I hope the entire patent system is simply dissolved. Patents are an artificial restriction on free trade that prevents competition and put profits in the pockets of the greedy undeserving.
Are trade secrets really worse? My (uninformed, anecdotal, unsubstantiated) intuition is that reverse engineering, or even just the knowledge that something is possible, ensures that trade secrets are no barrier to progress. While patents definitely seem like a barrier.
I think it stalls more innovation than it encourages, and generally prevents new entry into a technology space, because the existing players have all the patents that a new player would need to get started. The fewer players you have in a technology space, the less innovation there will be, because “necessity is the mother of invention” and people don’t generally start working on an idea unless they are exposed to the problems of that field. In theory, a non-player could start a research shop and then sell the results of their research in the form of a patent, and this happens sometimes, but just as often the industry decides they don’t want to pay, and leaves the idea dead until the patent expires.
My pet example is the mosquito laser. They invented it at MIT, and showed that it could effectively shoot down mosquitos that pass between posts. The hardware costs were a bit high, but would come down drastically if someone mass-produced custom chips for it. But, the overall idea is patented, and currently held by a “think tank” licensing company, and no product has emerged. I can only assume that it is because their licensing demands are too high. I’d be happy to start my own company to build mosquito lasers, but I’m sure that their licensing costs would kill any profit from it, so I don’t. And so the world is left with no mosquito lasers for more than a decade.
If you want another extreme example, the 3D printer craze was kicked off by the expiration of a patent on the FDM process: https://www.fabbaloo.com/blog/2020/3/2/the-challenge-and-opp... The innovation in the 3D printer space probably lost 10 years due to that patent.
One possible solution to the problem, without throwing out the entire patent system, would be to create a mandatory licensing system with fixed rates. For example, if you know that your design is about 60% patented, and there is a law that says 20% of your profits have to be given to the patent holder, then you might be able to go ahead and make the product and still turn a reasonable profit. The patent holders would get paid something and the products would continue being innovated without these stupid wait-17-years delays. Also it would put less severe stake on the patents, so people could just argue out the details in court about who gets how much money without worrying that it was going to bankrupt a company or kill the product line.
This is prophetic patents, another unwanted side effect of the system. I'd say it's the norm in every niche nowadays.
As soon as any technological idea becomes well-known, say some research idea getting hyped in the media (e.g., quantum, VR, some new kind of laser, 3D displays, etc.), then people everywhere run out and patent all possible imagined ideas of how this new tool might be used to make products.
> I can only assume that it is because their licensing demands are too high.
This seems an arbitrary assumption. Products don't make it to market for myriads of reasons. Seems like a poor example to use to target patents - especially as with patents you know that within ~20 years that idea will be freely available to everyone.
- Academics, who would be doing the same thing regardless of patent revenue
- Entrepreneurs (and people working for small companies), who are hurt much more by the existence of the patent system than the potential revenue from it.
- People working for big companies, who would almost always be building the exact same product if the patent system didn't exist, except they wouldn't have to worry about working around competitors patents.
Certainly the patent system makes some people money, but it mostly seems to be
- Lawyers (for obvious reasons)
- Owners of already very large and no longer very innovative big companies, who had the time to build up a war chest of patents.
I don't particularly believe that giving extra money to either of those groups encourages innovation, and I certainly don't believe it encourages innovation enough to make up the harm it does to people attempting to be entrepreneurs, people having to work around patents, and so on.
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One potential exception to this is bio related industries, which are different in that patents are often the primary product a company produces, instead of a byproduct produced by engineering work that happens for other reasons. Without patents you would need to find another way to fund that work, if you want it to happen. I wouldn't call most of that work particularly innovative though, it's mostly just very expensive mind numbing work like "trying a million different possible drugs" and "running huge human trials" and so on.
I would generally prefer that the bio work be funded by a different system, because I don't think the patent system produces good outcomes for society. It creates perverted incentives to always be creating new drugs, instead of finding new ways to use old ones. It creates perverted incentives to not build on each others work. It means that drug companies have the ability to charge substantially more than the cost of production for drugs they produce, meaning people who could be treated cheaply in an optimal system go untreated (note: The marginal cost of treating more people is really small since the expensive part is the R&D that already happened). Moreover it forces drug companies to do that if they want to recoup their R&D costs.
Something like direct government subsidies to companies who discover drugs that people end up using (for medical purposes) seems like a better solution. There are a million variations on that, but I'd claim that basically any variation on that is probably better than patents.
I believe we would have released open source FPGAs and the accompanying toolchain about 18 years ago if it wasn't for patents. I was getting quite into it, but the patent minefield made it financially too worrying to continue, and it also put off potential collaborators at the time. People literally warned me "you will lose your home - I'm not willing to take that risk". I didn't have a home to lose :p but it was still a downer.
And a novel high performance x86 CPU design. x86 is patented thoroughly, although now it ought to be ok to ship one that has the features from about 20 years ago. I would still recommend to be cautious!
And an ARM one. ARM is known to some in the field as a company with an army of lawyers after all.
A lot of innovation happens when patents expire.
Other people's open source FPGA designs are shipping now (and kudos to the designers - they are really well implemented!), in part thanks to many of the basic patents on FPGAs expiring about now.
I would be quite surprised if RISC-V implementations aren't dependent on a number of key patents having expired by now.
FDM 3D printing (where hot plastic is squirted through a moving nozzle) became popular when the patents on it expired. Some people into open source 3D printing think it happened because that's when people innovated. They did innovate at making it low cost, but the expiry of the patents was a factor too.
At the moment I'm building a specialised high-performance database engine, and I have to explicitly avoid some of the obvious on-disk data layouts because they turn out to be patented. It's annoying having to come up with some "clever" alternative, but I'll find a way.
I don't know if patents encourage innovation on balance, but they've definitely prevented me from shipping some fairly advanced things I've worked on in the past.
I don't begrudge the companies or the system, but I will argue that there is plenty of innovation impeded by it, and in my experience I have never worked anywhere that patents helped, only places where they hindered. It could happen but it hasn't yet.
When I discussed this with a patent attorney once, there was a fascinating gulf between people who dream up patentable (or already patented) solutions almost casually on demand when faced with a problem, and people who think this is impossible and such insights are precious gems that rarely occur. I'm sure it differs between fields, and I know there are some very clever patents. But in software and to an extent hardware, the two fields I'm most familiar with, most patents seem to cover natural solutions to a problem which would occur to anyone skilled in the area when faced with that particular problem.
