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Comment by tanseydavid | Hacker News Reader

Software patents or all patents? Serious question.

All patents. Rent seeking behavior around loose ideas of all things should be destroyed. The western world has an inherent desire to innovate, you do not need to provide overbearing protectionism to enable motivated individuals to innovate and invent technologies and products to progress society.

Patents don't exist to encourage companies to innovate -- they exist to encourage companies to share information about their innovations.

I think you're exactly right that the western world would continue to innovate without patents. I think what you're missing is that the rent-seeking would continue as normal, simply by using trade secrets, obfuscation, services-models, etc.

But that's fine. I would prefer having the specs - that helps a lot in writing high quality drivers. That said, open source relied a lot on reverse-engineering in the past - not to mention that reverse-engineering is much easier these days. But not being able to e.g. merge a driver into the Linux Kernel because of a software patent is an actual, real blocker. Same thing with patent-encumbered codecs.

Patents was supposed to be a tool to enable competition, but does the reverse now - and it is holding as back as society. We should move away from it. Especially and specifically when it comes to vague, loose ideas just like the GP post says here.

But companies can already do that. So presumably patents are more effective at preventing competition?

Of course, the existence of patents does not force everyone to use patents. But without them, those who would have used a patent would be forced to resort to secrets to protect their ideas.

Serious question: How does this worldview survive a collision with a stereotypical cancer-cure argument? Like, a pharmacological company needs to invest billions into R&D to invent a drug curing cancer. Without any kind of patent mechanism they will never be able to justify this kind of investment, cause the minute the release their drug, others can reverse engineer it and start selling generics of it for fraction of the cost because they never had to pay upfront R&D.

And the minute they don't release their drug, others will use AI to make their own version, even better.

Who's going to pay for collecting all the actual medical data, AI Jesus? Maybe the universities? Great, we agree R&D is best handled by public institutions funded by the taxpayer. But something tells me you wouldn't agree with me...

I swear most AI booster arguments can work about as well if we replace AI with the Holy Spirit.

(Apologies if this was sarcasm, I genuinely can't tell these days...)

Patents had good intentions, but they are long gone. Nowadays all patents are more or less rent-seeking tools. Software patents are just especially troublesome, I think FSF had some articles on it.

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