Comment by arcbyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcbyte | Hacker News Reader

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In 2010 you start a company, wholly owned by you.

In 2011 you obtain a patent wholly owned by the company.

In 2012 you fail to pay the franchise tax and filing paperwork for your company so the state dissolves it. You don't care because you aren't making money.

In 2013 another company starts making a product that infringes on your patent.

You are the defacto owner of the patent. This is because you were the owner of the company when it was terminated. All of its assets and liabilities devolved to you. No action was required of you for this to happen, it just happens.

Now imagine this business was actually a joint venture between two wholly owned subsidiaries of two different holding companies, one of which was public but has gone bankrupt and the other was private but subsequently merged with a public conglomerate that spun off a child company, keeping only 40% of its stock after IPO.

The patent is still owned by people, but good luck finding them all.

The purpose of a patent, generally speaking, is to encourage innovation by giving the creator legally protected time in which they can exclusively use that innovation. If they don’t use the innovation but someone else wants to, society is improved by dissolving that patent, even if the owner could theoretically be traced to some person.

Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is? Why do we need to pay taxes to employ those people? We have patent law, which is already a lovely gravy train for the state.

> Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is?

This is reversing the natural order of things. That bureaucrat isn't nullifying fucking ANYTHING. That bureaucrat is artificially limiting who is allowed to create/use a thing.

The natural state of the information is: "Use this - it's free". The whole of humanity might exist because mirror neurons literally go: "Hey - I can do that too!".

It's only when you add a monstrously complex and entirely artificial patent system on top of things that it gets complex.

So we're ALREADY deciding who is allowed to use things, and it's already artificial and bureaucratic.

All this does is fucking stop making it worse. And patent/copywrite is already so god damn egregious as a system. I'm firmly in the camp of "nuke it from orbit". It's time to try something other than this hideous abusive system.

It's hard to know what point you're making, although your aggression is (hopefully) a sign of how extremely you care about this topic.

I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power. You seem to be saying this at the end as well, so, as I say, I'm not sure what point you're making. But your excitement on this topic is appreciated.

> I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power.

What is confusing here? The entire structure is already a perversion of the natural world.

If we did not have our government, and the rules that it enforces (those "bureaucrats" you don't seem to like), then there is no "invention" to be nullified.

They already have this power. They enforce it through violence and imprisonment (tools reserved officially to the government). If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.

The question is not: "Will the government nullify my invention?!?!?". It's - "What might my life have been like if the government did not restrict SO many people from competing at all - by artificially stopping them from using the tools and ideas they see around them? (for fairly ridiculous time periods)"

> If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.

This is possible, but the power to enforce patents is in the courts, and not in the patent bureaucracy. Having a single group that can invalidate parents on a whim is different to that.

And patents can be useful, although I don't have many examples. SawStop is one, though, where even a 20 year patent doesn't seem to have been long enough to establish a successful business before incumbents swoop in. Patents like that are pro-competition in that scenario. Otherwise why bother starting a new business when your R&D effort can just be taken advantage of by someone else as soon as you hit on the answer?

The patent renewal system is the attempt to solve this. In the case that the patent isn’t wanted, or the patent owner goes out of business, the patent owner won’t pay the annual renewal (in most countries; the US is once every 4 years) and after the (usually) 6 month grace period, the patent is public.

The invention as disclosed and documented in the patent is free to the world.

Tough luck. If it's that important, register your ownership interest somewhere and keep that property claim alive by renewing it once every few years for a nominal fee. Property rights are not so important that the world should stop turning if a property owner has retired to a cave without leaving any forwarding address.

So hire a PI. If someone doesn't want to be found, that's one thing, but if they're just out there, living their lives normally, that's not insurmountable.

In reality, it's a bunch of work which costs money, and if you don't have to spend that money, why would you?

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