There is very little evidence of that.
Also, for using a system that's allegedly broken, the US is the country that has been the most innovative in terms of software for decades in a row now.
Realistically, you'll just (a) not get into that market at all or (b) ignore the patents then fight with or pay whoever comes after you. Apple vs Samsung is a nice example of where (b) can go but most choose (a).
If he's right about motivation, we should see all kinds of innovation in the mobile space with goal of licensing or selling resulting patents. That group is such a small percentage of overall activity in that sector so as to be nearly non-existent.
So, we have motivation for innovation (i.e. sell stuff) plus tons of innovators without people relying on patents or filing lots of them. The patent system isn't helping here. However, suits like Apple vs Samsung, Oracle vs Google, and so on show patent holders do use it to try to eliminate competition and ensure stagnation for profits. So, we have no provable need for patent system for innovation, proof that innovation happens anyway, and proof patents are used to remove competition in a way that harms consumers. Whether fully or not, his model of patent system = innovation boost is tested enough to reject it for mobile software. Similar arguments apply to software in general.
My idea has already been put to the test and proven correct: the US is the most innovative country in the software area. And has been for decades.
The scenario you are proposing is unrealistic because that's not how the system works. Otherwise, we would never have had the iPhone, Android nor the BlackBerry.
Now try to understand why the system works despite your understanding of it.
That doesn't prove your idea correct; it's likely the case we're innovative despite patents, not because of them, because developers largely ignore them and just code whatever they want anyway.
> The scenario you are proposing is unrealistic because that's not how the system works.
The system doesn't work, that's rather the point; the entire software industry, which you're going on about, largely ignores them, or collects them as weapons of defense against other companies.
No. My claim is simply: "The US is the most innovative country in the world in terms of software, and has been for the past decades".
This is a fact.
Your claim is: "This has happened DESPITE patents".
There is little to no evidence for your claim and the burden of proof is on you.
> The system doesn't work, that's rather the point
It it didn't work, the US would not be the most innovative software country in the world. It is, therefore your claim is wrong. The system works.
Could it work better? Sure. Propose a solution and show some evidence that your solution will be better than the current situation. Then we can talk.
False, you're claiming we're this innovative because of patents; the burden of proof is upon you to link our success to patents. In the software industry in particular, your claim is just absurd and programmers know it.
> It is, therefore your claim is wrong. The system works.
Incorrect, our lead in innovation does not logically lead to the conclusion that our patent system works well. That you think it does indicates a failure of logic on your part. Innovation happens with or without patents, patents by their very nature slow it down by preventing others from innovating. Patents have never increased innovation, that isn't their purpose; their purpose is to prevent innovation from disappearing into trade secrets and add it to the collective human knowledge. They do this by hampering innovation in favor of the original innovator in exchange for disclosure of the innovation.
> Your claim is: "This has happened DESPITE patents". There is little to no evidence for your claim and the burden of proof is on you.
There's mountains of evidence, it's found in how companies now use patents, as legal weapons to defend themselves from other companies and their hoards of patents. That's not what the system was designed to do. And now patent trolls, the existence of which are quite literal prove the system is broken.
Lets be clear, because someone else's argument fails isn't proof that yours is correct; your arguments have to stand on their own and so far you're not making your own case at all. If you want to defend patents, then defend them, you're not just right because someone else is wrong nor is our lead in innovation proof that patents work. Logic doesn't work that way.
And take note, you're talking to multiple people here.
I never made that claim.
All I said is that the US is the most innovative country in terms of software.
That's my claim and it's fact.
People who say that the system is broken need to first reconcile their claim with my statement of fact. And they're doing a terrible job at providing proof of their claims besides saying "the system is broken".
> That's not what the system was designed to do. And now patent trolls, the existence of which are quite literal prove the system is broken.
That's absurd exaggeration. The system is not broken, it has flaws. Fix the flaw that enabled patent trolls and the system will get even better than it is today.
> you're not just right because someone else is wrong nor is our lead in innovation proof that patents work. Logic doesn't work that way.
Totally agree. Good thing I did none of that.
No they don't. The system can be broken without conflicting with your statement of fact that we lead in software innovation. You think those things are conflicting, they are not.
> Totally agree. Good thing I did none of that.
It's all you've done, and you just did it again by claiming they need to reconcile with your fact; no they don't, another fallacy the false choice.
So your claim is that the US is innovative because of its patent system.
Same thing that saying you don't believe in god does not mean you believe there is no god.
In both cases, I'm just saying not enough evidence has been brought to support the claim (that the system is broken and that god exists).
A paper (Bessen, Maskin - 1999) that argues patents may hinder innovation[1]. Abstract:
"How could such industries as software, semiconductors, and computers have been so innovative despite historically weak patent protection? We argue that if innovation is both sequential and complementary—as it certainly has been in those industries—competition can increase firms’ future profits thus offsetting short-term dissipation of rents. A simple model also shows that in such a dynamic industry, patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare. The natural experiment that occurred when patent protection was extended to software in the 1980's provides a test of this model. Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms. Consistent with our model, however, these increases did not occur. Other evidence supporting our model includes a distinctive pattern of cross-licensing in these industries and a positive relationship between rates of innovation and firm entry."
Here's another paper on the same topic (Bessen, Hunt - 2004). Abstract:
"U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequately explained by changes in R&D investments, employment of computer programmers, or productivity growth. The residual increase in patent propensity is consistent with a sizeable rise in the cost effectiveness of software patents during the 1990s. We find evidence that software patents substitute for R&D at the firm level; they are associated with lower R&D intensity. This result occurs primarily in industries known for strategic patenting and is difficult to reconcile with the traditional incentive theory of patents."
An abstract from another paper (Bessen, Meuer, Ford - 2011) showing that lawsuits by non-practicing entities have cost the tech industry $500 billion over a 20 year period (from 1990 to 2010), with almost none of it going to the inventors:
"In the past, non-practicing entities (NPEs) - firms that license patents without producing goods - have facilitated technology markets and increased rents for small inventors. Is this also true for today’s NPEs? Or are they “patent trolls” who opportunistically litigate over software patents with unpredictable boundaries? Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives."
And an abstract from yet another paper (Feldman, Lemley - 2015) showing that patent licenses do not drive innovation:
"A commonly offered justification for patent trolls or non-practicing entities (NPEs) is that they serve as a middleman, facilitating innovation and bringing new technology from inventors to those who can implement it. We survey those involved in patent licensing to see how often patent license demands actually led to innovation or technology transfer. We find that very few patent license demands actually lead to new innovation; most simply involve payment for the freedom to keep doing what the licensee was already doing. Surprisingly, this is true not only of NPE licenses but even of licenses from product-producing companies and universities. Our results cast significant doubt on one common justification for patent trolls."
And finally, a paper (Johnson - 2011) that argues, using recent advances in relevant fields, that the fundamental belief that external incentives such as copyrights and patents are necessary for innovation is fundamentally wrong:
"The enterprise of intellectual property law has long been based on the premise that external incentives – such as copyrights and patents – are necessary to get people to produce artistic works and technological innovations. This article argues that this foundational belief is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral economics, psychology, and business-management studies, along with empirical investigations of industry, it is now possible to construct a compelling case that the incentive theory, as a general matter, is mistaken, and that natural and intrinsic motivations will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards. The result is that intellectual property law itself needs a fundamental rethinking."
[1]: http://www.researchoninnovation.org/patent.pdf [2]: http://www.researchoninnovation.org/swpat.pdf [3]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1930272 [4]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2565292 [5]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1746343
--
In fact, the only real evidence we have that patents may be a net positive is in biotech, and that's due to the extremely time-consuming and massively expensive process of R&D in that field. In every other field, we either have no evidence that patents drive innovation, or we have evidence that they hinder it.
Some examples include arithmetic coding[1], elliptic curve cryptography[2], and LZW/GIF[3]. Apple dropped ZFS because of licencing concerns[4] (dooming us all to listen to John Siracusa complain about HFS+ and lamenting the absence of ZFS for the last 6 years). Many of these have since expired and have had a burst of activity around them afterwards.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075505 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#US_patents [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_patents [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo... [4]: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-m...
It is undeniable that the US is successful and innovative. The burden of proof is on the people claiming the system is broken, because the end result does not support that claim. If you want to say that the US is succeeding despite a broken system, you have to prove that the system is broken because the success is already self-evident.
Now try to understand why innovation existed outside patent motivations. Then look up what big companies do with all those patents. Only then will you see the real effect of the patent system.
Now you might say that a lot of those open source research projects are funded by big companies, so they don't count. But most development on popular open source projects is funded by big or medium-size companies. Research isn't any different in this regard.
I think it's no accident that most of your examples are hardware, not software. The problem there is that open source hardware is difficult to make work, not that open source research is difficult to make work. The other main example you gave is Unix, but FOSS didn't exist in 1973--of course it wasn't open source by the modern definition. Its research successor, Plan 9, was open source.
Disclaimer: I work on one of those open source research projects.
Not sure you can lump 3 very different types of entities into one group.
I agree with your 1st type (startups) but what about #2 (academics) and #3 (FOSS volunteers) - what are some examples that "most innovations" come from them?
Those companies built their phones then spent tens/hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits fighting each other's basic patents and infringements thereof. That would appear to be option b in the parent's scenario.
Big companies can afford to take that risk. Small companies end up having to sell to bigger companies or close down when core tech is threatened by patent challenges.
Apple's patents and position led them to make insane profits close to $100 billion. Yet, their innovation isn't significantly greater than the more open alternative. The money goes goes into their pocket, mostly, plus some R&D and lots of lawsuits. The true result of the U.S. patent system: making owners money.
I'd say that's despite our patent system, not because of it. I suspect we could be even more innovative -- and indeed, recover some of the edge we've lost in recent years -- by at least killing software and business-method patents... and frankly I wouldn't be opposed to throwing out the entirety of the US patent system. (Which is of course impossible, even if there was US political will to do so, given foreign treaties and obligations in that area.)
You're not just saying that the system can be improved (which is kind of self evident and applicable to pretty much everything) but you're saying that software patents are holding back innovation.
How would you go about proving that?
I prefer to stick to a more reasonable claim: the system is not broken, it has a few flaws, such as those that enable the existence of non-practicing entities. Fix that flaw and everyone will finally realize that the concept of software patents is sound. We just need to improve its current implementation.
That's not a tough claim that needs proven, it's an obvious observable fact to every programmer in the industry. We can't write software without violating tons of patents these days, idiotic patents issued by ignorant people who don't understand the absurdity of the claims being made. Patent trolls, of which we are overflowing with, hold back innovation and they are a direct byproduct of an obviously broken badly designed patent system.
> I prefer to stick to a more reasonable claim: the system is not broken, it has a few flaws, such as those that enable the existence of non-practicing entities.
It's broken.
Let's look at it from the opposite perspective: ignoring harm completely, I assert that software patents do absolutely nothing to further innovation. There is no algorithm that would not get developed, no software that would not get written, if there was a lack of patent protection. I cannot imagine any person or company choosing not to build something simply because they it could not be patented and therefore could be "stolen".
So from that perspective, at the very least software patents are unnecessary and provide no real benefit in terms of providing an incentive to innovate. Maybe that's a "tough claim" as well, but that's just the way I see it from both personal experience and from watching the industry in general, and, frankly, I'd say it'd take some pretty strong evidence to convince me otherwise.
So if we -- bear with me on this -- take that as correct, then it becomes pretty brain-dead simple to assert that software patents are a huge net negative on innovation, creating a drain on time, brainpower, and money, to name a few things.
I've been on the receiving end of a patent-troll suit, and it was a huge waste of time for me (and my colleagues), as well as a huge waste of money for my company to pay for lawyers to deal with and settle the matter. And for what? Some greedy rent-seeking bastards to line their pockets for doing nothing that benefits anyone but them.
>There is very little evidence of that.
Given the abundant and widely-publicized examples of specific patents that obviously slow down innovation, I'm beginning to think a downvote is inadequate for comments that claim "little evidence". They should probably be flagged.
Amazon's 1-click patent, GIF patent, JEPG2000, the RSA patent come quickly to mind right off the top of my head, and there are numerous more examples that I'm sure a little googling could find quickly.
The part about US being most innovative...now that's just the basic scientific error of failing to isolate variables. A downvote suffices for that.
If I had to guess, I'd say the scale of the US software and creative works market is the dominant reason for the observation you made, and patents simply didn't play much of a factor, either to help or to harm.