Libertarians: patents, good or bad?

Great Debates
21

Why? How would this be helpful? If I’m an inventor/developer of a new drug or some other new process that will revolutionize my field, why should I invest the time and effort it takes to produce something if my expectation is to only get back my ‘original research costs’? From your post its obvious that ‘make a profit’ is a dirty phrase, but if I’m NOT going to make a profit, why should I bother?

In addition, what happens when the sue happy public gets involved? I’m sure it doesn’t bother YOU if, after limiting patents to a few years so that a person or corporation recovers their original research costs is then bankrupted by lawsuits for unexpected (or simply made up) problems (they probably deserve to go bankrupt, right? Damn capitalists pig dogs…), but why should I (or even a corporation) risk my time, effort and money on such a chancy venture if I’m only going to recover my research costs before what I created becomes available to everyone to use as they see fit? Because I should be working for the public good or something? Laudable I’m sure…but do you REALLY expect something like that to work? Its been tried, you know?

I’m all for taking another look at patent durations, and if they are too lengthy or other wise distort the market in some way having the government correct the problem (I admit I’m a bit leary of the governments ABILITY to correct anything related to the market though…they don’t exactly have a great track record). But first and foremost IMO should be protecting those people who are the engine of creation in our society. Without them we are back in the caves hoping lightning strikes so we can cook our supper…which we had to hit on the head with a rock because no smart guy would invent a pointy stick thing. Either that or back in the days where anything useful was controlled tightly by a guild or even an individual or family…and if the wrong person died at the wrong time their discoveries or knowledge died with them. How many times in our past has this happened because no mechanism existed to protect individuals rights to their own discoveries? How many times in our past has the person who invented a revolutionary process been screwed out of everything and died a pauper? Quick answer is…lots.

-XT

22

Sorry I meant 200% of research costs. Big error on my part. Writing while tired causes that…

BTW, saying you are leery of the government correction markets means you should be somewhat leery of the government imposing patents, too. Both are political “interventions” in economics.

23

You are correct, sitting on it is the issue. But even if the design is public keeping from sharing information is one thing patents encourage…knowing only one way of doing a thing is useful, but knowing all the research behind it would be better. Patent systems encourage people hiding this info, as well as using patents to keep others from using what you’ve found out.

24

Damn capitalists pig dogs? Dude, chill. :dubious:

25

Recall that many drugs were invented just under that system. A lot of medical research in this country was/is sponsored by universities, nonprofits and the government. Many of the nonprofits have been moving to keep the profits and people can get paid handsomely at nonprofits, but inventions have been made by people just doing their job, not seeking to make what could reasonably viewed as exhorbitant profits.

26

Oh well…I thought it was funny.

Do you have some examples? What percentage of new medical research is done by non-profit organizations or the government. How often are such ventures brought fully to the market place? What drugs are researched, developed, tested and brought to the market place in this manner as opposed to by profit companies?

Also, I thought I read somewhere that fewer and fewer new drugs are researched and developed in the US in recent years (I assume across the board by both profit and non-profit companies)…which is kind of interesting if true (it might not be…I’m unsure where I read that now) as it shows that perhaps ‘exhobitant profits’ don’t exactly characterize the industry. If they did you’d expect to see a large upsurge in companies developing and marketing new drugs…greed being what it is.

-XT

27

I don’t know how you come to this conclusion at all. Patents encourage just the opposite behavior. In case you did not know, all of the patents (including technical drawings and information) are available online for free. You can go and search on all kinds of terms and find out what people patented to solve what sorts of problems.

I remember reading about a piece of software which purported to provide engineering inspiration. It would allow engineers to search patent databases looking for solutions to similar problems they might be facing. What was interesting about it was that it made associations which were uncomon. Finding solutions made in radio development, for instance, that might be applied to toothpaste.

You seem to be thinking of trade secrets. These exist specifically because patents are not strong enough for some things. If you have a process or special ingredient which is not patentable or which you think might be challenges as a patent (most patent challenges are lost by the patent holder) then your only choice is to keep them a secret.

Taking a patent on the invention is exactly the opposit behavior. You first have to submit technical information sufficient to distinguish your invention from others. Usually this means enough information which would allow others to copy your invention.

Can you please explain the logic you go through to suggest that patents lead to secrecy?

28

Why do you think inventors would be any more likely to share their research if they couldn’t patent their inventions?

29

I know you persist in this view, I also know that this is somewhat a hijack of this thread. I won’t engage in a drawn out debate on the subject here. Suffice it to say that I disagree with you very much. I tend to see the idea that an individuals ideas do not belong to them as inherently dangerous. I will simply include a few cites. Feel free to take the last word on this bit if you like or start a new thread if you really want to rehash these ideas again.

Good overview of the history of IP focusing on Australia but including several links to books and studies.

Including a link to this PDF (broken in that page but faithfully found) entitled “The Rise of Intellectual Property 700 B.C. to 2000 A.D. an idea in the balance”

It summarizes the issue this way: " *The concept of intellectual property the idea that an idea can be ownedis a child of the European Enlightenment. It was only when people began to believe that knowledge came from the human mind working upon the sensesrather than through divine revelation, assisted by the study of ancient textsthat it became possible to imagine humans as creators, and hence owners, of new ideas rather than as mere transmitters of eternal verities.
Besides being distinctively modern, intellectual property is a dense concept, woven together from at least three complex strands of jurisprudencecopyright,
patent, and trademarkeach with its own sources in premodern custom and law, and each with its own trajectory into our own era. Still, copyright, and the complementary concepts of authors rights and literary property in continental lawthe focus of this essayare at the core of the modern concept of intellectual property.

It was here in the eighteenth century that the language of ideas and property
½rst came into contact with one another, and ½rst forged a legal bond. And it was here, too, that the very idea of a property right in ideas was most sharply contestedat the outset, and to the present day. *"

To state my opinion more forcefully, I’ll include a quote from the first link.

"*A 1793 French law specified that works of living authors could not be performed in a public theatre without the author’s assent and that the heirs had the same rights for five years after the author’s death. Jean Le Chapelier had roused the Paris Assembly in 1791 by arguing that

the most sacred, most personal of all the properties, is the work fruit of the   thought of a writer [...] so it is extremely just that the men who cultivate the field of thought enjoy some fruits from their work, it is essential that during their life and a few years after their death, nobody can dispose of the product of their genius, without their consent.

US lawyer Zechariah Chaffee echoed that comment in his 1945 Reflections on the Law of Copyright, saying that

intellectual property is, after all, the only absolute possession in the world ... The man who brings out of nothingness some child of his thought has rights therein which cannot belong to any other sort of property.

*"

30

I don’t want to start this debate up again either. I’ll just cite Thomas Jefferson:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

31

I don’t have business data on this, but I’m certain you’ve seen foundations advertising for donations to raise research funds or lobby government to expend funds on research. Many universities do medical research, which likely leads to patents for the faculty and/or school. Sorry, I don’t have an idea as to how much of the business this all is, but given the large size of medical research in the US gov. alone, it can’t be too small. I know there have been some investigative reports done on the pharm/univ relationship in the past and concerns about it.

32

I thought I already did. It’s commonly known in the field of research on patent law, etc. that patents can lead to secrecy. Maybe more or less than not having them, but the logic is that if you think you can make a buck off your discovery you’ll hold it close to your chest untill you have a product you want to release or even not release the discovery at all and just hope that nobody else discovers it (perhaps then undermining another patent you have) instead of sharing your discovery. This has become an issue in universities, but as an econ prof explained it to me, this is known to happen in firms…especially tech firms he said. Again, it’s a matter of weighing the policy options. Patents aren’t “natural” any more than government, but then I don’t view markets as the holy grail of institutional form that so many seem to do.

33

It would be hard to quantify, I don’t think they are any more likely in theory that I know. Just pointing out that patents are not the simply good thing that people often believe they are when this debate arises on here (as it does every so often).

However, I would point out that many people get up each day and do their job without patents. The benefit of patents is that it rewards investment of time, money, etc. in a speculative enterprise. However, it creates problems of its own when that enterprise can not be used as effectively or by as many people as under a system that allowed for compensation for discovery without all the market distortion patents create. What that system is, I dunno, but I doubt this Congress will give it to us, or the ones prior, will give it to us. Perhaps the price of drugs will eventually force the issue and lead to a serious re-evaluation of patent lengths.

34

No, you did not. Even in this post, you are simply asserting that patents have some means of encouraging secrecy. You have yet to explain how the fact that applying for a patent makes information about an invention public knowledge does not blow this assertion completely out of the water.

What you seem to be saying (besides markets suck or some such rhetoric) is that people wanting to earn money of of an idea of thiers will keep it secret. But this is not strictly true. It very much depends on the idea. Furthermore, even if they do want to keep the idea secret, patents will not help them. They will, in fact, hurt them.

If a person makes an invention, let’s say, and decides to keep it secret for purposes of comercialization, then the last thing he will do is take out a patent. In fact, patents are the only thing allowing him to make his invention public. Take a look at Thomas Jefferson’s quote that Mr 2001 gave us above. Realize that Jefferson became a proponent of patents as he saw the value they provide in the form of encouraging people to release information about thier inventions.

Ask your econ professor again if the tendency towards secrecy is a result of patents or a result of patent protection not being strong enough (as I suggested above). You might be surprised at the answer.

35

Honey, I have said nothing about markets sucking. Though they sometimes do. Also, I didn’t argue that applying for a patent is secrecy, it’s the patent system which encourages secrecy under some scenarios.

BTW, many economists worry that patent protections are too strong now, for some technology at least (see W Landes and D Lichtman, JEP, Vol 17:2)

Note the qualifications. This isn’t a black or white are; there are nuances.

36

What does this have to do with patents? If you’re holding your idea close to your chest, you have not patented it, because patents are public. If someone else discovers your patented idea, that doesn’t undermine anything, unless they discovered it first.

If you come up with a new idea and a way to make a buck from it, why would you keep it secret, taking the chance that someone else might discover it and beat you to market, instead of patenting it, guaranteeing you the exclusive right to produce and sell that product?

Well, I generally think markets will find good solutions to most problems, but here I think humanity is more important than economics: promoting the sharing of information and experiences is more important than any potential for profit. But so far, that’s exactly what I see patents doing - encouraging people to share their ideas by promising that even though everyone will get to see them, no one else will be allowed to use them.

The only big problem I have with patents is that too many frivolous applications are approved. (At least, that’s the impression Slashdot’s editors are trying to give me.) The concept of letting customers buy something with one click by storing their billing and shipping information in a database, for example, is not the kind of idea that anyone should have exclusive rights to. It’s like the idea of making a car with yellow paint on top, green stripes on the left, brown checks on the right, and pink polka dots on the trunk - it’s an obvious, straightforward combination of a few existing things, and if no one has ever done it before, that’s probably because they thought it was a bad idea, not because they couldn’t conceive of the possibility. But the solution there is to hire smarter patent examiners and make bad patents easier to challenge, not to overhaul patent law.

37

Dude, seriously. Can you give me even one such scenario coherently?