You may say it limits innovation. But it also protects smaller players from investing in innovation, by de-risking that a big customer might copy them and destroy their business. Which is mostly this scenario.
I think the bigger problem with the patent system is the patent trolls. Please someone solve that problem.
The more I look at the small innovators, they are all hungry to improve upon things the big companies are sitting on for 20+ years with a big moat to protect them, and I really get to thinking that in aggregate we are doing more harm than good.
A response I hear is "then no one would invest" and I think that's false. The investment landscape would change from a small number of big investments to a larger number of smaller investments - investing in tooling to help you beat the competition next year, but not necessarily giving you a 10 year investment for your big dream. And I think that's fine - people still want to innovate and the market already rewards innovators. It is not clear to me that government mandated restrictions on innovation are a good idea at all, and none of the common talking points really engage with the facts as I see them.
Take a look at FDM 3D printers. They went from $50k to $25k in the 13 years they were for sale and under patent protection, and then 10 years after patent protection ended they were $250 and sold by a wide variety of companies all over the world.
How many of today's patented goods could be made for 100x cheaper without patents and what is the cumulative effect of manufacturing machinery, medical equipment, washing machines, computers, and more being 100x cheaper? Is our world really better without that?
People don't invest because of first mover disadvantage in game theory.
Anything by William B. Bonvlian
Vitamin D fortification is a fun one, involved the creation of WARF in madison and proceeded Bayh Dole.
The only sector that could plausibly justify patents is biotech... but even there, the vast majority of early R&D is publicly-funded, and thus should negate protection.
A Government-mandated monopoly on ideas may have made sense at some point, but it's antiquated today. Today they serve to stifle innovation, extract rent and act as yet another form of regulatory capture -- e.g. when they become standards.
(Coming from someone who has 20+ patents to their name.)
You can be tripped over by patents you don't even know existed in unrelated fields, owned by people who didnt even work with the patent. So stupid.
So if you could back this up with some links, it'd be appreciated. Otherwise it's just an urban myth.
this one is not "confirmed." It's "plausible."
There are some, but it's nowhere near universal.
Google and Samsung sign global patent cross-license deal
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/google-and-samsung-s...
Google and Tencent agree to cross-license patents
https://www.ft.com/content/0a1b904d-77f9-3b48-885d-0c2693a6d...
SAP and Google Cozy Up With Wide-Reaching Patent Deal: The Potential Implications
https://www.constellationr.com/blog-news/insights/sap-and-go...
Google and Cisco Enter Into Patent Cross-Licensing Agreement
https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2014/m02/go...
Tencent is from 5 years ago, and it gives no details on how many patents are involved.
SAP is from 9 years ago.
Cisco is 9 years ago as well. I was in Legal for that one. It took months of negotiating.
Note there is no cross-licensing deal with Apple, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon.
Google literally bought Motorola for their patent portfolio -- or at least, that's the only "asset" they retained when divesting of the company years later. And I readily admit: Google is a "be less evil" player in this respect. (But not all: See wage fixing collusion verdicts.)
At some point, we have to acknowledge that patents are pursued purely in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction from other litigious players. This manifests as a tax on everyone -- the only people that win are attorneys.
the claim was "they cross-license." As I said if you read, the myth is "plausible" but not "confirmed."
yes, there are some cross-licenses. No, they are not universal. I gave examples of obvious ones that nevertheless don't exist.
On Motorola: I'm afraid I have to claim superior knowledge on that one. At the time, Google was actually hiring patent acquisition people, and in fact, I was interviewing them. They probably fell for the myth that you fell for.
They stopped that pretty quickly, when it became clear that most of Motorola's patents were worthless. I've looked them over myself. They were worth less than nothing: it meant that suits against Motorola now had to be defended. In other words, it was a big mistake that they undid.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that Qualcomm's patents over stuff like Wi-Fi and CDMA were probably more harmful than beneficial, but I'd love to know how one would analyze that.
So you can't implement 5G without their patents. Add that to encouraging complexity (10,000+ pages of spec to do something outwardly similar to WiFi), and they have a really effective moat around an "open" standard.
The entire protocol space is somewhat arbitrary. This is a bit like patenting a strategy in a board game you created, and that everyone is required to play.
What do you mean by open standard? I don't think 5G is patent-free by any means, nor is 802.11/Wi-Fi for that matter!
That's just how most hardware standards are developed, as far as I know. The best thing you can hope for is a consortium maintaining a FRAND patent pool, like for the MPEG family of codecs (and even there you can't be sure that there aren't any patent trolls lurking outside the pool).
Also, we don't need patents for innovation; just look at Open Source for a good example why. Stuff will be invented anyway, patents or no patents.
This is almost a no true scotsman argument.
The patent trolls are a direct result of incentives the patent system creates, getting rid of them necessarily involves seriously reforming the system.
Who is the "smaller player" in this scenario? $150 billion QCOM?