What problem are we trying to solve? Why do we think there is a problem? If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate, and since the system has been put in place humans have been exponentially more innovative than they were before, why do we think it needs fixing?
Nothing seems reasonable to me on the topic unless it comes with evidence as to how it would improve a system that would appear by any objective measure to be doing incredibly well.
And what does any of it have to do with ticket master? They’re awful in a lot of ways, but I’m not aware of patent trolling to be one of them. If they even have and enforce patents, I’ve not heard of them, and I work in live events so I’m fairly well-informed on that company. Everyone in the industry hates them, it's unlikely they’re doing anything awful that isn’t routinely mentioned.
> If the idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to innovate
No, it wasn't. The idea behind the system was to give people a financial incentive to be _open_. Patents are a trade with the commons; you would give up your secrets for a limited time period of exclusivity. People would innovate with or without patents, but they would keep that innovation to themselves.
With software, both sides of that bargain have changed. Secrets are harder to keep, and since everything moves so much faster, any given time period is much more damaging to the commons (e.g., 20 years is forever in software).
(I also don't think Ticketmaster affairs have anything to do with patents, FWIW)
That is an ahistorical view of the history of patents. Openness had never even occurred to anybody when patents were originally invented. Back then, it didn’t matter. Humanity hadn’t come up with much that you couldn’t figure out how it worked if you had one in your hands. It may have taken millennia to invent movable type, for example, but somebody who saw it could have copied it immediately. Its relatively recent that that has not been the case for almost anything.
It was developed to spur innovation, and that is still its main function.
U.S. Constitution at least seems to side with innovation, not openness. Constitution article 1 section 8 says Congress shall have power
"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"
This says nothing about publication, only about progress and exclusivity.
It doesn’t say anything about selling patents to third parties to abuse either. It specifies authors and inventors, and rights to their writings and discoveries. At what point does it extend those rights to a random unaffiliated attorney or corporation that engages in zero productive innovation or authorship? I agree that the argument your replying to is flawed, none of this applies to Ticketmaster here specifically, but the contemporary system absolutely is broken in several ways that were seemingly never intended by its original codification.
That’s short-sighted because it misses the fact that inventors are often not product people. There’s a big difference between creating something new and bringing it to market.
The big benefit of a functioning patent system is it allows people to make money just inventing things.
This group seems to have a “throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality when it comes to patents simply because of patent trolls, when the obvious solution is to just fix patent approval/litigation.
Nothing seems reasonable to me on the topic unless it comes with evidence as to how it would improve a system that would appear by any objective measure to be doing incredibly well.
And what does any of it have to do with ticket master? They’re awful in a lot of ways, but I’m not aware of patent trolling to be one of them. If they even have and enforce patents, I’ve not heard of them, and I work in live events so I’m fairly well-informed on that company. Everyone in the industry hates them, it's unlikely they’re doing anything awful that isn’t routinely mentioned.