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Comment by gbear605 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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