Comment by buellerbueller
10 hours ago
Maybe we should get rid of patent protection. We already have enough welfare for megacorps, and this is just another form of it.
10 hours ago
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.
> This is no longer the era of Thomas Edison and the individual inventor.
I get your point, but Edison is the worst possible example to use here.
You're describing the system as it exists today, where the powerful have been allowed to run rampant, suppressing competition, for decades. Not to mention the loss of trust in the patent system as a whole, due to things like software patents being transparently corruptions of the system.
If it were possible for an individual to profit from their patent today as they would have in the 1970s, it's much more likely that people would seek patents.
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.