Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

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The larger issue is how do we get universities incentives to produce practical innovation.

Currently, there are a number of different institutional frameworks for trying to deal with the issue. Most of them don't work well. We have university patents + tech transfer offices. We have obligated NIH patent holding + licensing available to third parties for NIH sponsored innovations. We have government funded 'incubator'-like institutions with wide or narrow research scopes, etc.

Patents overall are an attempt at a solution for a larger problem - how do we allocate rewards to innovators. Our main model for doing so, academically, is to try and fail to create transparent funding flows to finance enlightenment-style aristocratic researchers (with labs, equipment, staff, etc). We do this in a manner that avoids accusations that they are receiving privileged patronage while also paying lip service to the idea that free-riders, extra-territorial or not, should contribute to the effort.

But note that we're trying to do different things with this one tool - and attempts to fix it in one area often result in breaking it in another. The entire system is just kludge upon kludge because of this.

> how do we allocate rewards to innovators

The goal of the patent system is not to "pay innovators" - they already get paid by putting good products on the market.

The goal of the patent system is to get innovators to PUBLISH their solutions so that the public can benefit from them. (And build on them in the future.)

If the patent is obvious, then the public gets no benefit, and we're handing out monopolies for free.

This is a VERY interesting reply, because it showcases so much.

Having innovators publish isn't, big picture, important. The big picture importance is getting people to actually use the fruits of research in society where that would be optimal. Publication is a tiny element of making that happen, by facilitating tech transfer (but not really, because a huge chunk of patented innovations can't be replicated from the filed documents or published research papers. Intentionally.).

So why is publication treated as the aim? Because the rewards associated with innovation are best secured by secrecy in the absence of other anti-free-rider measures. Hence secrecy is replaced as the source of reward for innovators because secrecy is directly at odds with the social desire to implement superior tech or processes.

Your refrain is a common one used by patent maximalists to describe patents as a transaction between the public and the innovator, rather than a grant of privilege. This is because if we divorce patents from their actual social utility, and instead focus on their immediate results, we can ignore their externalities and create a self-fullfilling positive KPI to talk about ("Hey look, we published n innovations in public! More than last year!" vs. "On a Net basis, we've bettered things in society.")

> The goal of the patent system is to get innovators to PUBLISH their solutions so that the public can benefit from them.

Yes, and here the patent system fails again. By far the most patents read as an exercise in obfuscation, and nothing like e.g. a handbook or scientific publication.

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