The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.
It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.
The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics.
The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold:
1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect.
What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.
The first patents were not about innovation at all but essentially government guaranteed monopolies similar to guilds.
> 1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
Citation needed. I know of many patents that are side discoveries of R&D that was done anyway. It's a myth that others could easily undercut a company doing the research, the inertia of expertise of employees, processes etc. is typically much better at holding of the competition. None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting. The example of pharma is often brought up, but it's actually a very good counter-example, when pharma companies first developed, it was the Swiss and German companies which dominated and there was very little (Germany) or no (Switzerland) patent protection for pharmaceuticals.
Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.
> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.
That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.
You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).
Patents are in principle supposed to be non-obvious, and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description.
I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
There are merely a lot of people in the legal profession whose jobs depend on ignoring that fact.
This patent includes network diagrams, actual C data structure, technical terminology galore, etc, etc. It's got a ton more implementation details versus, for example, a scientific publication on this topic.
Like, seriously, it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details and not bland lawyer jargon:
>The second redirection mechanism, which is specified as a future extension of NDTP is having the server return an NDTP RDR RSP message in response to an NDTP request for which the NDTP server has no ownership of the supplied identifier string. Those skilled in the art will note that unlike the embedded redirection links mechanism, the NDTP RDR RSP mechanism applies to all NDTP requests, not just NDTP GET.
I didn't read this patent before making a sister comment, but looking through it, this one is actually really clear on exactly what is happening (which makes sense with everyone here saying "it's just DNS for data" - everything is obvious in hindsight) and relatively low on patent jargon.
A lot of patents give you a bunch of alternative implementations and component definitions, which can muddy the waters a bit. On the other hand, the figures can help you a lot.
Eh, this is like "first draft of a design document" level detailed.
The big issue is that it's a protocol, not a system. I.e. it's detailed only because it specifically _does not specify how to build anything_. Were they required to actually specify how to build something, i.e. a server that implements this protocol rather than the protocol itself, this would be woefully insufficient.
How are the mappings stored on disk? Does this entire protocol genuinely lack authentication? How is this meant to fail over when a server dies? If it's distributed, how do the nodes reach consensus?
You can't just jam stuff like this into a doc:
> Also, each update is preferably performed atomically
> to avoid creating an inconsistent state in the string Store.
They're just handwaving away how the data gets stored. Y'know, the part of the patent that's actually useful and does something.
What's left over after you discount the parts they don't specify is basically just a wire protocol for a KV store that doesn't exist. They might as well try to patent a method for making imaginary mittens for imaginary friends, because that's basically what this is.
Patents are usually narrowly tailored to a specific part of a design document of a complex system, not the entire thing. The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.
A lot of research papers are written the same way. They will go into great detail on a specific thing like a protocol or a storage format and then say something along the lines of "bolt this onto Redis" before presenting their data.
I’m fine with that in research papers. They have a very different goal where practical applications are not necessary yet (or ever in some cases).
> The idea is that a "person of ordinary skill in the art" can implement the normal stuff (ie the current state of the art) around the new innovation, and the new thing gives that system a non-obvious benefit.
Why specify a protocol at all then? Im sure a person of ordinary skill in the art can also come up with a protocol without an implementation. Takes like 15 minutes if you don’t have to worry about pesky details like having a working implementation.
There is no benefit, obvious or not, because there is no implementation. Whether it is safer or faster or whatever would be defined by an implementation. They’ve patented the digital equivalent of letterhead while positing that it will make mail more efficient.
Have you ever designed a protocol before? I'm not referring to something along the lines of "slap these fields in a JSON" for a service that gets 1 QPS, but an actual wire protocol intended for millions of QPS per endpoint. A good wire protocol is extremely difficult to design, far more difficult than an implementation of that protocol, and involves thinking ahead about all of the possible implementations and faults you will see.
That's why protocols like TCP are designed by huge collaborations of engineering teams across companies, while an individual who knows the protocol spec can implement TCP in a couple of days.
> it's got 20+ page of this technical implementation details
Yeah fantastic, like an entire page devoted to showing requests that have numerical identifiers. Groundbreaking stuff.
And it's all completely irrelevant noise because you can infringe on the patent even if your implementation in no way depends on any of those details
The only thing that matters is the claims, and they're written so broadly and interpreted by the courts so creatively that a subject matter expert cannot read the document and determine if something does or does not infringe on it.
Seriously, how does Claim 1 not cover 99% of HTTP requests ever made given that people were using reverse proxies and passing requests between backend servers for decades before this patent was filed?
>...and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
I provided a counter-example. I'm going to take the the fact you're not responding to the counter-example but rather changing the argument as acceptable that you were wrong.
> >...and detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the description. I can assure you that in practice they are neither.
> I provided a counter-example. I'm going to take the the fact you're not responding to the counter-example but rather changing the argument as acceptable that you were wrong.
You ignored the fact that the "innovation" is really embodied in the claims not the rest, because that is what will be covered in the end.
Apart from the fact that even this somewhat better written example makes claims much broader than what was actually done, giving one example does not invalidate the fact that many (and I argue most by a large margin) patents are much more vague.
In my experience reading patents, you have this backwards. The spec (pictures, detailed description, etc.) is where the disclosure of what you actually did and how you are advancing knowledge shows up. The claims are the enforcement mechanism attached to the stuff disclosed in the spec.
If you eventually sue someone, the claims are used, but they will often be challenged if they go beyond the scope of the spec.
In my past experience, this is only true because many people's eyes glaze over when they try to read patent-ese. If you can penetrate the obtuse form of English used, "in embodiments, ... may be ... to name a few" for example (and the weird ordering of paragraphs, etc.), it's actually not that hard to understand patents. There are a lot of people whose job it is to read patents, too.
A very common pattern is to write a patent and a research paper after the initial patent filing. When the patent office doesn't do their job you can still usually learn the invention from the paper. They key thing is companies wouldn't let employees publish without the patent part.
> > Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them (in fact many companies will purposefully not patent those things they consider central to their business, to keep them secret) and are instead written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering.
> That's pretty false. The requirement for a patent in the US is that it is detailed enough that an expert in the domain can reproduce the invention from the patent. Doing so efficiently and at scale is a different issues. Having dealt with patents personally, lawyers very much stress this point as a requirement for a patent that is not easy to overturn.
I have dealt with patents myself as well and in every instance the lawyers told me ok give me all the other ways of you can think of how to do things, no matter if it works or not. Also keep what you did sufficiently vague.
> You're confusing a patent being broad with it not being detailed. They are both. A patent is a detailed reproducible description that includes a ton of language to also cover other similar things. For example, "in one embodiment of this invention a silver coated aluminum substrate is used for part N." This is very specific in that it says what was used to make the invention (a silver coated aluminum substrate) but also broad enough to cover other substrates (one embodiment).
This is actually a great example. Often the implementation will only work with a specific thickness and quality of silver and the substrate has to be prepared in a specific way to get the correct properties. None of these would be mentioned in the patent, and would typically require large amount of experimenting (costly) to find out what actually works.
> Patents almost never describe processes and technology with sufficient detail to reproduce them
My father used to work for Pilkington's Glass. Pilkington invented the float-glass process, which made better, flatter glass than the plate-glass process. Yes, it was patented; but the main protection was control of know-how. When you licensed the process, you got several engineers onsite to make it work.
This is similar in some ways to the mediaeval Venetian glassmakers; they didn't have patents, but they did have assassins, who would hunt down runaway glassmakers and silence them.
The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops.
I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.
Paradoxically it's one of the most common arguments people use in favor of the system: it pushes innovation!
It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation. When real innovation happens it's mostly by coincidence on the small intersection of the Venn diagram.
Edit: It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.
Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point, your argument is designed to deceive:
> It actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation.
Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
> It's interesting that the patent system was created, in theory, to allow people to profit from innovation and actually promote it. Ironically it instead created a whole industry of extracting rent from broad useless patents that stifles innovation even further.
It's pretty obvious that a system created for a purpose can initially fulfill that purpose very well and then be corrupted by humans over time, with no implication of being initially unsuitable.
Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
I hesitate to reply to people that hide behind throwaway accounts, but sure, I'll bite.
>Even aside from the overwhelming historical evidence soundly disproving your point
That has basically nothing to compare against it. The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism. Maybe those attempts would not succeed even without the sabotage but regardless, of course it's better than feudalism and its predecessors. The key question for me is: is that the best we can do?
Capitalism did sprout innovation, but that does not mean it's the best way to do so. Ignoring the inherent flaws around the profit motive doesn't help anyone.
>Strawman argument
I don't think so, honestly. The reality is that a lot of research is done with the question of "how can we make money solving this problem?", rather than "how can we solve this problem?". You can't deny that.
Maybe categorizing that as pure/non-pure innovation is not a good way to put it, but the incentives of research do change with profit seeking. It's undeniable.
>corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital. It's a circular system.
Many do believe that democratically elect people should have more power than private institutions with zero transparency or checks. Not sure exactly how that "decreases the quality of human life". Where did that come from?
> Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital.
Isn't that the same thing that happened in every socialist attempt in the modern era? Isn't the cause the fact of original sin not the particular economic structures? To put it another way, how do you propose to solve the issue of "[sabotage] by capitalism" the line between good and evil that runs, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "right through every human heart"
You're right that corruption is not exclusive to capitalism. All systems will have that in one way or another. That was something the person I was replying to brought up. I don't think it matters for capitalism specifically. Any system worth considering should accept that corruption is unavoidable.
As for a solution... I don't know. I truly wish I had a ready answer to something as big as this, but I don't. The best I can come up with are multiple systems with checks, and we have some governments that attempt this, but inevitably someone ends up with unchecked power.
Today the power that goes unchecked is capital. It can corrupt other systems that don't account for it. Lobbying, donations, media time, etc. It's all affected by it, as systems like democracy were not designed to deal with external influence that is then used to consolidate itself.
That's why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
> You're right that corruption is not exclusive to capitalism. All systems will have that in one way or another.
Right, and if you'd done any research into alternative economic systems at all, you'd realize that free market systems are the only feasible economic system because it best addresses corruption. Socialism, communism, fascism, and other systems are more vulnerable to corruption than free market systems.
> I truly wish I had a ready answer to something as big as this, but I don't
If you don't, then don't suggest that people experiment with other economic systems when the cumulative toll of those experiment to date weighs in at over a hundred million lives.
> The best I can come up with are multiple systems with checks
That is what we have right now. In America, Canada, the EU, and many, many other "capitalist" systems. Why are you proposing it, when we have it right now?
> Today the power that goes unchecked is capital
This is objectively false. Laughably so. "Capital", whatever that means (as anti-capitalists regularly shift their use of it to avoid being caught in logical fallacies), is not an unchecked power in any of the top dozen current world powers - especially not the US, where there are literally dozens[1] of government agencies tasked with monitoring and controlling money and business in the country.
> Lobbying, donations, media time, etc. It's all affected by it
Everything is also affected by the pride of human beings - yet that has no bearing on the equivalent claim that "the power that goes unchecked is ego" - both that statement and yours are equally false.
> systems like democracy were not designed to deal with external influence that is then used to consolidate itself
"Democracy" is meaningless. You have to pick out a specific implementation of it - like the US, whose political system is designed to deal with external influences. The fact that it fails is because of corruption of individuals elected in office by the people - not because "democracy" somehow can't handle existing in a free-market system.
[1] The Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office, various agencies in the Department of Agriculture, basically everything in the Department of Commerce, the Secret Service, large swaths of the Department of Justice (especially the antitrust division) and the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs in the Department of State, parts of the Department of Transportation and the Department of Treasury, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communication Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and many, many more. The claim that "the power that goes unchecked is capital" is objectively. Wrong.
> free market systems are the only feasible economic system
Free market systems are not feasible, and capitalism (a system defined around description of a real, at the time existing, system) is not a “free market” system (an infeasible abstraction invented as a post-hoc rationalization for capitalism.)
We may have a terminological difference. When I said "free market", I don't mean a lasseiz faire market/capitalist system - I mean something similar to what the US has now, where money is a Thing and producers sell to consumers, but the government steps in to regulate around negative externalities, prevent harm to consumers, and keep the economy stable.
What are your definitions of "free market systems" and "capitalism"?
> I hesitate to reply to people that hide behind throwaway accounts
My account is three and a half years old, has more karma than your account, and has an equal amount of personal information (zero). Calling it a "throwaway" is inaccurate, saying that I'm "hiding" is manipulative, and your further statement
> but sure, I'll bite
...is further evidence of emotional manipulation instead of reason and intellect.
> The very few attempts that we had in modern times were ultimately sabotaged by capitalism
Given the many non-free-market states (almost all of which were communist, but the point generalizes), every single one of which has failed, the overwhelmingly most likely cause is simply that they don't work. Any claims otherwise require a massive amount of evidence.
> Capitalism did sprout innovation, but that does not mean it's the best way to do so. Ignoring the inherent flaws around the profit motive doesn't help anyone.
Nobody, including in this thread, is "ignoring" anything. Sane people look at the free market system, realize that it needs some amount of regulation to remain stable, and apply that. Insane people suggest that communism is a plausible alternative to free markets - and nobody has been able to come up with another system other than those two.
> I don't think so, honestly.
You're incorrect, then. The point that you made was "[Capitalism] actually pushes innovation towards profits, not pure innovation" - and nobody claimed that capitalism incentivizes "pure innovation", so that's the very definition of a strawman argument.
> The reality is that a lot of research is done with the question of "how can we make money solving this problem?", rather than "how can we solve this problem?"
Again, nobody claimed otherwise - if you had read the comment you're responding to, you would have also seen:
>> the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work
> Regulators that are corrupted in search of capital. It's a circular system.
This is both incorrect and irrelevant. Incorrect, because regulators are corrupted in search of money and power, not because of capital. Irrelevant, because those factors are present in every other alternate system. Free market systems are not unique in this matter, and so this is an irrelevant point to bring up because no alternative system will change this.
> Many do believe that democratically elect people should have more power than private institutions with zero transparency or checks. Not sure exactly how that "decreases the quality of human life". Where did that come from?
Again - you should read comments before you respond to them:
>> corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life
Putting corrupt regulators into greater positions of power is what "decreases the quality of human life".
> It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.
This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.
> Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
This is a whole lot of words that says precious little. Also, you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions. Tons of the massive tech companies we have today that feel older than time itself were products of university and government grants, notable in that they didn't have to make money. Huge innovations like GPS that basically any product can use for damn near free started life as ways for the military to track deployed assets. Flat panel LCD screens, lithium batteries, like I said, it's hard to find a product so ubiquitous now on this level that ISN'T in some way funded by the Government.
The corporations role in turn is to take those expensive new technologies and make them cheap, and in THAT regard, they are very good at their jobs. But it doesn't translate well to every product.
> It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
Horseshit. The entire open source community disagrees with you. Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you. Food pantries disagree with you. Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation. If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
> Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
> This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.
This is false - we've had many attempts at alternative systems to free markets - all of which have failed because they don't work.
Also, bringing "colonialism" into this shows that you're not interested in seeking out the truth - just pushing your own political agenda onto other people.
> This is a whole lot of words that says precious little.
Funny, I thought the same about most of your comment.
> you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions
Turns out that a decent number of technologies had their fundamental research funded by "defense projects, grant money, other such institutions" - which doesn't mean anything, because (1) many innovations are not funded in those ways (2) the vast majority of modern technology's commercialization was done exclusively by "capitalism" and (3) as we've seen with communist countries, the government can fund as much research as it wants, and it doesn't matter for any purpose except weapons development if the private sector doesn't go through the process of refining it and making it cheap enough that consumers can buy it.
> Horseshit.
That perfectly describes your next paragraph:
> The entire open source community disagrees with you
No, they don't. The open-source community does not encourage innovation in any way. It encourages free clones of successful products whose innovation was performed by another entity (literally a parasite on the economy) and ego projects. A large number of successful open source projects (e.g. Netscape/Firefox, OpenOffice, Llama, Inkscape, Blender, Eclipse) are reactionary projects that were started several years after a piece of proprietary software started to become popular, and often copy the UI, features, and workflow of those programs - the literal opposite of innovation.
> Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you
No, they don't. The internet archive does barely any innovation at all - in fact, they perform significantly more theft and copyright infringement than "innovation".
> Food pantries disagree with you
No, they don't. Food pantries are not models of innovation.
> Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation
I never claimed otherwise - but only someone speaking from a position of extreme ignorance would claim that anything except money has been responsible for the vast majority of innovation across all of human history (and especially over the past several hundred years).
> If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
Strawman argument - I never claimed this. Quite a silly strawman, too.
> Would love a citation on this
Software and genetics are patentable in the US, purely as a result of corrupt regulators - there you go.
And what exactly would stop an imitator from advertising that they're the "real deal"? Or maybe just that they're an "improved version"? There's extremely little regulation in advertising even now.
Patents IMO work better when it's a physically instantiated implementation of a very specific task. The big issue is where we've gone with software patents that are little more than "a server talks to another server and requests information from a database". Those implementations are extremely vague and cover way too much ground. Like the game patent that covered the entire idea of having a playable game during a loading screen or at least pretended to and the idea of fighting it was too expensive to bother trying to force the issue.
Not sure I agree — That's still investment. All that time spend doing research, even if for a completely different goal, doesn't come for free. Discovering two things in a process intended to discover one doesn't half the value of both things.
> None of the successful technology companies made their business by patenting
> written so broad as to just create a moat to prevent any newcomers from entering
I agree — software patents are ridiculous, too broad, and stifle the intent of IP rights. But parents protect other industries. My point is that a blanket "get rid of intellection property protections" statement is not realistic. It's nuanced.
FYI, I am in a hardware field and the companies I'm aware of (having had direct discussions with on CTO or senior engineer level) largely did patents to have something tangible to justify R&D to investors and financial analysts. They would never put know how that they considered crucial into a patent and considered patent litigation pretty worthless, especially against direct competitors, as they knew that everyone was violating everyone else's patents, because everyone working in the field comes up with the same solutions (so much for patents being non obvious to a subject expert).
It is a good idea to read the citation, at least in part. I am quoting from conclusion as that's the only part I am interested and read.
Today, I would argue that given the limitations of the existing literature we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies. While researchers have recently begun to make progress on the more limited question of how patents on existing technologies affect follow-on innovation (Galasso and Schankerman, 2015; Sampat and Williams, 2015), evidence on the overall effects of patents on research investments are needed as one input into optimal patent policy design.
This comment implies that most of the massive technological innovation since 1400s came around because of patents. That's far from the truth. Patent systems that old were local and very different from the modern variant. Besides, most regions didn't have patent systems at all. The Netherlands didn't really get patent law until early 20th century. That didn't stop them from innovating and inventing. Germany similarly.
No, they are questioning the parent comment's argument that patents are against the basis for modern technological development itself, which is obviously false if patents where present well before this development
Having worked at Amazon, patents there were "if you can imagine that software might be able to do a thing, patent it now". Absolutely no research was necessary, or indeed requested. You simply had to state "I have an idea".
In exchange you got a plastic puzzle piece to put on your desk. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than seeing a large number of those puzzle pieces in someone's care. You stood in the way of progress in service of Jeff Bezos? Awful.
The idea of "intellectual property" is anti-productive as well as immoral. Open source software is a very good evidence of the utilitarian benefits of doing away with software patents. And IP is immoral because it's impossible to grant and secure "intellectual property" rights without violating physical property rights. Please read Stephen Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" for a good treatment of both the utilitarian and the moral dimensions:
Yes, but the same can be said about non-compete agreements. Imagine a company invested a lot in research and infrastructure, only to get their key employees poached and bring most of it to a new company in their heads.
Yet, California forbids the non-competes, because it promotes competition and at least somewhat eases capital lock-ins (i.e. two dudes in a garage can start competing with "big ones"). I don't really see much difference with patents here.
Remember early Facebook infra looked very similar to Google, they had to get creative to make new names for internal projects clones of Google ones.
If you are arguing that non-competes shouldn't exist therefore patents shouldn't exist — I think you're framing the issue too broadly.
If a professional joins an organisation, creates something novel and valuable, and then is poached to another organisation to do the same thing — that's exactly what patents are there to protect.
Say they spend 5 years developing a nice kind of lubricant — the company can patent that lubricant. Then if the professional goes and joins another company, even if they have that knowledge, they'd have to conduct new research to find a new approach which doesn't run afoul of the existing patent. That's the point — patent's don't protect your market dominance, they just protect against imitation/copying.
Now say the work of that professional is systems architecture for some Google project, and they leave and join Facebook to build the same systems architecture for Facebook's project — of course that shouldn't be patented (although sometimes it is, and that's a different issue.)
A "restraint of trade" agreement in your employment contract (a "non-compete") is intended protect companies from others copying their product when other IP rights don't exist — and I agree that it shouldn't exist. It quite literally prevents new invention and done through an imbalance of power. But, organisational already have plenty of mechanisms to mitigate that risk — pay the person more, better working conditions, or just pay them a long gardening period.
>1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but a fundamental issue with patents is that your investment in research can be destroyed if someone else independently did overlapping research and filed first.
Which you mitigate by keeping an eye on competitors and avoiding overly saturated market spaces. This in turn incentives a broader research focus and also incentives publishing paper in saturated areas to make sure there's documented prior art. There's also an incentive for multiple smaller inventions spread over time. This all seems like a positive and not a negative for society as a whole.
I think it can be a positive as long as the threshold for what counts as an invention is high enough. If the threshold is too low then patents become an instrument for harassment and rent seeking, slowing down industrial progress.
We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.
We have to find the right balance. If a large number of patents sound like a sad joke to most professionals in a field, then something has gone very wrong.
That presume that we have the ability to finetune patent laws as needed and also presume that world changing inventions are necessarily novel enough to professionals in a given field. It has often happened commonly enough that inventions will occur to several innovators at once as the next step. It is questionable that it would be fair to penalize an inventor just because another was first to file a patent, potentially driving these inventors out of the industry.
It is also pushing against the reality that people are always building on the works of others. Patents are by themselves monopolies. That is how they work. Thus, people had resorted to arrangements to avoid constant patent lawsuits, which had happened in the past.
Yes, that's an interesting problem — the more capital you have to invest, conceptually, the more you can invest in talent and the faster you can research compared to smaller competitors.
Great for the rate of technological advancement, not so great for fairness.
Now image if there weren't patents. The larger entities would simply wait for their smaller competitors, copy their products and then use their capital to more efficiently/cheaply manufacture/market them.
edit: While also maintaining massive private documentation stores that further give them a moat. Patents are public so you at least know what someone did 20 years ago even if you're a one person shop. Without them you'd be in trouble unless you had access to a large companies massive and very private internal invention documentation store.
You can use the "dropping a hash" method (patio11 has used this). As you progress your work, you publish a hash of it using a service trusted by everyone to correctly identify the researchers and timestamp their hashes.
If someone publishes the paper, you can then publish the files that resulted with the dropped hash and therefore prove you had certain progress of the work at a certain time.
Yes you can provably document your progress, but it doesn't solve the problem that someone else may have published overlapping ideas earlier and you can't prove that you didn't read what they published.
I was mostly thinking in the case of overlapping research as mentioned in the parent comment, not independent research years after the publication (where indeed it sounds impossible to prove you didn't read it).
Basically, if you could show that you had already made significant progress before the publication date, then you might be granted the patent as well.
I've been working in the industry for decades, and most patents I've seen are either portfolio-inflating bullshit, or rent-seeking that blocks innovation for decades (like the infamous compression patents). I'm sure some people worked on their technology a lot, but pretending like software patents are necessary for people getting paid or for technology to advance is nonsense. They are much more frequently used to impede than promote innovation, and their overall impact is mostly negative.
> The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality.
The last 600 years is a rounding error in the history of humans. Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented. Those humans also burned witches and imprisoned people for criticizing the church.
We would have a better world if our goal was progress for all over profit for a few.
For the first 200,000 years of human existence, hardly any technological development happened at all relative to the last 600 years (though I am doubtful how much patents contributed to that development). The rate at which technological development has continued to speed up is part of what's causing problems here: patents last ~20 years, which is an eternity in IT. The other problem is granting patents on software at all - the USA is unusually permissive in this.
Most witch burnings happened in the last 600 years - there had been very few (at least in Europe) in the previous millennium and a half. I just pointed out in another comment that the first criminal blasphemy laws in England and Wales were also passed 600 years ago.
It is not easy to divide human progress into before and after. Technological progress very much depends on what has gone before. It accelerated when it reached a certain point of development.
I agree with you that patents are not a key cause of progress, and they often impede it by preventing people other than the patent holder further improving anything patented.
I also think they probably work pretty well for mechanical inventions, but they have been applied to everything - drugs, software, electronic devices, even business methods in some places.
> Imagine if the different methods of lighting a fire were patented.
It would have implied a better, more developed society.
It would implied that there is a writing system.
It would have implied that there was a way to store records long term.
It would have implied that there was a long distance communication system.
It would have implied the existence of some state and rule of law.
It would have implied some type of justice system where you could get redress.
It would have implied a society with excess production of essential materials that it can support the division of labor involved in supporting this system.
We’d expect this regardless of intellectual property laws. I think the overall innovation follows a logistic function. Early in history most people were primarily engaged in subsistence (hunting or agriculture). It took a really long time to develop the basic tools and infrastructure to get to the point where people could start to specialize in jobs not immediately related to food production, storage, or defence.
None of that stuff is strictly dependent on IP laws, they just happened to be the obvious solution to the problem “how do researchers and artists protect their investments from folks that steal/copy their ideas and beat them to market?”
Even ignoring education, the compounding effect of innovation and how most people didn't have the preconditions for innovating at all, you would expect us to have vastly more innovation right now just by virtue of having more people. We now have 20 times as many people on earth as in 1400, 40 times as many as in the year 1, and 200 times as many as in the year -4000.
Correlation ≠ causation. The printing press came around the same time and probably contributed to this development, not patents. If he was greedy maybe he would've patented the technology and normal people wouldn't learn to read.
Also, much more importantly, the invention of the scientific method and science as a philosophy of epistemology.
Common knowledge of physics for a thousand years was that heavier things fall faster, so spoke Aristotle. Nobody actually "fact checked" that because "duh, of course heavier things fall faster, this feather falls so slowly, everyone knows that" and so knowledge could not advance.
IMHO patents are useful for things where you spend a ton of money researching something, but the implementation is rather straightforward. Think of the secret Coke or Pepsi recipes, I would imagine very hard and expensive to develop but easy to produce once you know what to do.
Compare that to something like AWS and the equation is basically flipped. Figuring out what to do is not that difficult compared to actually doing it, Amazon could probably open source all of their cloud offerings tomorrow and outside a handful of very capable actors, implementing another AWS would be next to impossible.
Lots of things in tech are flipped on their head like that, you can describe the idea and functions of Uber at a high level on a back of a napkin, but good luck actually implementing and doing so successfully.
That's why personally I think patents should be abolished in the tech space, they just don't help anyone except the owners of the patent but they don't help in the way people actually intended it to. Here it's not like Cove lost out on being a huge cloud player because Amazon stole the idea behind S3 and DynamoDB, they just "own" the idea and are trying to extract money from Amazon.
Coke’s recipe is protected by Trade Secret, not patents. If you can figure out how to reverse engineer Coke 1:1 on your own, you can sell the resulting product. Coke is only protected from people selling their recipe to competitors.
Patents are only useful if they are actually enforced, through lawsuits and lawyers. The amount of time and money spent on patent lawsuits as opposed to innovation is a form of deadweight cost and must be factored in any argument for or against patents.
What patents give is a seat at the negotiation table. It is not by itself a business model.
As someone who holds several patents, I totally agree. Every time I interact with that system, it makes me want to burn the whole thing to the ground.
The legal definition of novelty and obviousness is nonsensical. The duration is far too long. The USPTO does a terrible job of screening for quality. The court enforcement is little more than a high-stakes game of chance.
It would be an interesting experiment - a world where no patents exist, only production (though corporate espionage / theft is still illegal).
Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering, and copy the product. In some areas, like pharma, R&D is notoriously expensive, and the pharma companies have only that many years to recoup all that cost, before their patent runs out.
Would it lead to more money spent on making reverse engineering difficult? Both the products, and the manufacturing process.
The other aspect of patents that folks are omitting is that in order to get a patent, the applicant has to publish their recipe. In most cases, this will be strictly better than simple reverse engineering because more participants can then use the IP once it expires (as opposed to those with the means and desire to reverse engineer it).
Patents are a two-way street where society gets something in exchange for granting a limited-duration monopoly.
> Some argue that this will effectively kill R&D, because the second you've created something - others would start reverse engineering,
Reverse engineering is not needed - it's time-consuming, expensive and error-prone.
The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!
As much as some people hate to admit it, intellectual property laws have their place. Are they perfect? Not in my opinion! But, things would be worse without enforced intellectual property laws.
> This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.
What incentive could you possible offer them? If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's trade secrets, all they have to do is offer a key person $500k/year salary.
If a FAANG wants your 20-man company's patent, they are going to pay you for it.
And, as someone who's actually been in court more than a few times, no, they won't kill you via legal bills in a long protracted court case (say, by violating the IP) to get the IP - that happens so rarely you may as well hope for significant winnings at a casino.
And even if they pursue a protracted legal battle hoping to kill the company to acquire the IP, then they have to bid on the open market for it, against other FAANGs!
And even if they do kill the company, then they still have to deal with whoever gets the IP (which is why that strategy is almost never viable), because that IP doesn't become public domain simply because the company died, it will go to someone, somewhere.
Everyone lionizes the 1900s as this massive period of innovation. Part of the way we got here is by INVALIDATING PATENTS
When the world beat Germany (twice), part of the reparations for the world wars was basically invalidating most of Germany's intellectual property. The second world war we went above that and basically claimed human beings who were working on that intellectual property.
When America was struggling to get useful radar to work, the British brought us the cavity magnetron, and the US was able to utterly industrialize that into a million allied radar systems. When the US thought jet engines were a dead end fuel hungry fad, the Brits showed us theirs, which was way more advanced and helped the US get on the right track for future development.
When everyone was basically inventing computers as a real thing, the allies benefited greatly from massive cross-pollination, including people who are now considered grandfathers of modern computing literally meeting in a train station and chatting about the computers they were building which helped them work together to build bigger and better machines.
You don't advance innovation and invention by limiting an idea to the six people working R&D on this specific concept in GE, you advance innovation by letting every smart person and their friend dick around with the concept in freedom.
The entirety of the modern internet is basically built on this fact, and moved so damn fast, yet people will STILL insist "no, to encourage innovation you have to not let people innovate!"
Yes, it's more like VC. But, the point is university research is not some magically altruistic thing. It is driven by grants either from the government or someone who made a lot of money.
University research is labor. Researchers get salary or stipend, usually relatively modest on the ridiculous white collar standards. Nobody gets rich from grants. Typical best case scenario for grant researchers is to stay employed. Tenured faculty don't get any money from the grants.
(Very) few do get rich by leeching publicly funded research for spin-off companies. High level admins can get relatively rich from obscene salaries, but they aren't the ones applying for the grants or doing the research.
Probably not altruistic, but not usually primarily for money either. If money is what you want, university is a very bad place for trying to get it. People do do things for other reasons than economic gain regardless of what the prevailing economics dogma and ideology claims.
Not directly, but if it can save a university from having to use their endowment or other funds for something they would probably already do anyway, is there fundamentally a difference?
Nobody gets access to the money privately. The grant is paid out in salaries for work instead of capital gains. There's no capital investment for the grant.
Of course grants are an economic incentive to do something. But not all economic incentives are profit.
Edit: To be clear, universities as such don't generally apply for research grants. Researchers in universities do, and for getting a grant they get the luxury of working for a salary for a few years, or getting somebody else to be paid for their work. Universities do take a cut (overheads) from the grants to nominally pay for infra and admin etc, but in reality a lot of it is spent on all kinds of non-related things like teaching and alumni dinners and chauffeurs for the provost.
Military costs crazy amounts of money. Education and healthcare cost crazy amounts. And roads, public transport, water and sewage, social security, basic research, space programs, police, governance, firefighting etc.
You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine? Especially if that research focused not on "what's the most profitable medicine" but rather "what medicine would increase well being the most"?
You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?
Government investment in biomedical research has a history of following political fashion rather than optimizing for the best outcomes. Diseases that a politician cannot talk about in a press conference don’t get funded. The rise of private foundations funding a large percentage of all biomedical research was a response to government, and sometimes companies, reliably ignoring major medical research areas.
Research funding is allocated mostly by the academic community itself, via panels consisting of academics. This does have problems of its own, but they have little to do with politics as in elected politicians. Policians can have some influence on general directions, but it's quite limited.
What you say sounds very much based on the general anti-government and anti-democratic ideology rather than evaluation of history.
I am familiar with the history. The problematic gaps in medical research are well-known even within the government communities with budget for biomedical research. Ironically, the US military has ended up funding, despite their more limited budget and no real mandate, basic medical research into common non-military diseases like multiple sclerosis that NIH/NSF ignore but have obvious ROI for reducing population-scale medical costs (which affects the military but is outside the scope of its mission). Similarly, the rise of privately funded foundations to fill persistent odd gaps in government-funded biomedical research are well-documented.
The large increase in non-traditional funding orgs for biomedical research over the last several decades has been driven by a widespread perception that the traditional government funding has been increasingly captured by a academic cliques with low ROI priorities.
I've worked in government science orgs, the capture of funding control by ideological academic cliques is very common. It has unfortunately infested the biomedical research funding, which reduces realized ROI from the money allocated to those orgs. In the US government, some of the best medical R&D ROI dollar-for-dollar right now is found in the military, but that really shouldn't be their job outside of traditional areas like trauma medicine.
> You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine?
Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.
Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)
Nobody should get or have 1 billion dollars. Not even close. I've fundamentally soured on that.
But even that would be better than the current system where people that have nothing to do with the research get obscene amounts of money solely on the merit of having obscene amounts of money.
You probably do put quite a chunk of your taxes to fund research in the medicine, and pharma profits on top. Especially outside US drugs are typically bought with public funds. With the privatized drug development model we just get extra middlemen leeching off profits.
The drugs business is hard to use an an example, because it's precisely because things are covered by patents that it is worth spending a lot of money on. Not only that, regulation by the FDA and similar entities can be expensive because there are large businesses that can pay for the expense, because they were awarded a monopoly in the past for other drugs.
Then again, Amazon likes to take open source projects and monetize them so cheaply via aws at scale that it drives the creators out of business. And authors need ip protection to keep some random Amazon like printing press company from stealing almost all their revenue from books they write because they just have better distribution and marketing
(unless authors are supposed to make almost 100% of their incomes from touring and live shows, as the overwhelming sentiment on hn is towards musicians)
> antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia
I'd argue the opposite. It has been one of the primary driving forces behind human progress for the past 300-400 years. The world today would be a much bleaker and more miserable place if IP rights never became a thing.
Imagine writing or any type of content creation without copyright. Even after the printing press was invented it was basically impossible to make a living only from writing without being independently wealthy, having some rich patron or a daytime job. Publishing any new content was risky and generally unprofitable, it would either flop or if it didn't other publishers would start printing it without giving you a dime.
Without IP rights innovating only makes sense if you're large corporation and have a moat or you're funded by someone else (state/universities/etc.). For any small to medium business it would mean that you would incur all of the costs and couldn't compete with others which would steal your tech as soon as it becomes public.
Of course there is a point where it might start stifling innovation and we might be already past it but that's a bit like calling for air travel to be banned because of the whole Boeing debacle etc.
Books are fancy, but let's not mix up progress with being able to live off writing them.
We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.
That said, the startup selling IP model works somewhat in the pharma sector, but that's patents, and you mentioned books, where the whole IP regulation game got abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright).
Yes, obviously. And more than books and pop songs and whatnot. Also more than medicine, though it's definitely up there on the list somewhere.
And all of that is thanks to finally some groups of people pulling out their heads from their asses, stopped trying to focus on trying to loot their neighbors, and instead started to trade.
> Books are fancy, but let's not mix up progress with being able to live off writing them.
Ok you can substitute this with any type of R&D done by individual or small to large companies.
> We see innovation in open source every day from small startups, from various sized communities, and from hobbyists.
Open source is only really successful in areas where it's a cost centre. Generally, companies mainly invest it into when using OS allows them to reduce their costs and they can focus on other ways of making money/differentiating their products. e.g. there would've been a lot less innovation in OS if Google/Meta/etc. didn't make billions from ads and other services.
> and you mentioned books,
Well yeah.. or any creative content.
> abso-fucking-lutely captured by the industry (with their ridiculous 100+ years of copyright
Yes, I also think that's excessive. To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content. In any case it's obviously preferable to not having any IP protection...
Books are rarely written as solutions to overcome a specific pragmatic problem. (We need a blue LED, sure I'll write a novel series about it! We need walkaway-safe nuclear power plants, let me get my quill! We need to come up with a delivery mechanism for mRNA vaccines ... hm ... order the ink and warm up the presses!)
Sure, books are great at popularizing ideas, serve as a unit of discourse, like papers, journals, conferences and whatnot.
But when Dickens wanted to make money he wrote A Christmas Carol not A Teatrise On Socioeconomic Inequalities for Saturnalia. (And most likely he had a bigger impact this way.)
> To be fair though I don't really understand why do people care that much about being able to use Mickey Mouse in their content.
I think people somewhat rightfully feel that the social contract has been unfairly altered. The deal was that Mickey gets a temporary monopoly, and we respect it so we then get it for "free".
In a hypothetical bleak grey philosophical vacuum the first time someone draws a mouse what would be the fair thing? Respecting authorship (so no plagiarism), giving credit, sure, that's the minimum, but can others copy it, add some colors and pizzazz and become the new creative king/queen of the hill? (One one hand, maybe it would give society the best stuff, the most amazing variations of all the themes. On the other hand maybe artists would burn out in 2 seconds and nobody would ever even dare to try to come up with anything original, because the game is to derive better derivatives.)
... but I don't think so. If it would be that easy to turn anything up to 11 in a second, then we would see it all the time. (Instead what we see is conservative reboots/remakes/remixes that fit the current mainstream. With its pros and cons! It's important to note, that it's despite all the brutal forever plus zillion years copyright regime we do get these summer hits that are basically old song with a new spin. And it's fine. And sometimes we get Dune part I, II, and soon III, and hopefully more parts too! Bless the maker and his water!)
Of course. I just used books as an easiest example of why IP was beneficial and created an environment where individuals could make a living independently by creating content. Indirectly this (amongst other things) create an environment where intellectual work actually became valued by the society.
Patents are probably a more straightforward example .e.g. why would've have Savery, Newcomen, Watt etc. have worked on created and improving the steam engine and how would've they attracted the investment necessary for that if they could in no way profit from their work?
Well, why did anyone - before patents - invent anything? :) Fame, recognition, reputation, furthering the king's glory, and of course mad pussy (or whatever the correct terminus technicus is nowadays).
And as I (hopefully) implied before, it's good that we worked out a social contract that incentivizes these things (that we think are the cornerstones of the progress we want/need), but it seems there's quite a lot more work to be done on this, because it was very crude before, and now it's just ridiculously blunt.
And it's a hard problem, I don't want to say that most people today only really get the downsides (higher medicine prices), because the whole drug discovery and push to market pipeline is horribly inefficient, eats money like there's no tomorrow, and it's not just patents. The FDA can grant ~3 years of exclusivity with the marketing authorization, right?
But. We see that patents are already not good enough for medicine. (Or that the busy little lobby beavers built a huge fucking dam around the patent moat. Just to be sure.)
If there were no patents most of them would just be kept as secrets, and you would, for the most part, get right back where you started(if not in a worse position)
What you're talking about is a very specific area of patent law: Patents on manufacturing processes. The assumption is that without the patent the knowledge necessary to reproduce the products made with the method would be extremely difficult or impossible. This is nonsense in this day and age.
Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process and underpaid employees who know the secrets can be easily poached. Therefore, the entire concept of patents existing for the sake of disclosure falls flat on its face.
> Modern engineers of varying sorts can reverse engineer basically any process
This is in part because they are steeped in a society where essentially all innovations are published, and have been for hundreds of years. This would not be the case if each engineer could only draw on a single career's worth of exposure to actual practices.
The problems aren't patents. The alternative to patents are company secrets, which are much less conductive to innovation.
The point of a patent is that a company can share something without it being immediately used by their competition, who didn't have to do the RnD, and now obviously can undercut them.
The problem is that the patent system is largely gamed and exists to a significant extent to drag your opponents and random companies into multi million dollar lawsuits over the most flimsy excuse of a research result.
This take just does not concord with reality. The rate at which innovation has happened since the first patent was issued in the 1400s is many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which it happened before.
I'm would not argue that patents are the cause of this rapid pace of innovation, but the data does not come anywhere close to supporting your claim.
The rate at which innovation has happened since Constantinople fell is also many orders of magnitude higher than the rate at which it happened before. More evidence is needed to assess how much each event contributed to this innovation rate.
> It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape
This is a strong claim, without any evidence to support it.
In fact, a look at the historical record, as others have pointed out, very much shows an extremely strong correlation between intellectual property rights and technological development. Sure, this is merely correlation, but that's certainly better than a strong claim without any evidence.
I'm curious though, if intellectual property was no longer a thing, which industries would need to be completely restructured. Some rather important ones, I would say. Journalism, in my mind, being at the top of the list. Not that it would be impossible, but the implications would very much be profound. I'm not sure what such a world would look like, but the transition would likely be rather difficult. Maybe it would work out better in the end? Who knows!?
Thanks for the reference. I downloaded the book, and looked up the parts that talked about newspapers, in particular. I found the arguments to generally be counter to what the industry has figured out, in terms of actual survival.
From the late 90s to the early 2010s the news industry was very pro-active about making their work freely available to everyone. This made enforcing copyright on news articles not really a thing. Coinciding with this the news industry rapidly shrunk, and is now a shell of what it used to be.
Interestingly, the trend of "free" reporting is now strongly reversing. Many publications now put most of their work behind a paywall, no longer freely giving away the material they produce.
From the book:
"The distribution of news on the Internet makes an interesting contrast to
the distribution of music. While the RIAA has used every imaginable legal
(and in some cases illegal) strategy to keep music off the Internet, the news
reporting industry has embraced the Internet. Most major news agencies
have a Web site where news stories may be viewed for, at most, the cost of
a free registration. Far from discouraging the copying of news stories, most
sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news
is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire
newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example
of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost
entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news
has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this
should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of
going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can
possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to
get the news?"
What the authors of this book don't state is that, the ramifications of this shift to "freely shared" news has meant that far fewer journalists are out there actually reporting. (The layoffs have been massive.) They go on to say, just a few sentences later that "the news industry has been thriving, profitable."
Obviously, this is just not true. The news industry is struggling. The layoffs have been massive. This type of pain in the industry was happening in 2008, when the book was published, and continues still.
With the authors missing such glaring (and important) facts, it's hard to take their arguments seriously.
I disagree. Societies with better human rights (internally - not necessarily how they treated people outside their society) have tended to make more advances historically.
AWS made 90.8 billion in 2023. I think a $525 million charge for using a smaller company's intellectual property reflects exactly what you're saying.
If IP was more important then the lawsuit probably would've gathered more than half a percent of Amazon's revenue for something that was '"essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."'
AWS didn't steal the technology. They re-invented it in a way that was similar to a patented technology. Imo this is a failure of the patent system. AWS should not have to pay anything in an ideal system.
What is your alternative to IP that solves the secrecy problem? We've created an environment where companies can share most of what they are doing when it comes to AI. How much quicker has AI advanced because researchers at one company can learn progress and techniques from other companies?
IP doesn't feel great but it feels a lot better than having every bit of research be a trade secret.
This doesn't seem like a few protocol fields, but about the entire mechanism of distributing the information and how to get from a request to any one server in the distributed network to the one that actually stores the information you requested (at least looking at the claims in your first patent).
I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000 when the application was made, so I'm not saying this is a valid patent, but it doesn't seem like a completely frivolous patent to me at first glance.
Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.
I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings.
The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference.
None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they invented a directory backed DNS service and web browser connections. This company sounds like one massive troll.
Another poster I think put it better: what the patent is describing is essentially building a DNS system for data. Claim 1 describes how DNS forwarders work (the "client" is a DNS client, the "server" is a DNS forwarder, and the "data location server" is a DNS authoritative name server). Claim 10 then describes how a DNS recursive resolver works (the "client" is the rescursive resolver, and the "data location servers" are authoritative name servers). Claims 17 and 18 then essentially describe the full distributed DB that uses this DNS-like mechanism for retrieval.
The sub-claims are just covering minor variations of the implementation, and can safely be ignored in general in any patent.
IANAL but there was a patent describing a USB-powered vibrator.
While the idea of a vibrator is not new, and the idea of powering devices via USB isn't new either, the combination of these two non-new ideas was new.
The patent was granted, and when someone (not the patent holder) produced a USB-powered vibrator, they were found in a violation of the patent in question.
Similarly, if someone made a patent about "building a DNS system for data", and someone else used that idea to actually build that system, they may be in a violation of the patent. The more claims (or sub-claims) there are, the more specific the innovation was, and now the question is whether the supposed infringement was actually implementing all of the claims of the patent.
That sounds ridiculous to me... By the same logic, I could patent a car that is charged by USB (not very efficient, but eh, it's new !) and then nobody could build a car charged via USB ?
If you paid the filing dues (a significant sum), and nobody has patented that before, then yes.
> nobody could build a car charged via USB?
Anybody could build a car powered by USB, and you could then sue them for the infringement of your patent. It could then go in many directions, from you becoming very rich, to your patent being invalidated and you found responsible for court fees.
It's so not ridiculous that Amazon was able to prevent the entire ecommerce industry from implementing anything even close to a "one click purchase" flow because of a patent. Not because you couldn't see Amazon's source code for the feature, or couldn't come up with your own completely different implementation of the idea, but because as long as you can convince a completely unsophisticated and inexpert jury members that a paragraph of extremely vague text can be read in any way to apply to anyone else's system, you are violating their patent.
Imagine being able to patent addition, or the very concept of a cake, such that nobody could make a product that was bready and/or sweet without paying you a protection fee.
Remember that the US patent office had to expressly ban any patent for "perpetual motion machine", not because it is literally impossible by physical reality, but because they kept granting patents for physically impossible perpetual motion machines
The patent system is the problem. None of this should have been granted but when you really try to define what software patents are novel it becomes incredibly difficult.
Just because you think this is trivial does not mean a layperson does.
Is an encryption algo novel? What's novel about it, it's just a hashing function with some new parameters.
The reality is, software patents are a joke and should be dropped entirely. Copyright is enough protection for most use cases.
Aka, don't hate the player, hate the game. And ideally, do something to fix it instead of complaining about "trolls" as if that'll ever fix the issue.
IANAL but the route to resolve this seems to be to challenge the patent on the grounds it should never have been granted and have it overturned, which it looks very much like it would be an easy argument to make, if not easy to achieve in practice.
The problem is the cost of doing this. If it gets overturned, the defendant shouldn’t be the one to bear the cost. I’d be happy with either 1) the patent owner or 2) the patent office, who didn’t do its job properly.
The UK and USA patent offices, I understand, have procedures to file evidence showing a patent application is not valid - eg because of the 'invention' already being known.
Your comment seems to relate more to unfairness in [lack of] awards of costs in USA legal proceedings.
If you sue me for something I didn't do then it shouldn't cost me anything; that seems reasonable whether the domain is IPR or any other aspect of life.
This varies between countries. AFAIK it is far harder to get the other side to pay your costs if you successfully defend a case in the US than it is in the UK.
While I agree with you, I can't see how we could ever fix the issue.
The same patent holders are the biggest backers of our politicians and will absolutely never allow any reasonable fix to the system itself.
All I read is how we should vote and yell at our representatives, completely ignoring the fact they were only elected because of donations from those benefiting from this system in the first place.
Not reading the patents, having a metadata server separate from the stored object data has been around for a long time. For example: IIRC, Lustre does this and was around well before the cloud (to the point where any patents that may have applied would have expired). Many HPC storage systems work with split metadata and object storage nodes, I’m just not sure how long others have been around. But, I’m sure AWS tried to get the patents invalidated first… right?
If this covered separate store networks, then maybe that’s somewhat unique, but that’s not a far leap for me.
According to Wikipedia, Lustre was released in 2003, while these patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 (they were only granted much later, in 2007, but the filing date is the most relevant), so that's not a good example. The patents are expired today, but they weren't in 2018 when this suit was filed.
Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially: how close is AWS' implementation to the exact algorithm they describe? How many others came to the exact same implementation not knowing about this patent, potentially proving that it didn't actually meet the bar for novelty at the time it was granted?
It's supposed to be very unlikely, unless you're actively looking for trouble. In principle, patents are supposed to only be given out for inventions that pass a bar of novelty. If that were true (it often isn't), it should ensure that it's very very unlikely for others to arrive at the same patentable invention independently. If they do, tough luck to the second person.
Still, patents become public from the moment they are filed. So you can scour the patent applications database as well if you fear others have already filed for a patent for something you are trying to do. Of course, that will mean that, if you go ahead with your own implementation and the patent is later granted, you will not be able to claim that you didn't know about this, and will face higher damages if you end up in a lawsuit.
The principle here is that a company decides to publish some internal discovery instead of keeping it for themselves, and the government in return grants them a limited time monopoly on that invention. The company could instead keep the invention a secret, but in that case, they can't stop others from using it, and if someone else patents it, their secret invention can actually infringe on the patent granted to someone else later.
Lustre started out as a research project in 1999, before commercialization and release. I assume this means more was publicly available about the design prior to the patents being filed.
Also, depending on the feature set listed in the patent, GPFS (which I remember using around 2000) was definitely around earlier than 2000. It was/is a clustered file system from IBM that had distributed storage nodes. Not sure how it did metadata though, which might not make it relevant to the patent, but the same ideas were definitely at work here.
(And it being IBM, you can be sure those were patented too)
My read of patent one is that they basically created DNS for storage. But DNS was invented in 1983 so I'm not really sure what was novel here other than pointing it at data, which uses a few extra headers, ala my comment.
Even if there was nothing closer to this than DNS I don't think this patent should be valid.
I think that in general, "use solution A to problem X to solve problem Y instead" is, in principle, a valid patent - assuming that it's not obvious that solution A would help with problem Y. After all, patents are about "how do I solve problem Y", not about the general algorithms themselves.
However, the "it's not obvious" part is very important. Not working in the field, it's not at all clear to me if using DNS for data was an obvious idea in ~2000 for building a distributed DB or not.
TXT records were specified an rfc published in 1987. SRV records in feb 2000.
This sounds to me like the web. You make a connection, you request a resource, it returns content and references to further resources that are required to get the full content of the resource you originally requested.
>Of course, if indeed AWS came to a very similar implementation themselves, as the jury found, then that further suggests that the idea is not that novel.
That wouldn't matter if AWS came to the very similar implementation on their own, after the Plaintiff's patent was issued (and became public information). Patent, unlike copyright, does not allow for independent invention/creation. If you come to, on your own, something already covered in a patent during its term, then you infringe.
Yes, it doesn't matter for determining if you are infringing on the patent. But it does matter for (a) the kinds of damages that you can be liable for, and (b) it can matter if you try to attack the patent itself to try to get it invalidated. Patents are only supposed to be granted for non-obvious ideas, so one way of attacking a patent is to show that many people came up with that idea independently, which is a strong argument that the idea doesn't pass the non-obviousness test and can get the patent invalidated.
They are, but the lawsuit was filed in 2018 when they were still in force. And the infringement is even older, so they can still claim damages for the whole period between AWS launch and 2020/2021.
I'm not a patent lawyer, just a programmer, but reading just the abstract, this seems to be covering a DNS system that can be configured via an API, which I guess does cover S3, but also, like, almost every other domain-related thing?
My reading of the claims is that they are mostly for a DNS server implemented using an object-oriented database, mapping the object tre with the DNS hierarchy and dedudcing IP at each level.
The rest is just this principle as pure software or as a hardware appliance with pre-installed software, and with a GUI to control the object mappings. But the central idea seems to be the OO aspect.
Edit: also, this doesn't seem to be the right patent. Another poster cites three different patents, one with a similar number to this one (the correct patent is 7,814,170, the one you cite is 7,814,180).
There were three counts the jury found in favor of Kove, one for each of these patents:
> as follows: (a) On Count 1 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,814,180; (b) On Count 2 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,233,978; (c) On Count 3 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,103,640.
Interesting. Given that '180 is assigned to InfoBlox and '170 is assigned to Econnectix like the other 2 patents, I believe that '170 is more likely to be the patent they actually used in the suit, and the verdict form has a typo.
Seems like they are patent trolling to me. Hope Amazon wins the appeal. Nightmare for their corporate counsel to have to walk a jury through this and just hope for the best
Amazon should just pay a bunch of people to write down a working implementation of the patent using a pencil and paper. It'd be a LOT of paper but it would meet the, "if it can be done with a pen and paper" criteria outlined in CLS Bank. It wouldn't even be complicated or difficult... Just tedious.
I don't get it, it is quite obvious that there are many prior art examples. Some easy ones are freenet and gnutella, both predating the patent by months. Even CODA filesystem (1987) checks all their patent claims.
But we realized if we feed the troll massive amounts of money then they can come back and pay more legal fees and create a need for our worthless court!
Also the life of the startup entrepreneur is just too easy these days. They need to feel more stress that at any moment some rando from Florida can come in crush what they've been working on the last 7 years.
Im still very undecided on software patents and have been since they were first awarded
software patents in general are a bad idea imho, go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain.
otoh
society benefits a lot from good ideas entering the public domain, and the patent system is fairly effective at stopping everyone keeping their secret sauce a secret.
Since the US has them, and this decision seems fairly clear cut (or Amazon and google would have got them thrown out as invalid already) about all I can say is congratulations to Kove.
I’d be curious to hear an anecdote about a single software patent that benefited society at large.
For example, I agree it would be very interesting and arguably valuable to have a public document describing how Amazon built S3. Unfortunately, these patents don’t describe what AWS did. They describe how some random “inventor” thought a system like that could be built (more realistically, of course, that rando likely never dreamed of any valuable application like S3).
I've yet to see a software patent which wouldn't have been reinvented by someone else looking at the same problem. The thing with software is that the cost to experiment is extremely low compared to other fields so we can, and do, "just try it".
At this point in my career for example everything I do is basically tweaking or adapting patterns I've seen in other systems to the ones I'm working on.
Cost to experiment being low doesn't make non-obvious ideas obvious. As a trained researcher with patents I'm no longer surprised by how often simple ideas have remained undiscovered for decades.
> go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain.
If you rely on trade secrets, then you can't sell your software without protecting it using a dongle or whatever; your "customer" might in fact be your competitor. It's not that hard to figure out how a piece of software works, and to write your own code that works the same way.
It's not hard to figure out how some novel machine works either; but how to fabricate it is often a tougher challenge. It's easy enough to explain how a transistor works; fabricating reliable transistors at scale is another question.
Hmm. A dongle was used to protect trade-secret software in the days before software patents. Now SaaS is used instead; therefore software patents are still unnecessary?
I used to work for a firm that rented all its premises. My boss explained to me that the company's assets were its software, and nothing else. The patent portfolio is the physical manifestation of those assets - you can borrow against a patent portfolio, but not against a vault full of trade secrets.
You'd think he'd have mentioned staff; but staff can leave, and you can't secure loans and investment against employees.
Anyway, it looks as if that firm at least was using patents not as a way of preventing unfair competition and the stealing of inventions, but as a financial instrument. That's not what they're supposed to be for. And the fact they are used that way makes it horribly difficult to reform the patent system; if patents are like (e.g.) bonds, then reforming the patent system carries the risk of crashing the financial system.
Software patents include a detailed explanation of the way the technology works, in return for telling society how the technology works (so anyone can use it at the expiry of the patent) the government grants exclusive use of the technology - patents are a trade.
If an inventor keeps (can keep) their technology secret, it is better for them to not patent it - and they can keep exclusive use of it as long as they can keep it secret.
Trade secrets laws are far more brutal than patents iirc.
This is why I am undecided, there are no easy answers.
but then there would be no incentive to publish the internal workings of the innovation, and you are back to trade secrets. 20/25 years is already fairly short tbh.
In the future, there will be only two companies. One will hold the patent on walking up a hill, while the other will hold the patent on walking down a hill. The major debate will be whose patent you are violating if you are only halfway up.
Kove owns three data storage patents that it alleges AWS has infringed: U.S. Patent No. 7,103,640 (the '640 Patent), entitled "Network Distributed Tracking Wire Transfer Protocol"; U.S. Patent No. 7,814,170 (the '170 Patent), entitled "Network Distributed Tracking Wire Transfer Protocol"; and U.S. Patent No. 7,233,978 (the '978 Patent), entitled "Method and Apparatus for Managing Location Information in a Network Separate From the Data to Which the Location Information Pertains."
Apparently by taking prior art (DNS, server,user interface), and packaging it into a single "product" (DNS software optimized for specific hardware) - You've created a new thing.
It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.
The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.