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Comment by bsinger98 | Hacker News Reader

I completely disagree. If I invent a new technology I should have the right to sell it. It is not fair for the inventor to create a novel technology only to have a huge corporation steal your idea. It is similar to China stealing US IP, it ruins the incentive to actually invent new ideas. If I create something novel, I deserve a short term monopoly so I can compete against established corporations.

For example, look at the Wright Brothers. They invented the airplane and didn't make any money. They spent their entire life suing people for stealing their idea. The system should encourage and incentivize creating ground breaking inventions.

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> If I create something novel, I deserve a short term monopoly so I can compete against established corporations.

I agree, but I don't think the current patent system does this. I think the length of patents should be reduced dramatically, 5 years sounds reasonable.

It's crazy when you think about how patents last for 20 years, which doesn't really work with the current pace of technology IMO (as an example, the iPhone wasn't released until 2007). So you can't use anything Apple patented to make the ORIGINAL iPhone work until... 2027? That doesn't seem good for humanity to me.

If the lengths were reduced, and the requirements much more strict, I think the world would be a better place.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent

It’s not at all unheard of for a patent to take 5 years to be granted. Do those folks just lose out? Or do we base patent term on issue date instead of filing date? (NB: it used to be that way, and it invited all sorts of gamesmanship.)

Maybe if they only lasted five years there wouldn't be as many applications since they wouldn't be as valuable so processing could be faster.

Not gonna work. getting a new patent in genetic sequencing takes 10 years of research. then in 5 years you sell only a couple of products, especially if you're not the market leader. Then your competitor can use your idea while you invested billions in it.

Think about oxford nanopore and illumina for example. if illumina could just use their patents after 5 years and given that they already have 90% market share, they would be dead.

Solution: allow a company or individual keep a patent up until (total assets - total liabilities) / (research costs) is greater than 15.

Their problem was that other engineers didn’t actually use the novel tech the brothers invented in their airplanes. The basic idea of putting an engine with a propeller on a winged vehicle was not novel, it had been tried many times before. It was simply a matter of power to weight ratios and aerodynamics knowledge crossing the right threshold.

Their key innovation was wing warping for control, but the industry rapidly switched to flaps and ailerons, leaving the brothers’ main innovation behind. Their aerodynamic concepts were advanced, but again others pushed beyond their concepts very quickly.

So their technical innovations were brilliant, but not used extensively by later engineers.

No, this is not correct. Actually, they also patented flaps and ailerons or anything else that could manipulate the wings outer surface to adjust roll.

Their real contribution was coordinated flight control. That is, rotation or roll (via warping or whatever) in coordination with rudder. This is what really made stable air flight possible. They figured this out through tremendous personal expense, scientific method, and personal risk. A sustained multi-year effort. Seems reasonable to get at least some licensing revenue when others copy it.

You realize the Wright Brothers in particular are an absolutely horrible example of the patent system working right?

Their patent trolling is credited with setting back the development of the United States aviation industry for years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

So really, the only benefit is the actual patent ending up in the public domain, at the cost of further slowing down the field when someone ends up with patent rights assigned andisfeeling particularly litigous.

I agree somewhat. The problem is that there are so many bullshit patents in the world that mostly just create a minefield for those trying to create new things.

A proposal (in “Radical Markets”) I agree with is to charge a property tax of, say, 2% for each year that a patent holder wants to keep the patent. The value of the patent is whatever the owner decides it should be but (to prevent claims of $1 values) the owner must sell the patent to the first entity willing to pay more than the declared value.

This, in theory, would ensure that only patents that were genuinely useful would be kept around rather than being used as tools to stifle innovation or rent seek for those that actually create great works.

This assumes you can make a reasonable estimation of the commercial value of the patent at filing time, which is unlikely.

Maybe it goes to auction each year and the current owner gets a chance to outbid the final price? Whoever wins the auction gets to pay the 2%.

If you invent a new technology as part of a grant funded by my tax dollars, it's much less clear.

The problem seems to be that the bar for "novelty" in software patents is extremely low. (Amazon's patent on 1 click ordering is probably my favorite example).

My (least) favorite example is that Microsoft got at least 3 patents out of Exfat in the late 2000s for trivial extensions of FAT32, which incorporated long-public, in-no-way-novel techniques to FAT in basically the most obvious possible way to add the features. (Basically: hashed directory entries for speed of lookup; a single extent design that only works for 100% contiguous files; and a free bitmap.) These things were easily predated by the same techniques in, e.g., ext3 (2001) and classic Berkeley FFS from the 80s, but MSFT gets to prevent unlicensed 3rd party ExFAT implementations until 2029, if not further.

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