultimately it comes down to how much deregulation occured.
If you go all the way and the FDA was replaced with companies who offered to test and "approve" drugs for profit then I think it is difficult to establish a full trust relationship with those entities.
You mention the FDA becoming advisory; that could become a good compromise. However there is a danger that people would simply ignore the dangers and, at some point in the future, suddenly realise they had done something terrible to themselves :D
A balance is crucial; I think we actually have it in the drugs industry, but perhaps there is room to make modify as well...
but you have no choice but to accept them as the entity whose recommendations you follow with regard to drugs
What features are included in a car is regulated by competing companies and you can pick which set of choices you deal with.
The competition between companies and the choices that you have imposes a discipline that does not exist with government.
With the government, you are simply coerced to accept their judgements. Which are influenced in all sorts of ways by the drug companies.
And if something becomes glaringly obviously wrong with something the government is doing, fear not. In a decade or two, someone will get around to changing it.
Your mistaken presupposition: all drugs only ever impact just the person taking them, they are all completely metabolized into totally harmless chemicals in the first body they enter.
Quite right. My statement was based on my judgement that I (or perhaps other individuals less circumspect than myself) am more likely to die from an inadequately tested drug than from the lack of a drug which would have been invented in an FDAless free-for-all.
Or another scenario: maybe the drug to treat my disease has been invented, but nobody knows about it because it hasn't been properly tested and is competing with thirty other startup drugs (mostly useless, some harmful) which claim to treat the same disease. How is my doctor supposed to magically know which one to prescribe me?
Do you really want the market flooded with new software, whose effects aren't well understood?
You can find effective software despite almost no government regulation, why do you think it won't work for drugs? I'm sure a lot of private rating agencies evolve in the such free market of drugs.
There's a lot of totally crappy software on the market. The key difference is that you can try a better application after getting burned by a bad one. Not necessarily so with drugs - they can do unrecoverable damage.
I think this shift in policy would require an enormous cultural shift. Currently, our society mostly trusts the drugs available on our store shelves. A deregulated market would require consumers to be much more critical in order to continue to function.
Woah. I'm a big advocate of deregulation of many things but doing it to drugs seems a very dangerous idea.
In the first place these are things that can seriously affect your health - it makes sense to demand these are tested before they can be sold to people.
Secondly it would give more credence to the anti-drugs and pseudo-medicine movements. At the moment at least the govt. agencies can make a decision on if a drug is safe or not; with that out of the way it becomes even more of a PR war. :D
(additionally I would argue that the bar for entry into drugs research is higher than it is into software development, I don't think you could evolve an environment as diverse and self sustaining as the software world)
You seem to discount the amount of people that are dying due to the slow development cycle of drugs. If there was regulation there would be more experimentation, perhaps more people would die from the effects of new drugs -- but you could choose to only use drugs that have been stable and well studied while those who have nothing left to lose could use medicine directly off the chemists work bench.
> perhaps more people would die from the effects of new drugs
I'd argue this is almost certainly a given. But the problem is not those who die now - but those who are taken ill much later down the line. Ten years or whatever.
> but you could choose to only use drugs that have been stable and well studied while those who have nothing left to lose could use medicine directly off the chemists work bench.
I entirely agree with the sentiment there (it would be great to see the wider liberalisation and faster iteration of new drug trials for example). but (and I feel this is a big caveat) how do people decide which drug is stable and well studied. It is not necessarily sufficient to trust the pamphlet or advertising the company gives you.
I don't know. Maybe it is cynicism but I suspect that if drug research were deregulated the standard of drugs produced would decline rapidly.
And finally; I am not so sure drugs research would explode with innovation. We would get drugs to market faster, sure, but there is a standard of entry into drug research that still requires funding, education and resources.
Maybe it is cynicism but I suspect that if drug research were deregulated the standard of drugs produced would decline rapidly.
It probably would. But that is irrelevant - the relevant question is, "would consumers benefit?"
A hypothetical - imagine that government regulations forbid the sales of laptops weighing more than 4lb, having less than 8gb ram and a 500gb HD (roughly a $5,000 laptop). Eliminating this regulation would almost certainly result in lower quality laptops (read: bigger, less ram) being sold.
> It probably would. But that is irrelevant - the relevant question is, "would consumers benefit?"
I see the point you're making. But it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Obviously there is no way to make 100% sure a drug is safe without tests lasting at least the average lifespan of a person (etc.). But I think we have a reasonable medium at the moment; some drugs have long term affects that slip through, but for now the benefit is tipped in favour of "consumers"
With deregulation I feel that barrier would start to move. We might start seeing drugs having side affects in, say, 5 years rather than longer. Or causing unrelated illnesses in a certain set of people. I can't accept that it would be a good thing.
Also there is space for duplicitous companies to make a fast buck and endanger people. Look at how homeopathic remedies are popular; imagine if such people could play with real drugs?
A hypothetical - imagine that government regulations forbid the sales of laptops weighing more than 4lb, having less than 8gb ram and a 500gb HD (roughly a $5,000 laptop). Eliminating this regulation would almost certainly result in lower quality laptops (read: bigger, less ram) being sold.
I don't understand this argument. Partly because it's a meaningless comparison. But also because we are dealing with peoples lives; that is not a trivial thing!
(in actual fact I think a real analogy would be if the govt. regulated that the components of said laptop had to be proven stress tested for 6 months before release. Clearly that would be limiting - but the quality of the laptops sold would be much higher. Regardless I still think the example is too trivial).
We probably would see more dangerous drugs. We would also see more beneficial drugs, and more drugs with a mixed package of benefits and harms.
Another hypothetical: we might see an anti-depressants with a lower risk of sexual side effects, but a higher risk of heart attack. The FDA considers heart attacks much worse than impotence, so they would probably ban this drug.
Since I don't care that much about long life, but I care a great deal about good sex, I would probably choose this drug over a safer one which causes low sex drive. What right do you have to deny me this choice?
This is where my cynicism kicks in; look at the drugs companies. I suspect deregulation would see some very shady practices evolve and highly dubious drugs being pushed on hapless patients.
You clearly have the intelligence to make the decision you outline. You perhaps have the cynicism to see through marketing guff - or will take the time to read the research. Will everyone be able to make such an informed choice? Especially if the drugs companies are queued up pushing their merchandise!
What we have now limits your options, yes. But it also protects many others from a potentially dangerous uninformed decision. I believe at the moment we have the happy medium of morally protecting many people whilst still allowing an element of choice.
Here's a counter example too. Imagine you made your informed choice and then found that 5 or 6 years down the line these drugs left you with recurring, painful urinary infections. Or perhaps it causes memory loss. How would you feel about the choice you made then?
The irony is that with deregulation the chance of either of those drugs having such an effect seems potentially a lot higher....
So basically, you feel that there is a set of people out there incapable of making decisions for themselves. I suspect you also don't consider yourself to be part of that set.
But if some people truly are incompetent, why not just have them declared as such and not restrict the rights of others? Rather than creating a class of elites who rule over all of us, why not simply delegate the task of managing the incompetent to social workers or other such professionals?
you feel that there is a set of people out there incapable of making decisions for themselves
Not exactly what I said. I think it's disingenuous to say everyone is capable of making informed decisions; either through laziness, lack of understanding or purely out of being mislead they can make a poor choice with consequences they don't really "get".
In the choice you highlighted a commercial drugs firm could play the risks up and down to get someone to buy the more lucrative (or simply their) drug. I realise this happens already but organisations like the FDA limit this practice - mostly by banning drugs with serious side affects.
But if some people truly are incompetent
I believe I am talking about the majority here. I'm a smart thoughtful and cynical person but I am not sure I would be able to make an informed drugs choice in many cases. This applies in all sorts of aspects of our lives as well; I think we do need advisories and regulators in some areas to help us with these decisions.
You clearly have the intelligence to make the decision... Will everyone be able to make such an informed choice?
It is absolutely true that people might make poor choices. Part of being an adult is making poor choices and suffering the consequences.
As for your concerns about false advertising, that is already illegal. Further, if you are truly concerned about misleading claims, keep the FDA, but reduce it to a labeling role. Then you get all the benefits of the FDA (provided you buy only FDA approved drugs), but I'm still allowed to buy drugs which meet my criteria but not theirs.
I dispute the way you interpret my original comment though. The point I was making was that I assumed you were, in this hypothetical situation, going to read the research and calculate the proper risks associated with the drug you choose.
If you dont then your not making a properly informed choice. I postulate that most people wouldn't - not through a lack of intelligence necessarily but all manner of reasons (laziness, misinformation, confusion, disinterest). Don't we have a moral right to avoid putting them in a position to accidentally choose a drug that kills you in a few years time?
This is the main point really; your example is very compelling (because I actually agree we should be able to quantify and choose our own risk). But I feel the real issue with de-regulation is that the drugs would have unknown future side affects.
Taking your example: what if the drug had only been tested and used for a year or so. You start using it understanding the risk so far discovered (fair enough) - but then in 3 years time it is discovered regular users are developing terminal cancers. What if they discover that any regular use brings the death rate within 5 years to 100%?
These are the risks regulation tries to balance out.
I may read the research, I may simply trust the (advisory only) FDA, I may trust my doctor, or I may take the average opinion of my doctor, the FDA and Consumer Reports. Whatever I chose, I feel my risk weighting is appropriate for me personally. Why do you feel you know better than I do what is best for me?
As for quantification of future risks, any individual drug has unknown future side effects. To quantify the risk, we quantify based on the reference class of all drugs:
P(unknown side effects | new drug) = (# drugs with bad side effects) / (# drugs with more than 5 years of use)
Suppose this number works out to less than 100 deaths per 100,000 drug users (I'm willing to bet it does). That is the death rate of commercial fishing. Assuming you don't favor having regulators ban commercial fishing, and assuming this number is less than 1 in 1000, would you favor changing regulations on new drugs?
> As for quantification of future risks, any individual drug has unknown future side effects.
Meh, I already made this point previously :)
Obviously there is no way to make 100% sure a drug is safe without tests lasting at least the average lifespan of a person (etc.). But I think we have a reasonable medium at the moment; some drugs have long term affects that slip through, but for now the benefit is tipped in favour of "consumers"
Clearly drugs will end up having uknown effects. We have to balance releasing drugs quickly with understanding the most immediate risks they present.
The immediate problem with your figures is that they deal with current drugs regulation. I imagine they are limited by the regulations - and so if you remove them the figure may start to creep up (as dangerously undertested drugs hit the market). How far does it have to go before it's too far?
No, I approve of the idea of exploring ways to reduce regulation and open up industry. But total removal; seems a bit of a slippery slope :)
Because competence of decision making is a spectrum. People aren't rational, period. There's no test for deciding whether someone is competent to make decisions regarding their health, so you can't declare them incompetent either.
There's a reason the Hippocratic Oath has "First, do no harm" in it. You don't go around experimenting on human subjects on the off chance that it might be good. The Nazis did that and it's not exactly been upheld as a standard to follow (though that was of course involuntary.) One can argue over the morals involved, but society generally doesn't accept the argument that killing individual people is justified by some uncertain potential to save others (except maybe when it comes to national security...)
society generally doesn't accept the argument that killing individual people is justified by some uncertain potential to save others
Isn't that what the FDA does? If you have fatal disease X you can apply to get into a drug trial. You can be denied (leading to your death). You could be accepted, but placed into the control group and given a placebo (and die).
People may die during the drug trial phase for the greater good of society learning if the drug is safe and/or effective. Maybe that's a good trade-off and maybe it's not, but we are trading lives for something we value more... knowledge.
I'm in favor of abolishing the FDA. But the biggest downside is that it might be impossible to determine if drugs were effective because very few sick people would volunteer for a drug trial where they might get put in the control group (and not get the drug).
Uhh no. The biggest problem with drug research is the ridiculously high amount of initial capital it takes to develop a drug. You can't just throw out buzzwords like "startups" and "software" like they're a panacea.
There isn't actually a single company that has succeeded in bringing drug development under millions of dollars in that list. The closest is the last one, but that company hasn't actually produced any results yet.
It's true that developing a pharmaceutical is an expensive process, but on the other hand the compounds used are often naturally occurring. In that sense, it seems to me that these are instances of "discovery" and not "invention", just like genome patents in general.
I might be fine with restricting the right for others to sell pharmaceuticals based on the same compound for the same purpose, but certainly not to bar general research into what other effects it may have.
>I might be fine with restricting the right for others to sell pharmaceuticals based on the same compound for the same purpose, but certainly not to bar general research into what other effects it may have.
There is a general exclusion of the monopoly right over that of the right to continue scientific research. One could find novel uses, but unless the patents have been poorly drafted it would be impossible to exploit them - you're simply finding more reasons for people to buy your competitors drug.
> I might be fine with restricting the right for others to sell pharmaceuticals based on the same compound for the same purpose, but certainly not to bar general research into what other effects it may have.
Umm, that's exactly what current patent law does. The recent denial of a "gene patent" affirmed that.
The Viagra-for-ED patent doesn't keep me from patenting the use of the exact same compound as a floor wax.
ACLU v myriad wasn't about patentable second use of patented products, nor was it about obviousness over the state of the art (the natural world is not considered to be in the state of the art):
it was about novelty - the natural DNA in your cells was, in the judge's view, still the same substance (even in cDNA form and artificially synthesised) as the chemical in Myriad's 'invention' (since for him, function was crucial not form - its form might be altered and origin be synthetic, its function is the same - to carry information - and that information is the same).
> it was about novelty - the natural DNA in your cells was, in the judge's view
Except that the judge said that it wasn't. The judge said that they can't patent discovering a gene - they can only patent doing something new with or to said gene.
That's why the applicants wrote the claim the way that they did - they claimed suppression of said gene to accomplish something. The problem with that claim is that they didn't invent a means of suppression. They assumed one, hence they didn't actually have an invention, which is what the judge actually wrote.
I think patents are a big impediment to innovation.
And I think they are morally wrong. Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do?
Coming up with an idea is only a very small part of the battle. Making a viable product is much harder but also not the biggest problem.
The biggest challenge often is getting people to buy a thing. And we already have significant incentives in place for that.
There are things that we need that take a great deal of investment to discover and that cannot be protected with trade secrets.
But if the innovation is of significant value, presumably one can make a profit from it and get to market faster than the competition, so there is reward for innovating.
People that need an innovation can also create a bounty or reward for making it happen. And we have seen a lot effort in response to things like the x prize and darpa's grand challenge.
So I don't see how the alleged benefits of patents justify the curtailment of individual rights.
The problem is that money trickles down from the point of transaction, and the volume of the trickle is determined by your leverage.
So what you're saying is that the people who get people to buy a thing should make almost all the money, followed by the people who make viable products, followed by the people who do the research and development and come up with the ideas coming in dead last.
The problem is: in this model, the people who come in dead last are the ones who keep the innovation pipeline full.
I don't like the present patent system, but without something like it the only people who make any money are those in marketing.
You could argue that whether a patent is awarded for an invention should have a dependency on the capital required to produce the innovation. Innovation, distribution and marketing for software has become so inexpensive that patents are seen as an impediment to innovation. While for innovations requiring more capital this may not be the case.
So if one person goes through a long and complex expensive process to yield a complex solution to a problem, and then I do a bit of work and spend far less capital and come up with a simpler and less expensive solution, I should get paid less?
That reminds me of when they used to pay programmers by the K-loc of code they wrote.
Inventions that are simpler, cheaper, and require less capital are worth more for that reason.
One of the things that bothers me about some patent opponents is that their argument amounts to a devaluation of intelligence vs. brute force or slow plodding advancement. There really are "eureka" moments, and intelligence does matter. It is possible with intelligence to occasionally happen upon a brief compact insight that radically advances some art, and it is those brief compact insights that are worth the most.
> Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do?
The inherent problem with patents and (to a lesser extent) copyright is that they attempt to fix one problem and as a side affect enforce this too.
Playing devils advocate for a moment; a society without patents is unfairly weighted (in terms of invention) towards BigCo. i.e. you get a lot more innovation but only those with big cash can do something with it - and not necessarily by paying the inventor.
Under current law things are potentially unfairly balanced to the patent holder. I realise that in practicality it is still weighted towards BigCo anyway because they can fund lawsuits etc.
There is, surely, a balance between the two extremes (I don't believe we have it at the moment).
As it happens I think we need to be careful considering the broad concept of patents. We are all familiar and, probably, all opposed to the idea of Software Patents in their current form (or at all). However making software is reasonably trivial - and getting a patent is, thought relatively costly, not too difficult.
This is not entirely the case in other industries; which makes a slight difference (in the sense that the investment for software development is generally lower for an individual inventor)
but is the cost of developing software lower than simply coming up with an idea?
You say that no patents would favor big companies. But without intellectual property, wouldn't it be EASIER for anyone to compete with the big companies?
As usual, history provides a slightly more useful perspective on patents, and on how their utility is changing along with society.
Although the idea of patents was first introduced a very long time ago, their modern version didn't show up until the 1800s or so. At that time, there were meager tools available to the average citizen, and innovation then wasn't like it is today. It more typically required a disproportionate outlay of resources, especially given that (at the time) labor was relatively cheaper than technology in the southern parts of the U.S.
Later, the U.S. underwent the industrial revolution, and innovation moved from profit-motivated individuals to profit-motivated companies; again, patents were seen -- correctly, at the time -- to be fostering the innovation that was advancing America's technological development.
But the landscape is much different today. The average individual has at hand resources that would have been remarkable to Ford or Edison, and probably dumbfounding to Eli Whitney. For roughly a month's salary, I might accumulate all of the materials I need to invent a new kind of robot, and if I'm interested in software, then all I need is a computer, some time, and a problem to solve.
So, now patents are no longer as justifiably the protectors of innovation, and now the case can be made that they are actually hindering it.
Conditions aren't the same now as they always were.
The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down.
Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US.
It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter.
Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents.
It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
The newly industrial US ignored foreign patents and copyrights - claiming they were an attempt by europe to keep the new country down.
Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit is an attack on the widespread (legal) piracy of his works in the US.
It's also how US steel got it's head start - by not having to pay a license for the Bessemer converter.
Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents.
It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
The idea behind patents is to given inventors an incentive to disclose their inventions to the public in exchange for getting a monopoly on them for a limited time. Even the word patent derives for its Latin antecedent meaning "open" (in contrast to its English-derived counterpart, "latent"). And, of course, a monopoly grant over any invention will by definition hinder others from using that same invention during the term of the monopoly.
In open, collaborative environments, you have openness by definition and you have no need to give inventors incentives to disclose because they are doing this axiomatically day-by-day as they routinely share their development work. In such an environment, it will appear absurd to the inventors that they should be hindered from doing their work by arbitrary restrictions granted to a monopolist over what they regard as routine tools of their trade. This seems arbitrary, capricious, and damaging. Such a system can even be perceived to be obscene in allowing others who happened to win the rush to the patent office door by a hair's breadth to bring damage claims for up to two decades against others who were not quite so fleet of foot. And all the more so if the "inventor" is not really anything of the sort but rather some troll who lays about conceiving "claims" that get patented for the sole purpose of extorting money from those who truly are in the real world inventing useful products. And hideously so to those who philosophically oppose the idea of such monopoly grants altogether, and see them as being even vicious and oppressive as they are condoned by the social policy of the day as upheld by politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists.
That is the case against patents as reflected in the spectrum of opinion pretty widely found here on HN, and it reflects the open, collaborative perspective many of the members here take with respect to the very idea of innovation.
In essence, the paper cited in this piece says that the whole world of innovation has moved, or is rapidly moving, to a state where openness is the governing principle behind most inventions. If that is indeed true, then the authors of that paper are right by definition - a patent system that is designed to spur public disclosure by, in effect, "paying" the inventor via a temporally-limited grant of a monopolistic advantage over the invention makes no sense where inventors are more than happy to disclose it all for free based on other things that may motivate them (the gaining of recognition, the belief that useful information ought to be free, or whatever).
The real question, though, is whether this assumption of the authors is a correct one. Things clearly have changed in major areas of innovation but to generalize this to the whole world of innovation may or may not be valid. And that is why the patent reform movement is in fact moving quite slowly in the broader society, whatever its fervor in the narrower circles frequented by the members here.
Not saying that reform is not needed - it plainly is. Just don't be surprised if others aren't eager to join in the movement, especially when they are subjected to the counter influences brought on by lobbyists, lawyers, etc. The movement may take sway with Congress but I wouldn't expect this to happen any time soon.
I believe that no scientific theory or logical argument can support patents - further I believe my opinion can be proved fairly rigorously. Although the utility of such proof is not obvious.
The basis for the patent system reflects the tradition of individualism in this country. The idea of a lone inventor (or lone company) creating new stuff is romantic but unrealistic. Invention is often building on top of other ideas and knowledge. It's more of a collaborating effort, as this paper re-affirmed.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadI have been able to find any studies that conclude that patents help innovation. Can somebody provide links if there are any?
I only see the number of patents mentioned as "evidence" of innovation.
I think, as software people, we tend to generalize the ridiculousness of software patents, and we decide that all patents are ridiculous. There are industries where innovation is the result of serious risk and serious investment, and it is in everyone's best interest to encourage that. The rub is figuring out which industries and which classes of innovation should be protected, and which should not be protected.
I can see how patents could help there. Are there any studies that favor patents?
I would also argue that a lot of people invest in finding a solution to problems that affect themselves or loved ones without any thought to the possible financial return. The cure is what they want and its worth spending money to obtain.
I would suggest the bounty system as a way to deal with the need for CURES to disease. Or treatments if cures are not possible.
There is a cost to innovating and a cost of dealing with the government. Yes, dealing with the government is a very expensive process.
Ensuring safety is important. Does the current approach accomplish this? Some would question that it does.
Still, whoever pays that bill and takes the risk of never being paid back should get a fair return if successful.
If one feels that the government has the right to create this enormous regulatory burden, than it can certainly assign the benefits of going through all of that to the one paying the bills for a sufficient time to recover those costs.
I qualify that because I don't quite agree the government should be involved or that coercion is necessary, but that is a whole other can of worms.
If there is a benefit to be had, there is a price worth paying. I just don't automatically assume government is the way to make that happen.
We are quite used to seeing government or coercion as the method, but I think other mechanisms can make the same beneficial occur. For the most part, I think government is a far greater impediment to many good things than most people realize.
But I give your comment a point. Its a valid concern.
The patent system exists, the assumption is that it works. Why would anyone think to do a study to prove it?
On the other hand, proving that it doesn't work is certainly an interesting research topic.
They were independantly rediscovered about a century later - but how many lives were lost in those 100years!
An analogy would be that you'll never be able to remove government entitlements unless the nation faces bankruptcy because the recipients will fight tooth and nail to keep them.
For example, patents are not prevalent in software. There is hardly an innovation crisis in software.
Hardware design is also becoming more like software design. Same with business processes.
Tell that to the HTML5 video codec people.
Yes I will. HTML5 (and thus HTML5 video codecs) are still very young in the grand scheme of things. It's pretty innovative stuff and it's evidence that patents slow down innovation via collaboration.
> This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
In fact, I would refer to open source as an attack on the rationale for the patent system.
You don't understand what a brawl business can be. People almost never collaborate to sell! You want the customers, you want the leverage!
Heh... collaborate to sell... how cute...
Marketing is more winner-take-all than anything else.
Nice happy idealism sounds really great until you end up in the real world with people competing over money when they have kids, mortgages to pay, etc.
You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again.
Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world.
But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.
If you just want to develop something to solve some problem you have, and the choices are either putting in the full resources yourself or to collaborate with someone else who has complementary expertise, then you have no reason to not collaborate. You put in a fraction of the resources but still get the full benefits of having your problem solved.
Only in some extremely paranoid view of the world where every piece of knowledge you have should be leveraged does what you say make general sense. If you are Apple, for example, say you compete on design and functionality of your apps. How would it not benefit you to collaborate with other companies to develop some library or parts of the OS or whatever? Your competitive position is not damaged because you help Microsoft or whoever get the same functionality, because you're not competing on that.
One of the authors of the research paper has a lot of work on innovation and open source in general:
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm
Thanks for the link to the author's site. He has a non SSRN link to the paper on the following page; the link text is the "(PDF)" that follows the SSRN link he first cites.
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers/evh-08.htm
I think of drug companies and software companies as the two extreme examples. Drug development is basically a money-losing proposition without patents, because it takes millions to get to anything useful, and once you do it's distilled down into something that's almost trivially easy to copy.
With software on the other hand, innovation happens in tiny steps. Often patents are granted to ideas that took someone a few days to come up with. As software is built, hundreds or thousands of these ideas come together to (hopefully) create a high value application. Once you have a high value application as long as you don't release the source code it's not easy to copy. The patents don't help someone recreate it. They have to pour blood and sweat into the codebase to come up with something that actually replicates the value. In other words the patent helps no one but the trolls.
Of course this is obvious to any software developer which is why we reflexively assume patents are bad. However in between software and drugs, in the space real physical inventions, things are quite a bit grayer. In the case of physical things, the "obviousness" test is a little easier to apply because everyone has some familiarity with tools and objects, and R&D can be fairly expensive for a lot of simple end products. It seems to me that the underlying theory of patents is fundamentally sound, but just has absolutely no applicability to software.
On of the biggest problem with drug research is that it's highly regulated by government, so it's too costly for a small startup. Remove this regulations and you'll get a software-like situation with thousands of startups and new drugs.
e.g. read this: http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...
We should be careful not to let one mistake justify another.
As an individual deciding a drug is safe to use should not require you to read all the relevant research etc. - you need a safe, objective marker. i.e. law and regulation.
Unless you are very unusual and are completely off the grid, you've probably solved the question of how you personally decide how to trust a wide variety of commercial agencies of highly varying degrees of regulation and highly varying degrees of life-threateningness. Possibly without realizing it. In theory it may be unsolvable, in practice it doesn't seem to be.
It should be pointed out that this isn't theoretical, either. People die because the FDA forces them to not take drugs, even when death is essentially assured in the short-term anyhow. It's a well-known problem. If the FDA was more advisory, I suspect it would be a net good. I really can't imagine people en masse running down to WalMart and buying Dangerousol (now with twice the danger!) any more than they manage to now. (Which you can't ignore either, the FDA is not perfect.)
If you go all the way and the FDA was replaced with companies who offered to test and "approve" drugs for profit then I think it is difficult to establish a full trust relationship with those entities.
You mention the FDA becoming advisory; that could become a good compromise. However there is a danger that people would simply ignore the dangers and, at some point in the future, suddenly realise they had done something terrible to themselves :D
A balance is crucial; I think we actually have it in the drugs industry, but perhaps there is room to make modify as well...
According to comments here, FDA made mistakes too.
What features are included in a car is regulated by competing companies and you can pick which set of choices you deal with.
The competition between companies and the choices that you have imposes a discipline that does not exist with government.
With the government, you are simply coerced to accept their judgements. Which are influenced in all sorts of ways by the drug companies.
And if something becomes glaringly obviously wrong with something the government is doing, fear not. In a decade or two, someone will get around to changing it.
Or another scenario: maybe the drug to treat my disease has been invented, but nobody knows about it because it hasn't been properly tested and is competing with thirty other startup drugs (mostly useless, some harmful) which claim to treat the same disease. How is my doctor supposed to magically know which one to prescribe me?
You can find effective software despite almost no government regulation, why do you think it won't work for drugs? I'm sure a lot of private rating agencies evolve in the such free market of drugs.
In the first place these are things that can seriously affect your health - it makes sense to demand these are tested before they can be sold to people.
Secondly it would give more credence to the anti-drugs and pseudo-medicine movements. At the moment at least the govt. agencies can make a decision on if a drug is safe or not; with that out of the way it becomes even more of a PR war. :D
(additionally I would argue that the bar for entry into drugs research is higher than it is into software development, I don't think you could evolve an environment as diverse and self sustaining as the software world)
I'd argue this is almost certainly a given. But the problem is not those who die now - but those who are taken ill much later down the line. Ten years or whatever.
> but you could choose to only use drugs that have been stable and well studied while those who have nothing left to lose could use medicine directly off the chemists work bench.
I entirely agree with the sentiment there (it would be great to see the wider liberalisation and faster iteration of new drug trials for example). but (and I feel this is a big caveat) how do people decide which drug is stable and well studied. It is not necessarily sufficient to trust the pamphlet or advertising the company gives you.
I don't know. Maybe it is cynicism but I suspect that if drug research were deregulated the standard of drugs produced would decline rapidly.
And finally; I am not so sure drugs research would explode with innovation. We would get drugs to market faster, sure, but there is a standard of entry into drug research that still requires funding, education and resources.
It probably would. But that is irrelevant - the relevant question is, "would consumers benefit?"
A hypothetical - imagine that government regulations forbid the sales of laptops weighing more than 4lb, having less than 8gb ram and a 500gb HD (roughly a $5,000 laptop). Eliminating this regulation would almost certainly result in lower quality laptops (read: bigger, less ram) being sold.
Would that be a bad thing?
I see the point you're making. But it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Obviously there is no way to make 100% sure a drug is safe without tests lasting at least the average lifespan of a person (etc.). But I think we have a reasonable medium at the moment; some drugs have long term affects that slip through, but for now the benefit is tipped in favour of "consumers"
With deregulation I feel that barrier would start to move. We might start seeing drugs having side affects in, say, 5 years rather than longer. Or causing unrelated illnesses in a certain set of people. I can't accept that it would be a good thing.
Also there is space for duplicitous companies to make a fast buck and endanger people. Look at how homeopathic remedies are popular; imagine if such people could play with real drugs?
A hypothetical - imagine that government regulations forbid the sales of laptops weighing more than 4lb, having less than 8gb ram and a 500gb HD (roughly a $5,000 laptop). Eliminating this regulation would almost certainly result in lower quality laptops (read: bigger, less ram) being sold.
I don't understand this argument. Partly because it's a meaningless comparison. But also because we are dealing with peoples lives; that is not a trivial thing!
(in actual fact I think a real analogy would be if the govt. regulated that the components of said laptop had to be proven stress tested for 6 months before release. Clearly that would be limiting - but the quality of the laptops sold would be much higher. Regardless I still think the example is too trivial).
Another hypothetical: we might see an anti-depressants with a lower risk of sexual side effects, but a higher risk of heart attack. The FDA considers heart attacks much worse than impotence, so they would probably ban this drug.
Since I don't care that much about long life, but I care a great deal about good sex, I would probably choose this drug over a safer one which causes low sex drive. What right do you have to deny me this choice?
You clearly have the intelligence to make the decision you outline. You perhaps have the cynicism to see through marketing guff - or will take the time to read the research. Will everyone be able to make such an informed choice? Especially if the drugs companies are queued up pushing their merchandise!
What we have now limits your options, yes. But it also protects many others from a potentially dangerous uninformed decision. I believe at the moment we have the happy medium of morally protecting many people whilst still allowing an element of choice.
Here's a counter example too. Imagine you made your informed choice and then found that 5 or 6 years down the line these drugs left you with recurring, painful urinary infections. Or perhaps it causes memory loss. How would you feel about the choice you made then?
The irony is that with deregulation the chance of either of those drugs having such an effect seems potentially a lot higher....
But if some people truly are incompetent, why not just have them declared as such and not restrict the rights of others? Rather than creating a class of elites who rule over all of us, why not simply delegate the task of managing the incompetent to social workers or other such professionals?
Not exactly what I said. I think it's disingenuous to say everyone is capable of making informed decisions; either through laziness, lack of understanding or purely out of being mislead they can make a poor choice with consequences they don't really "get".
In the choice you highlighted a commercial drugs firm could play the risks up and down to get someone to buy the more lucrative (or simply their) drug. I realise this happens already but organisations like the FDA limit this practice - mostly by banning drugs with serious side affects.
But if some people truly are incompetent
I believe I am talking about the majority here. I'm a smart thoughtful and cynical person but I am not sure I would be able to make an informed drugs choice in many cases. This applies in all sorts of aspects of our lives as well; I think we do need advisories and regulators in some areas to help us with these decisions.
What you said:
You clearly have the intelligence to make the decision... Will everyone be able to make such an informed choice?
It is absolutely true that people might make poor choices. Part of being an adult is making poor choices and suffering the consequences.
As for your concerns about false advertising, that is already illegal. Further, if you are truly concerned about misleading claims, keep the FDA, but reduce it to a labeling role. Then you get all the benefits of the FDA (provided you buy only FDA approved drugs), but I'm still allowed to buy drugs which meet my criteria but not theirs.
If you dont then your not making a properly informed choice. I postulate that most people wouldn't - not through a lack of intelligence necessarily but all manner of reasons (laziness, misinformation, confusion, disinterest). Don't we have a moral right to avoid putting them in a position to accidentally choose a drug that kills you in a few years time?
This is the main point really; your example is very compelling (because I actually agree we should be able to quantify and choose our own risk). But I feel the real issue with de-regulation is that the drugs would have unknown future side affects.
Taking your example: what if the drug had only been tested and used for a year or so. You start using it understanding the risk so far discovered (fair enough) - but then in 3 years time it is discovered regular users are developing terminal cancers. What if they discover that any regular use brings the death rate within 5 years to 100%?
These are the risks regulation tries to balance out.
As for quantification of future risks, any individual drug has unknown future side effects. To quantify the risk, we quantify based on the reference class of all drugs:
P(unknown side effects | new drug) = (# drugs with bad side effects) / (# drugs with more than 5 years of use)
Suppose this number works out to less than 100 deaths per 100,000 drug users (I'm willing to bet it does). That is the death rate of commercial fishing. Assuming you don't favor having regulators ban commercial fishing, and assuming this number is less than 1 in 1000, would you favor changing regulations on new drugs?
If not, why not?
Meh, I already made this point previously :)
Obviously there is no way to make 100% sure a drug is safe without tests lasting at least the average lifespan of a person (etc.). But I think we have a reasonable medium at the moment; some drugs have long term affects that slip through, but for now the benefit is tipped in favour of "consumers"
Clearly drugs will end up having uknown effects. We have to balance releasing drugs quickly with understanding the most immediate risks they present.
The immediate problem with your figures is that they deal with current drugs regulation. I imagine they are limited by the regulations - and so if you remove them the figure may start to creep up (as dangerously undertested drugs hit the market). How far does it have to go before it's too far?
No, I approve of the idea of exploring ways to reduce regulation and open up industry. But total removal; seems a bit of a slippery slope :)
Kind of like what the Nazis did, except without the violence.
Isn't that what the FDA does? If you have fatal disease X you can apply to get into a drug trial. You can be denied (leading to your death). You could be accepted, but placed into the control group and given a placebo (and die).
People may die during the drug trial phase for the greater good of society learning if the drug is safe and/or effective. Maybe that's a good trade-off and maybe it's not, but we are trading lives for something we value more... knowledge.
I'm in favor of abolishing the FDA. But the biggest downside is that it might be impossible to determine if drugs were effective because very few sick people would volunteer for a drug trial where they might get put in the control group (and not get the drug).
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/14/436028/drug-startup-a...
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2355897150
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10006932/biotech-start-up-fl...
I might be fine with restricting the right for others to sell pharmaceuticals based on the same compound for the same purpose, but certainly not to bar general research into what other effects it may have.
There is a general exclusion of the monopoly right over that of the right to continue scientific research. One could find novel uses, but unless the patents have been poorly drafted it would be impossible to exploit them - you're simply finding more reasons for people to buy your competitors drug.
Umm, that's exactly what current patent law does. The recent denial of a "gene patent" affirmed that.
The Viagra-for-ED patent doesn't keep me from patenting the use of the exact same compound as a floor wax.
ACLU v myriad wasn't about patentable second use of patented products, nor was it about obviousness over the state of the art (the natural world is not considered to be in the state of the art):
it was about novelty - the natural DNA in your cells was, in the judge's view, still the same substance (even in cDNA form and artificially synthesised) as the chemical in Myriad's 'invention' (since for him, function was crucial not form - its form might be altered and origin be synthetic, its function is the same - to carry information - and that information is the same).
Except that the judge said that it wasn't. The judge said that they can't patent discovering a gene - they can only patent doing something new with or to said gene.
That's why the applicants wrote the claim the way that they did - they claimed suppression of said gene to accomplish something. The problem with that claim is that they didn't invent a means of suppression. They assumed one, hence they didn't actually have an invention, which is what the judge actually wrote.
And I think they are morally wrong. Why do I lose my right to do something because you write that thing down before I do?
Coming up with an idea is only a very small part of the battle. Making a viable product is much harder but also not the biggest problem.
The biggest challenge often is getting people to buy a thing. And we already have significant incentives in place for that.
There are things that we need that take a great deal of investment to discover and that cannot be protected with trade secrets.
But if the innovation is of significant value, presumably one can make a profit from it and get to market faster than the competition, so there is reward for innovating.
People that need an innovation can also create a bounty or reward for making it happen. And we have seen a lot effort in response to things like the x prize and darpa's grand challenge.
So I don't see how the alleged benefits of patents justify the curtailment of individual rights.
So what you're saying is that the people who get people to buy a thing should make almost all the money, followed by the people who make viable products, followed by the people who do the research and development and come up with the ideas coming in dead last.
The problem is: in this model, the people who come in dead last are the ones who keep the innovation pipeline full.
I don't like the present patent system, but without something like it the only people who make any money are those in marketing.
That reminds me of when they used to pay programmers by the K-loc of code they wrote.
Inventions that are simpler, cheaper, and require less capital are worth more for that reason.
One of the things that bothers me about some patent opponents is that their argument amounts to a devaluation of intelligence vs. brute force or slow plodding advancement. There really are "eureka" moments, and intelligence does matter. It is possible with intelligence to occasionally happen upon a brief compact insight that radically advances some art, and it is those brief compact insights that are worth the most.
The inherent problem with patents and (to a lesser extent) copyright is that they attempt to fix one problem and as a side affect enforce this too.
Playing devils advocate for a moment; a society without patents is unfairly weighted (in terms of invention) towards BigCo. i.e. you get a lot more innovation but only those with big cash can do something with it - and not necessarily by paying the inventor.
Under current law things are potentially unfairly balanced to the patent holder. I realise that in practicality it is still weighted towards BigCo anyway because they can fund lawsuits etc.
There is, surely, a balance between the two extremes (I don't believe we have it at the moment).
As it happens I think we need to be careful considering the broad concept of patents. We are all familiar and, probably, all opposed to the idea of Software Patents in their current form (or at all). However making software is reasonably trivial - and getting a patent is, thought relatively costly, not too difficult.
This is not entirely the case in other industries; which makes a slight difference (in the sense that the investment for software development is generally lower for an individual inventor)
You say that no patents would favor big companies. But without intellectual property, wouldn't it be EASIER for anyone to compete with the big companies?
Although the idea of patents was first introduced a very long time ago, their modern version didn't show up until the 1800s or so. At that time, there were meager tools available to the average citizen, and innovation then wasn't like it is today. It more typically required a disproportionate outlay of resources, especially given that (at the time) labor was relatively cheaper than technology in the southern parts of the U.S.
Later, the U.S. underwent the industrial revolution, and innovation moved from profit-motivated individuals to profit-motivated companies; again, patents were seen -- correctly, at the time -- to be fostering the innovation that was advancing America's technological development.
But the landscape is much different today. The average individual has at hand resources that would have been remarkable to Ford or Edison, and probably dumbfounding to Eli Whitney. For roughly a month's salary, I might accumulate all of the materials I need to invent a new kind of robot, and if I'm interested in software, then all I need is a computer, some time, and a problem to solve.
So, now patents are no longer as justifiably the protectors of innovation, and now the case can be made that they are actually hindering it.
Conditions aren't the same now as they always were.
Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents. It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
Then at the end of the 19C when the US was industrialized it suddenly got a lot more interested in patents. It's rather like how Disney wants to use 19th century fairy tales in it's cartoons for free while making sure it's stories will still be copyrighted in the 29th century
this is bad usage. it's definitely a theory.
In open, collaborative environments, you have openness by definition and you have no need to give inventors incentives to disclose because they are doing this axiomatically day-by-day as they routinely share their development work. In such an environment, it will appear absurd to the inventors that they should be hindered from doing their work by arbitrary restrictions granted to a monopolist over what they regard as routine tools of their trade. This seems arbitrary, capricious, and damaging. Such a system can even be perceived to be obscene in allowing others who happened to win the rush to the patent office door by a hair's breadth to bring damage claims for up to two decades against others who were not quite so fleet of foot. And all the more so if the "inventor" is not really anything of the sort but rather some troll who lays about conceiving "claims" that get patented for the sole purpose of extorting money from those who truly are in the real world inventing useful products. And hideously so to those who philosophically oppose the idea of such monopoly grants altogether, and see them as being even vicious and oppressive as they are condoned by the social policy of the day as upheld by politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists.
That is the case against patents as reflected in the spectrum of opinion pretty widely found here on HN, and it reflects the open, collaborative perspective many of the members here take with respect to the very idea of innovation.
In essence, the paper cited in this piece says that the whole world of innovation has moved, or is rapidly moving, to a state where openness is the governing principle behind most inventions. If that is indeed true, then the authors of that paper are right by definition - a patent system that is designed to spur public disclosure by, in effect, "paying" the inventor via a temporally-limited grant of a monopolistic advantage over the invention makes no sense where inventors are more than happy to disclose it all for free based on other things that may motivate them (the gaining of recognition, the belief that useful information ought to be free, or whatever).
The real question, though, is whether this assumption of the authors is a correct one. Things clearly have changed in major areas of innovation but to generalize this to the whole world of innovation may or may not be valid. And that is why the patent reform movement is in fact moving quite slowly in the broader society, whatever its fervor in the narrower circles frequented by the members here.
Not saying that reform is not needed - it plainly is. Just don't be surprised if others aren't eager to join in the movement, especially when they are subjected to the counter influences brought on by lobbyists, lawyers, etc. The movement may take sway with Congress but I wouldn't expect this to happen any time soon.
I believe that no scientific theory or logical argument can support patents - further I believe my opinion can be proved fairly rigorously. Although the utility of such proof is not obvious.