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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

This speaks to the patent system being so far perverted from its original purpose that I feel it's time to seriously begin considering if we want to support it in any form. Are patents in 2015 being used more for "promoting the useful arts"[1] or more as a weapon for large enterprises to use against their large and small competition?

This same broken-ness applies to another system of legal monopolies too: copyrights. Are those used more to "promote the useful arts" in 2015, or are they used more by rightsholders to stamp out that which they don't like?

I wonder what our economic, artistic, and technological landscape would look like if we decided, as a society, that these legal monopolies are causing more harm than good, and that they should be severely curtailed, if not outright abolished? I wonder if it would really be as bad as the people who have a financial interest in these things say it would be?

[1]: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=00...

(interestingly, the copyright laws use the same "useful arts" wording almost verbatim)

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The first question I would ask is one about duration. Does 20 years promote the useful arts more than 10? 30? 15? 4?

Same for copyright. We currently have 95 years after the creators death. Would 10 years fill the same role, and if not, how much worse would it be. 1% worse? 5%? 10%?

In one of Eben Moglens talk (professor in legal history), he spoke how the fundamental system of government changed in the 20th century. The administrative Procedure Act of 1946 made everything subject to the rule of cost/benefit analysis, asking whether proposed government actions are more helpful than they are harmful and making a systematic and careful evaluation of the relationship between benefits and cost before deciding to intervene in the economy. The change was profound, and just about the only thing that didn’t get changed to conform with it was patent law and copyright.

Happen to have any more info for finding this talk from Moglen?

https://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2009/Moglen_Cardozo/

Despite its title, Bilski is only talked about in the last 1/5 of the talk. The 4/5 before that, he goes through a historical perspective of the patent system.

The difference between copyright and patents is that as a property right, copyright has a clear boundary: you know whether you copied someone else's stuff [1]. You can infringe a patent without knowing of its existence, and even if you do know and actively try to work around it, the only reliable way to determine if you are successful is in an expensive lawsuit.

Imagine if you wanted to put an addition on your house and needed to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit that could stretch over a decade before you could determine whether it would cross your neighbor's property line.

[1] There's still some gray area around fair use, but the contrast with patents is night and day.

> copyright has a clear boundary: you know whether you copied someone else's stuff

You can violate a copyrighted song by writing a song with a similar melody or motif. In the U.S., the accuser needs to prove that you previously heard the original song, but not that you were aware of the similarity or purposefully copied the musical idea.

> the accuser needs to prove that you previously heard

Yes, indeed there are corner cases; and ugly outcomes. At the limit anyone can sue anyone for anything. But by broad strokes, both in theory and in practise the situation around copyright is far more clear, and appears to produce less collateral damage.

The real estate situation happens sometimes, in countries without proper cadastral mapping and central registries. It's why title insurance exists.

> interestingly, the copyright laws use the same "useful arts" wording almost verbatim

That's because "useful arts" comes from Art 1 s. 8. cl.8 of the Constitution, which authorizes both patent and copyright laws:

> [Congress shall have the power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Medical drug patents are arguably the best use case for patents and there doing exactly what they are intended. Remember the advantage of patents is what happens when they expire and we have a huge number 'generic' drug options cheaply available.

However, if you look at most fields (ex: engine design) they benifit from the same thing. In the end the real issue is new fields spend their first ~50 years in patent hell where the most obvious things are easily patented and you can't default to a 20 year old 'safe' design without major compromize.

> Medical drug patents are arguably the best use case for patents and there doing exactly what they are intended. Remember the advantage of patents is what happens when they expire and we have a huge number 'generic' drug options cheaply available.

What happens all too often when drug patents expire is that no one manufactures the drug at all, because the people with the capacity to do so get better returns manufacturing things that are still under patent (even if that's a newer but less effective treatment for the same condition, or even if it leaves no effective treatment for a condition available.)

That makes bo sense. Why woul rhey abandon a working drug if no one else is interested in manufacturing a knock-off?

The way it works is approximately this:

1. Your patent on drug A expires

2. You have an active patent monopoly on drug B which is functionally similar

3. You use your giant network of marketing staff to convince medical professionals to use B instead of A

4. The market for A collapses due to lack of demand.

The generics manufacturers cannot afford to spend nearly as much bribing doctors, so you don't get an equivalent demand push for generics unless one of the competing large pharma groups decide that the generic is profitable enough to counter the targeted campaign with a targeted campaign of their own. But why would they, when they can milk their own patent monopoly cashcows a bit more using the same marketing spend.

Every insurance policy I've ever had has stipulated that if a generic is available, the insurance will not pay 100% for the brand name drug. Wouldn't that be enough to keep generics in business?

This only applies if the active ingredient is the same molecule in the generic and the brand-name drug. Because drug B is has a patent monopoly scaring people off making generics, this is never the case.

In 2012, 84% of dispensed drugs in the United States were generics.[1]

Yes, the original manufacturer often spends money to develop follow on versions that can qualify for new patents, but this isn't always an effective strategy. When it is, it's usually because the follow on version has substantial benefits for patients (e.g., monthly infusions at the doctor's office instead of weekly). If those benefits aren't there, insurers can and will decline to cover the new form of the drug and insist on the generic.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/business/use-of-generics-p...

How dysfunctional are these doctors? I was in urgent care last week for a foot injury, and right on the wall in the exam room were some awareness posters about Ebola and antibiotics, yet every time a discussion of some awareness issue comes up, people talk about how doctors aren't even on top of things (maybe I'm stretching a bit to call generics vs marketed an awareness issue, but I don't think so).

(My foot is fine, I got a cold, yay hospitals)

Programmer's inboxes are filled with emails from recruiters.

Doctor's inboxes are filled with emails from drug company reps offering to take them out to play golf and fancy dinners and give them boxes of free samples of the drugs made by the companies they rep. Those companies don't sell the low cost generics!

(source: a relative of mine is a drug company rep!)

That's what I meant by dysfunctional. Dinner with some boring company rep hardly sounds like something a person needs to do weekly.

Do you think they hire boring people to be reps? If you were in charge of hiring the most effective people for this job, who would you hire?

Prostitutes and stand-up comedians. I'd also make an exclusive club at the airports for doctors who sell my drugs.

My replacement.

I'd want to hire people who are knowledgeable about pharmaceuticals and are able to accurately and intelligently answer questions about research studies and side effects. But an effective person would probably hire hot chicks and chatty dudes and give them big expense accounts.

For the record, my relative is very good looking and fun to hang out with.

Doctors are a heterogeneous mix just like people in any profession. There are good guys and bad guys... but nobody thinks that they are the bad guy. ;)

Because if they invest enough in marketing and regulatory compliance to keep it profitable, a generics manufacturer will immediately spin up and drink that milkshake.

If they abandon it, and no generic is produced, patients are forced to the patented alternatives.

The drug companies don't want to compete with their own products if they can avoid doing so.

I see discussion in this thread about what makes sense or seems reasonable, but no empirical observations. Two examples that come to my mind would be acetaminophen and coral snake antivenin. The former is widely available as a generic, the latter is extremely scarce in the U.S. in part because its manufacturer fears competition. Maybe someone can add more examples or help explain the different outcomes for these two?

> Maybe someone can add more examples or help explain the different outcomes for these two?

The different outcomes are largely explained thus:

Drugs with a very large demand and especially ones which are OTC and around which consumer brands can be developed (where brand identity allows a premium to be charged, substituting in some degree for the monopoly rents patents allow) are likely to continue to be manufactured after patents expire. Prescription drugs with a limited demand even if they are the best (or only) effective treatment for a particular condition are less likely to continue to be produced once patent protection expires..

Aren't there problems when something potentially useful wouldn't be patentable (say, it's already known elsewhere) so there's no major profit in going thru the FDA approval process?

I'd think it would be better to tie the temporary exclusivity to who put it thru the approval process directly (and relax the restrictions a bit, but that's a separate issue...).

Pfizer has sent a letter out to people working in the NHS warning that they face legal consequences for prescribing an available generic version of pregabalin for pain relief, as although the initial patent for the drug has expired, there is a second patent on using the drug for pain.

So despite the fact that the generic is legally available within the NHS, Pfizer seems willing to chase doctors who prescribe it for pain relief.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/24/pfizer-threatens-pharmacist...

(edited to make sense, thanks to jameshart)

I try not to be picky about simple spelling and grammar issues online, but this is an important one: you mean prescribe, not proscribe. The meanings are almost opposite, so it matters more than most.

To prescribe is to define a desirable course of action. To proscribe is to define an undesirable course of action. Doctors prescribe medicines; laws proscribe crimes.

Oops, thanks for picking that up. I usually try and proofread my posts, but I missed that.

This is a very complicated issue. I don't know laws/regulatory system in the UK, but in the States the FDA has to approve a medication for a specific indication. So if later people discover X drug is great for unapproved Y condition, then doctors have to prescribe it 'off-label.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-label_use

I don't know to what extent manufacturers can limit prescribing their branded drugs for off-label use. I feel like if I wrote a Rx for any drug for any indication, it would get filled without hassle... although if it was really outlandish, the Pharmacist would probably give me a call.

Source: I'm a doctor.

This isn't off-label use though. This is where the drug has been specifically approved for that use.

Pfizer here are not trying to limit prescribing their branded drugs for off-label use, they are trying to restrict the available uses of products that are legally supplied to the NHS by other companies.

I don't think the pharmacy knows your diagnosis when you fill a prescription. It isn't written on the prescription. You can in fact run into problems with the insurance company if the treatment is extremely expensive.

> Medical drug patents are arguably the best use case for patents and there doing exactly what they are intended.

Sort of. There's still a lot of rent-seeking. Consider this (egregiously) common pattern:

1. Release new wonder drug.

2. Rake in money until patent expires.

3. Make minor tweak to wonder drug, just enough that you can get a new patent.

4. Don't worry that this new version isn't as effective as the original. Just send armies of drug reps to badger doctors into prescribing it anyway. They'll go along with it; they don't have the time to read the medical literature and figure out for themselves that the old version with the expired patent is still a better drug.

5. GOTO 2

Point 4 is hard to believe, and without it you're describing a well functioning system that promotes investment in new technology.

Point 4 is known as "Evergreening" and it surely happens. An example I can think of off the top of my head is Lexapro.

Pfizer tried to do this in Canada with Viagra, and the Canadian Supreme Court invalidated their patent in return.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/pfizer-caught-gam...

Even assuming point 4 does not hold up, the GP is describing a system that promotes arbitrarily long development cycles. i.e. if it takes 5 years to develop the next generation of a drug, but the patent expires after 20 years, you are basically rewarding the whole industry to do no more than 25-30% of technically feasible R&D.

#4 is because of a defective health-care system. No amount of patent reform can fix that.

Another version of steps 3 and 4 is:

3. Discover that the same drug works for a different disease and patent the new application of the old drug.

4. Since the drug is still patented even after the original patent has expired, anyone making the drug still has to pay up even if they are selling it for the original, out of patent, use.

That's not true at all.

If you patent for disease A, then the patent expires, even if you patent for disease B, it doesn't stop anyone from making a generic version of your drug to treat disease A. Doctors will also prescribe that generic for disease B (there is nothing to stop them).

You are right. It seems the story I heard was an exaggeration of the bullying tactics a team of lawyers can perform.

That's not the only way to fund drug development. For example, there was a bill in Congress a couple years ago to tax health insurance companies for development of patent-free drugs, using an X-Prize style system so it wouldn't be the government picking which research to fund.

The insurance companies get to spend less paying for treatment, and using the tax system gets around the public goods problem which prevents insurers from doing this voluntarily.

Medical research should really, really not be publicly funded. Say goodbye to anything remotely controversial. From life extension, to genetic engineering, to abortion and birth control, etc.

I think this is a great point. Not sure why it's getting so many downvotes. Though I might quibble that medical research should not be exclusively government funded, or that it should not depend on government money. I'm OK with the government steering some extra money to the projects that need it (sometimes good social policy and private economic incentives don't align the way you'd like), but I agree a system where research is totally dependent on government money could be very bad.

The bill didn't outlaw pharmaceutical patents, it just provided an alternate funding mechanism that would produce drugs without patents. Any area the government wasn't funding would be the same as it is now.

We should at least publicly-fund antibiotics research, given that the current system is almost completely failing on that front.

The NIH and its $30 billion a year in funding seem to be doing a fairly decent job.

http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm

Funding report by disease/research area:

http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx

Note: Over a billion dollars a year is spent on stem cell research.

Who picks the research 'prizes'? Nominating prizes could be politicized, leading to government picking which research to fund.

The insurance companies get to spend less paying for treatment, and using the tax system gets around the public goods problem which prevents insurers from doing this voluntarily.

That makes no sense. If you put a limit on potential returns by instituting a fixed "X-prize", why would companies continue to invest in R&D? Wouldn't they just pick the cheapest to develop drugs in order to maximize their return?

Could we just move medical drugs to a different system? The majority of costs there isn't even inventing it, it's getting it tested and approved. It makes no sense for wildly different industries to use the same patent system.

I've never really considered a sort of distributed patent/copyright system before, one based on industry/products. You would likely run into issues about defining what is or isn't a new industry, but in general, I like the idea.

> In the end the real issue is new fields spend their first ~50 years in patent hell where the most obvious things are easily patented

I think this is the most important part of your comment. How well patents work for drugs is a secondary question.

I would put it this way: the PTO has no good way of distinguishing mere novelty from nonobviousness. In a mature field, the two probably correlate pretty well: everything obvious will have been thought of. But in a young field, they don't. Specifically, when a new technology opens up new applications, those applications are often novel enough to be considered patentable, even when they are obvious to anyone who has the need that the application addresses.

When new technologies are extremely general, like personal computers and the Internet, this problem is at its worst: there are very large numbers of such new applications. And so we get lots of patent applications of the form "do X on a computer" or "do X over the Internet", and because those ideas are novel, as far as the PTO can tell, it assumes they are nonobvious.

The European patent court, as I understand, tries to address this problem by requiring that a patented invention demonstrate a "novel technical effect". I think this is a good idea: it attempts to distinguish inventions that are truly new technology from those that are simply novel applications of technology, the implication being that the latter are more likely to be obvious, even though novel. In fact, I think this is a much better approach than the one the US Supreme Court took in the recent Alice decision [0], in which they rejected a patent for being about an "abstract idea". Both approaches require the PTO to make a judgment, but the question of whether an invention is an "abstract idea" seems to me much harder to pin down (what's a non-abstract idea?) than that of whether it contributes to technology or merely uses technology. (Though I wouldn't say the latter question is always going to be trivial.)

Another thing I would like to see is heavier and more consistent reliance on what are called the "Graham factors" [1], particularly those that show objective evidence of nonobviousness: commercial success; long-felt but unsolved needs; and failure of others to solve the same problem. I would go so far as to say that the presumption, particularly in a young field, should be that an invention, notwithstanding its novelty, should be considered to be obvious unless the applicant can demonstrate some objective evidence that it isn't.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Interna... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...

The thing about patents is that they are public. They encourage sharing inventions in exchange for a period of protection for the inventor. It is generally fair, I think, for an inventor to be able to see a return on his/her investment of R&D effort and expense. Without such a system, inventors would keep their work secret under "Trade Secret" protection or just not bother at all. I think abolishing the patent system would slow technological progress.

The problem with patents is that they seem to be awarded for many "inventions" that do not seem to really be novel. Patent inspectors have not kept up well with the rapid pace of innovation that software allows. Fix that problem, and I think a lot of general unhappiness with the system would go away.

Copyright? I'm not aware of any general problem with that. It's pretty simple, the original author has a period of protection for their work. What's wrong with that?

> Copyright? I'm not aware of any general problem with that.

If you do a Google search for "problems with copyright" you'll find many articles on the topic, including http://gizmodo.com/5989166/everything-wrong-with-digital-cop... and http://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/ulr/article/viewFile/7/11 and https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday .

To start, copyright terms are getting longer and longer, while "economists who have modeled the ideal copyright term have uniformly suggested that it should be far shorter than it is right now. Some have suggested that it should be as short as 15 years."

I think that's why GP said "general problem." GP was responding to the suggestion that we roll back all or almost all copyright law, not just, e.g., shortening the term to 15 years.

I have a hard time understanding what "general problem" meant. It could mean "the existence of copyright", but the text is structured in contrast with patents, and ams6110 seems to say that the existence of patent protection is not the fundamental flaw but rather the threshold criteria for notability. So "general problem" doesn't seem to mean the bare existence of those monopolies but something more specific.

I didn't ask for qualifications because the implication is that "a period of protection" it simple. I focused mostly on that. The US Constitution says that copyright is for a limited time. Some people think that the current time is too short and want it to be "forever less one day". This is not allowed, so the current method is to keep extending copyrights, giving an effective infinite copyright period in the US.

A common view is that Disney wants to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain. This is why the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is sometimes pejoratively called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

So does "a period of protection" mean that the protection can be extended retrospectively? If so, is it okay for extensions for be applied indefinitely, to get an effectively infinite period of protection?

I agree with Karunamon in that even this 'simple' aspect is "causing more harm than good, and that they should be severely curtailed, if not outright abolished." (I'm for the 'severely curtailed' part.) Resolving that in the way that I think it should be is definitely not simple.

> Copyright? I'm not aware of any general problem with that.

https://www.eff.org/pages/unintended-consequences-fifteen-ye...

open source?

I am from Brazil, here piracy is widespread, also I make games, a industry that loves copyright.

First, it must be understood that the "official" original explanation of copyright was to prevent people not authorized by the author to sell the author stuff, ONLY that, it was NOT intended to prevent the general public from getting free stuff. (the actual explanation was that the first copyright laws were made to allow censorship, but I don't have enough information to explain that now).

Today what I see is lots of people on the "First world" frankly believe they are entitled to earn money from pure intellectual work and that poor people should stay uneducated/ignorant/cultureless if they can't pay.

I personally had lots and lots of pirated games, books, and media in general, because then there was no other choice, I was one of the first "gamers" in Brazil, I was also poor, and stuff was mostly not available here, even to get a pirated copy of Doom (the first one) was hard, very hard (my dad had to make some engineering work for Kia Motors, and asked as part of the payment a copy of Doom, after he learned that the factory manager had a copy).

I am very sure, that if I went with the route of obeying copyright laws, I would be a very, very different person today, probably I would be a cashier, and would contribute to society much less than now, and the same applies to almost all programmers from the third world.

Or you frankly believe a random indian/pakistani/brazillian/peruvian that is a WinAPI programming master had a legal copy of windows and all the tools when he was first learning as a kid?

Same here in Eastern Europe - every game pirated, every software product - pirated.

20 years later - huge steam library, working in software and paying a lot of taxes, etc etc.

Great point and wonderful way to show how copyrights harms everyone.

It's the epitome of selfishness to create something and not allow others to look at it and copy it when there is no loss to the creator. The expectation of profit from just having others listen to a song or use a decide whose blueprint you created is a problem of entitlement in our current culture.

It's an interesting argument that has some merit in my view, that violating copyright on games was just the "carrot" you needed to learn a useful skill, the manipulation of computers.

And yet, doesn't this mean that you owe your skill to defeating copyright schemes, and that if they didn't exist for you to defeat, you wouldn't have the skill you have today? :)

because then there was no other choice

I spent a long time pirating games, but seriously, 'no other choice' is nonsense. You could just 'not play the game'. I don't think that software piracy is the great evil that it's made out to be, but neither do I think it's harmless and that there's justice in people just taking entertainment because they don't have enough money at the moment. It's not like video games are a staple required to sustain life.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't care that you pirated software, but I think it smells bad that you paint it as some sort of social justice issue or class war.

frankly believe they are entitled to earn money from pure intellectual work

Work is work and consumes effort and time, whether it's shifting bricks or squashing bugs.

By the way, I was in my post talking about people with your exact argument.

The choices you are giving me are: pirate, or be ignorant and cultureless.

You thinking the second is a good choice, is frankly stupid, games are not just entertainment, they are part of popular culture, they showcase interesting technologies, and may even have actual uses (example: simulators that teach real skills).

And I was not talking only about games, but all sorts of media, or you think all the coding books that curious people (including teenagers) here have are legal?

> Without such a system, inventors would keep their work secret under "Trade Secret" protection or just not bother at all. I think abolishing the patent system would slow technological progress.

Patents are not a black and white problem (either with or without).

What I think is the really core problem is that the length of patents must be inversely proportional to the innovation pace of the field they apply - which is the opposite of the current legislation.

Patents may be OK "in general", but it's not OK to have a 20 years exclusive in a field where such amount of time represents many generations of products, otherwise it simply is a legalized racket.

> Copyright? I'm not aware of any general problem with that. It's pretty simple, the original author has a period of protection for their work. What's wrong with that?

The Mickey Mouse Protection Act is a huge problem. In a nutshell, every time a large company's copyrights are about to expire, they pay Congress to extend them for another period of time.

This is the original and first argument for patents and copyright. The point is that it is very naive.

Patents don't actually work that way. No engineer looks at a patent in order to make something. Have you ever read a patent? A few that cover useful technologies? They do not provide information useful for implementing anything useful, they only use strange language to cover a couple related ideas as generally as possible so they can apply to as many independent creations as possible, to maximize their offensive, defensive, and monetary value.

Copyright has been extended to last way way too long and the idea of it is often abused to threaten people who are actually abiding by the law with expensive and hugely inconvenient court cases. Throwing out copyright altogether would probably have strange effects and not be a good idea.

Throwing out the patent system would be quite fine. Patents are literally only used to stop things from being made, never to enable something to be made.

>Throwing out the patent system would be quite fine. Patents are literally only used to stop things from being made, never to enable something to be made.

I don't think you're considering the bigger picture here.

For example: it costs billions of USD to create a normal prescription drug. That's an insanely serious investment. How likely do you think that investors will be willing to help fund drug research when a month after your new wonder drug hits shelves there are generics sitting right along side it? Generics which cost considerably less because they don't have to recoup all that R&D. Same thing applies to any other product with a sizable R&D budget.

Now, I'm definitely not saying the current patent system is without problems, but saying that patents never enable development is a tad short-sighted in my opinion.

Well you're right, drug companies bankrolling clinical trials is the biggest (and only) real argument for keeping patents.

On the other hand, drug companies mostly develop lifestyle drugs these days. Drugs that cure people are less subjective and not profitable enough. I'd bet most of the real medical research still comes from academics sponsored by government, *-for-the-cure fundraising organizations, etc.

>Copyright? I'm not aware of any general problem with that. It's pretty simple, the original author has a period of protection for their work. What's wrong with that?

Not just their work, but derivative works, and they get control over it essentially indefinitely. It used to be that works went into the public domain after 15 years. Thus anyone can print copies of A Christmas Carol, but not anything from the 20th century. Most books from the 20th century have disappeared entirely. E.g. see this graphic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi...

There is really no economic advantage of copyright after 5-10 years, but a huge cost on society.

> There is really no economic advantage of copyright after 5-10 years

I agree that Copyright lasts much too long, but there is a significant economic advantage to the Copyright holder for more than 5-10 years. Disney does not keep lobbying for longer copyright because they are stupid. Plenty of 10 year old media is still purchased.

I meant there was no benefit to society. Obviously there is a benefit to (some incredibly small percent of extremely successful) copyright holders (at the expense of everyone else.) Even Disney movies still would have been made if they only got the revenue of the first five years. The vast majority of movie's profits are made at the box office and then a few years afterwards.

> I agree that Copyright lasts much too long, but there is a significant economic advantage to the Copyright holder for more than 5-10 years. Disney does not keep lobbying for longer copyright because they are stupid.

ISTR seeing that for the vast majority of works, most of the income ever earned for the copyright holder is earned within the first 5-7 years after creation.

Of course, some copyright holders have some works that are valuable longer, and use the proceeds from them to produce enough that they'll hit more of those jackpots (or can outright buy others.) But its not clear that supporting the ability to create those jackpots supports economic gains for society as a whole (rather than providing a gain for a minority of copyright holders at the expense of everyone else) or that it serves the constitutional purpose of copyright (which isn't to maximize rewards to creators, but to provide some reward to creators in order to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

Most revenue means more than 50% of revenue, not all significant revue. If a work get 10% or 20% of its total revenue in its second decade than there is a significant increase in the incentive to create and publish if the creator owns that work for its second decade.

Again, I agree that Copyright lasts much too long. I was responding to the statement "no economic advantage of copyright after 5-10 years" (which it seems I misunderstood anyway, Houshalter replied that they were referring to no net economic benefit to society).

Or we could simply cut all of the nonsense verbiage out and be more honest about the purpose of the current patent system -- the government offering usage of the courts to protect companies that agree to keep their IP within the confines of the country.

Notice how I'm not making any spurious claims about "useful arts" or whatever.

It's strange this modern affinity for "honesty", as if admitting being a jerk somehow makes you less of a jerk.

If something has been perverted from it's stated goal, nothing is gained from perverting the goal statement. In fact, I'd argue that much would be lost, as you'd get people saying (correctly) "the system works as intended".

Losing a good statement of purpose is always a great loss. It's much harder to make people aware of an error of omission than an error of inconsistency. When we find a good statement of purpose, we should cherish it, defend it, and fight until our systems embody it!

It has nothing to do with keeping it in the country either; plenty of non-US countries have US patents.

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