Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

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>What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?

Do the hard grunt work of getting enough of a broad base of political support for Congress to enact reform. Seriously, that's what it comes down to. And it's not some impossible thing even for a minority so long as it's focused. Precisely because majorities don't really pay much attention to such things and these days are fairly fixed, even a fraction of a percentage of the vote that always votes and will do so based on a single or very small set of issues can have an outsized impact.

In this case, the goal would probably be a few very targeted things. My nomination would be 1) Eliminate software and "business method" patents entirely, with the argument that software is already covered by copyright and vague ideas shouldn't be patentable, and 2) actually fund the USPTO to a much higher degree and give it more teeth so more patents can be taken down early.

I don't think it's an impossible dream. It's an issue that doesn't fit into typical polarization, since there are major business benefits both ways. There are easy outrageous examples of patents that will strike the average person as obviously wrong. It's something Congress can do without the slightest question. There will be economic interests against it, but there are ones for it as well. And the tide has been turning a bit on IP maximalism.

I've written my Senators at least, talking about some of the personal harms I've seen as a developer. I got replies. If nothing else, everyone should do that and not just post on the internet. They certainly are unlikely to immediately change their stances, but they absolutely pay attention to letters because so few write them. If they start seeing enough people concerned about an issue, they will if nothing else give it some much higher level attention. Unfortunately I don't know of any national advocacy/lobbying organizations devoted purely to patent reform. The EFF does some good work there, but they've got a wider umbrella of critical issues to fight as well. I donate what I can to them but it'd be nice if there was some place just for this too.

Still, I hope to see some progress in my lifetime on reigning them back in from when they were invented in court in the 80s.

Would you share what you wrote to your congressman?

Or dont do patents at all.

Patents were made for a time before ubiquitous multinational corporations. If there are multiple sources of truth and markets for what is protected invention, then it greatly dilutes the power of that patent. This ends up hamstringing the countries most dependent on patenting to encourage innovation because we are still beholden to foreign interest who file their patents with the USPO or sell to an American troll. The US is the most fastidious in their preservation of patent law despite its many flaws and this is why we will lose out most in the global turning against protected invention.

All developing nations ignore international copyright, trademark, and patent IP rights. The US did it back in the late 19th century, other nations in the early 20th, Asian nations in the late 20th century. What is happening now is nothing new.

China is now starting to enforce IP rights because as they move up the industry maturity scale, the rights become more important.

IP rights only become relevant to developed nations, where manufacturing and other primary/secondary industries become less important than service industries.

There is no "global turning against protected invention".

There is "developing vs developed nations ongoing opposing interests".

I believe you'll find that ubiquitous multinational corporations do indeed outdate the patent, by a couple hundred years.

Ubiquitous as in many? or just a few colonizing the world?

You still need patents. Healthcare is an obvious example, if we eliminated patents we'd have 0 new drugs pass FDA approval over the next decade.

But software is very different from medical patents.

Actually, there is pretty strong evidence that patents are counterproductive for pharmaceuticals. Before the harmonization of IP laws, pharmaceuticals had different eligibility for patenting in the US, Europe and Switzerland. The US had the strongest, Europe somewhat weaker and in Switzerland it was inelligible. The Swiss companies invested the most money into R&D and were generally the most successful. The US ones were the leas successful and did the least R&D and instead invested much more into lawyers and marketing.

Did the Swiss companies choose not to patent medication in other countries? It could just be that the market in Switzerland was small enough so that there was a gentleman's agreement not to copy the pharmaceutical.

The patent laws where you do the research doesn't matter as much as the patent laws where you're recouping the cost of your investment. And I assume those companies made 100x more money in the u.s. than Switzerland.

Funny. New drugs existed before patents were a thing.

Really? Name some. The patent system started in 1790. The FDA didn't exist, thus no expensive trials and safety validation. Medicine was just a bunch of trial and error with no controls.

Plenty of medicines existed before 1790...

...opium and extracts for pain relief, cinchona bark for malaria, cloves and clove oil for oral pain relief, I could go on, but you could also Google this.

And the fact that a "patent medicine" is a synonym in history for "snake oil" shows how little scientific rigour patents brought to medicinal development, and how the patent system was initially co-opted to lend an air of legitimacy to quackery.

Penicillin and ether were not covered by patents. Pretty sure those were two of the greatest of all time.

On the patent side you have such modern marvels as OxyContin, which has arguably caused more loss of life than COVID-19.

Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.

All Opioid deaths between 1999 and 2017 were about 400k in the US. Well less than the Covid death toll in the US alone.

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

Average expected years left to live for a Covid death is about 11, prior to having any information on pre-existing conditions. Divide that by 2-3x once you are given pre-existing conditions.

The average Opiod death is 3x that by years alone, and more when going by expected healthspan.

Hence "loss of life" and not "deaths".

> Patented drugs are generally awful. The idea that it costs $1B to make a game changing drug is a lie. It costs $1T. The US taxpayer pays 99.9%, and the big pharma company spends a billion to generate some shitty subpar derivative that they can then get monopoly protection on and create an artificial racket supported by false marketing.

This number is impossibly wrong. There were 48 new drugs brought to market in 2019. At an average cost of 1 trillion dollar per drug would mean the entire economy of both the U.S. and Europe were devoted to drug research which just isn't true.

stdlib

Iirc the inventor of the Polio vaccine could've patented it, but chose not to.

How much did it cost to get FDA approval before patents existed vs now?

> You still need patents. Healthcare is an obvious example, if we eliminated patents we'd have 0 new drugs pass FDA approval over the next decade.

That's only if you look at how the system is today and evaluate as it is today.

Software mostly doesn't have patents: theres no patent to an uber, to a paypal, to an amazon. You would have a different business model to fund medical innovation, for example, advance payments from prospective patients.

Really? How about socializing all of medicine.

The patent's purpose is to incentivize innovation. Some industries need this (medical) others don't (software).

So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical).

Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways.

Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless you mean socializing drug discovery which would be a completely unproven way to develop drugs at scale.

It's funny, I've heard from biomed engineers that it's clear to them that patents don't work in the medical field, unlike how they're effective in the software field.

It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.

Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed.

I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry.

The whole thing is a big lie.

End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. We need to abolish them outright.

Drugs are much easier to copy than software programs (i.e. there's no copyright protection).

And it currently costs billions of dollars to get FDA approval.

Basically assume I find a new antidepressant. I spend 2 billion dollars proving it's safe and effective.

How do I get my money back when any drug manufacturer can now manufacture the same drug?

Not zero, but 3½ years for patents and 21 years (7+3½ per extension) for copyright is enough.

But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time?

I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”

Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.

I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.

Agree with you and well put.

One slight nit: it helps if you don't spread the big lie "intellectual property" (since it's an oxymoron). Someone here on HN told me about the term "imaginary property" which works great, because then you can still use the "IP" acronym.

There is no extension (and even filing system) for copyright. Do you want to introduce that?

Yes, and unregistered copyright would be treated as public domain.

So you write a letter and dont want it published by the recipient, you need to file? Or all software written in a company, file? What about confidential stuff, file?

Abolition of intellectual property does not mean abolition of privacy; original author will still have the right of initial publication, but once published, no privacy assumptions and no recirculation restrictions unless registered.

Under which law is the privacy of a private letter enforced?

Tesla does not make hybrids. Ab initio.

Though this is only one person's personal experience, to me this was an illuminating conversation on the state of medical device repair as a consequence of strong IP protections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsJG2ODOcXA

It costs close to a billion dollars to being a drug to market. Who's going to spend that kind of money if there's no patent protection?

The problem is that there is no way to experiment with other ways of funding health care research, as the cost of doing so is set at highly entrenched monopoly prices. There is no reason for those with capital to consider alternatives when there is already so much money to be made in the existing system.

I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.

Including drug discovery? I'm very skeptical of that working out better than the current system (for drug discovery).

Our current system uses incredible amounts of public funding for drug discovery.

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/10/2329

The article references mentions $100B over a period of 7 years, or $14B per year.

That’s a decent chunk of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. Pfizer alone spends around $10B per year on R&D. J&J: $12B. Merck: $13B.

The coronavirus probably shows patents to be a thorny mechanism for innovation. Pfizer might have a vax patent but then can't freely make money of it. If there were no patents, but they were the best manufacturers, might have been easier to have a freer market on it.

Patents necessarily put more capital investments into patentable work than unpatentable work, but that doesnt mean it is more efficient. I understand the principle of patents, but eventually you end up in heavy interventionism, state funding, litigation, etc. Best to do away of all of that imo.

And how much of the expenditure goes anywhere useful? And remember that they're incentivized to report 15% of their revenue being spent on R&D for tax reasons.

That $100B is just for drugs that later got FDA approval, not the NIH grant budget.

If you’re going to make that argument, you also have to consider the opposite possibility: I’ve worked on (non-medical) projects with public funding in the past. One can only hope that my experience wasn’t representative for the amount waste of public money in the medical world.

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