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Comment by M8R-fhlcjm | Hacker News Reader

Patents provide the incentive to invest in R&D by providing a form of guarantee on their investments.

Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce many of the innovative companies.

> Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce many of the innovative companies.

The article suggests that the available evidence does not support this conclusion. It seems that in historical technology fairs, countries with a weak or no patent system in place performed as well as other countries, both in terms of numbers of inventions they presented, and awards they received.

The article also describes some instances where patents clearly inhibited innovation - for example in the US in 1916, aircraft production halted due to patent disputes between Wright and Curtiss.

That's assuming the article is right, but a look around the world shows the opposite - generally speaking the stronger the patent rights, the stronger the innovation. Weak IP African countries vs strong IP in American, European, Japan, Korea.

What came first, though, strong IP or innovation? I could see strong IP laws growing out of existing innovation.

Oh come on, you can't seriously be using Africa as an example here. Most African countries lack basic infrastructure and many haven't had a peaceful decade in the last 50 years. IP is a type of law, so countries with weak rule of law probably have weak IP. But I think there is a solid case to be made that the other rule of law issues swamp IP in terms of suppressing innovation.

not so long ago (few hundred years) the new world (America) was behind African infrastructure and yet pulled itself up.

One common sense argument is that as industry developed and competition increased, the dominant players were able to perform regulatory capture to ensure that they could rule the market through easily-gamed IP laws.

Except advancement of western civilization was much more due to technological innovations than 'gaming IP laws'.

Call me crazy, but I don't think a lack of strict patent law is the only thing holding African countries back.

IP laws not only thing holding them back. But it ain't helping either. No incentive to spend resources (be they $money, or time inventing).

Exactly, this correlation definitely proves that strong IP rights are the reason for the innovation. It's rock solid, just like this chart[1] that reveals the true cause of global warming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp(en).svg

About as hard to prove direct correlation as for you to prove the opposite. However, use common sense. The data is overwhelmingly in my favor.

Where's the evidence to that? In fact the evidence shows the contrary. Also, US does not have the strongest patent laws.

1) Where is the evidence of the opposite? The data is overwhelmingly. 2) U.S. is certainly in the top tier of strongest patent laws.

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