Comment by selimnairb
7 months ago
The Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain. Same for drug patents.
7 months ago
The Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain. Same for drug patents.
Or yea know get rid of patents and how broken they are, especially while our enemies are ignoring them anyway.
> Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain
This means seizing the ruling class gets to seize anyone's inventions. Nobody writing these rules intends that. But while we can forgive the first dozen attempts out of naivety and, later, stupidity, I'm not sure how we similarly excuse modern performances.
Patent expiration into the public domain is already “the ruling class seizing inventions” in the same sense (in the sense that it isn’t — in both cases, the goal is to make nobody profit from the patent any longer; not to transfer the profits to the government.)
Patents only exist as a concept, as a way to construct an equitable compensation for invention, to incentivize invention, that allows the market to determine what the total compensation over the legal lifetime of the patent should be, by licensing it or refusing to at given prices.
Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.
Theoretically I agree completely. However in practice, analytically figuring out a dollar amount that isn't over or under paying seems nearly impossible. I fear that the gov would be buying out a lot of useless patents. That would also create an even bigger incentive to get BS patents through, because you don't even have to prove the value in the market, you just gotta convince a bureaucrat that it could be beneficial to humanity.
2 replies →
> Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.
Exactly. Ideally we wouldn't have patents, but would have a "Star Trek" luxury space communism economy. Until then, if an invention proves to be highly beneficial to society after a few years, I would entirely support governments buying out patents early. In the end, information is a public good (non-rival, non-excludable), so let's start treating it that way.
The ruling class of the United States, by and large, isn't a part of government (elected or civil service) and seeks a government that is smaller, weaker, and more dysfunctional rather than the reverse.