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July 16, 2007
Do Patents Pay? 
An article on slashdot ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/15/1959230&from=rss ) concerning a book "Do Patents Work" seeks to suggest not.
I suggest the author, the commentators, and the NYT article are both "fucking morons" and "full of shit".
I've had enough with people framing this issue as something that is black & white. Its not, and treating it as such may make for great ratings ( re: web hitcount, nielsen ratings on debate shows, adspace prices in the nytimes ) -- but it cheapens the issue. I'll gladly put forth that anyone saying "Long live patents" or "Patents should be abolished" is a fucking idiot, completely shortsighted, and isn't worth reading.
Here's the truth of the matter -- patents make a lot of sense in some situations, and make no sense in others. There are many factors at play - I'm only going to touch on two of them.
a) Lets talk economics: The law of diminishing marginal utility. This is basic econ -- far before a 101 -- you should have learned this in high school. Simplest put, 1 patent is good, 2 patents are great, but you hit a tipping point where maybe 100 patents might not be so good, and with 101 patents you're spending more on filing fees and lawyers than income your patents generate. From a business standpoint, is the concept of patents bad because of this? No - but your legal team and middle management are idiots who should be fired.
b) "Evening the playing field". *Properly* used, patents promote innovation and reward innovation. They let the average person create and chance reward, instead of limiting invention to wealthy.
I'll contextualize this in terms close to me. I spent 3 years of my life with 'after hours' work, then quit my job and sunk 1 year of my life in 80hr weeks PLUS my entire life savings ( ~$100k ) developing what I felt was revolutionary software. A few months after I put my product online as a beta and started shopping it around for investment to make fully stable, it was was cloned by a group of people who raised $3 million dollars in capital. It was a clear clone - the entire public featureset, even the copy , appeared on the clone; the holding company that cloned the product formed weeks after I went public, and were directly connected to people that I pitched to.
Because of patents, I may not lose my entire investment -- and the moral/ethical crime of taking anothers work and showing it as your own may become legally enforced.
Anti-Patent activists will readily make light of the evils of patents -- how drug prices are too high, how web browsers have weird integration issues, how innovation is stifled be the fear of infringment.
What they CONSTANTLY fail to address are the benefits of patents -- how a pharmaceutical company is incentivized to spend 400 million dollars trying to cure AIDS, or how an ordinary person with a good idea but a limited income can take a rish and go out and create something /without/ fear of being stomped on by someone bigger.
A world without patents isn't the world of low-cost drugs and independant invention: Its the world where 'The Rich Get Richer' and 'The Establishment' is strong and abolute. Its the world where ideas and innovation are devalued by marketing budgets. Its the world of the ultra rich and ultra poor.
Likewise, a world with eternal patents & copyright isn't a world of fairness and prosperity. Its a world where innovation stops because of infringement and legal fear. Its a world daily activities become 'taxed' by usage fees. It , too, is the world of the ultra rich and ultra poor.
Patent law shouldn't be abolished, nor should it be eternal - it should be reformed in a way that best benefits society ; in a way that balances the needs and benefits of society as a whole, while it rewards innovation and safeguards risk.
Maybe I'm crazy, or maybe i'm just excercing the part of my brain not steeped in partisan rhetoric ( the part i like to call "common sense" ) but Intellectual Property isn't a black & white issue, nor is it one-dimensional. Its a complex beast that can't be simplified in 3-line slashdot postings , and shouldn't be polarized by fame-hungry authors and law professors with insatiable egos looking for fame.
Posted by Jonathan at July 16, 2007 12:07 AM
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