Comment by vessenes
11 hours ago
When you file a patent the patent attorneys tell you how critical it is to do so.
When someone infringes a patent, especially if you’re not commercializing your patent, the patent attorneys tell you, “wow, that looks really tough.”
It’s a big company game at this point, in general, or you’d need something that drives an immense amount of value before the patenting seems worth it, as far as I can tell.
OK sooo... is there a way to get investors to cover the legal costs?
Or just outright sell the patents to a competing big company and let them duke it out. Now at least you end up with some money.
Maybe we should get rid of patent protection. We already have enough welfare for megacorps, and this is just another form of it.
This is the solution, they do not push for innovation anymore (if ever).
(ignoring the snark but valid point)
To the contrary, innovation is proceeding full speed, despite patents. The only thing patents are doing is 1. enriching the lawyers on creation, 2. restraining law abiding innovators in country (meaning all other countries will proceed to ignore it anyway), 3. give the advantage to all other countries, and 4. enrich the lawyers again if they can find one of the in-country infringements to pursue (again ignoring all the others).
None of these outcomes is beneficial. The system is broken and antiquated. Ditch it.
This is exactly the wrong way to be moving. We should be properly enforcing our laws on megacorps, not just shrugging and throwing them out entirely because it's just toooooo haaaaard to actually stop these companies from breaking them.
Without patent protection, any individual or small business that comes up with something new and (currently) patentable would have no recourse whatsoever. The megacorps could just start producing whatever it is as soon as they find out about it, and outcompete the actual creator with massive economies of scale and the ability to take a loss effectively forever on any given product.
>This is exactly the wrong way to be moving.
Sure, if you live with an 1800s era mentality about who invents things. This is no longer the era of Thomas Edison and the individual inventor. If our laws don't meaningfully reflect the way our lives are lived now, they won't be useful frameworks. I think your proposal may be about 2 centuries behind the times.
>Without patent protection, any individual or small business that comes up with something new and (currently) patentable would have no recourse whatsoever. The megacorps could just start producing whatever it is as soon as they find out about it, and outcompete the actual creator with massive economies of scale and the ability to take a loss effectively forever on any given product.
It seems like they do this anyway, and patent protections mean high prices for consumers on patent-protected products. Given that in the mid-2020s, the corporation:individual ratio patents is ~18.5:1 (up from 4:1 in the 1970s), I see the benefit gradient being more pro-consumer by getting rid of them.
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Honestly, this would have pretty positive effects on costs of medicine, replacement parts for machinery, etc. It definitely hampers the regulatory capture moat that these companies build.