They aren't cancelling the patents because of some ethical medicine-must-be-free reason. They are cancelling them because they are about to be revoked. A sort of, you-can't-fire-me-if-i-quit-first move.
But why? Is there some sort of precedent they are seeking to avoid? Is this just them giving in the towel and looking to avoid further legal fees? Why are they cancelling instead of just letting the process play out?
They might be trying to avoid discovery which voids side agreements concerning confidentiality and possibly collusion / cooperation. Such conditions coming to light might undermine defense of the same / related patents in other jurisdictions.
Hypothetically, and IANAL.
Edit: I'd say the article supports this interpretation.
If the EU patent is revoked in court in EU, the court in other country almost certainly will revoke the equivalent patent in their country because the precedent.
Which other country? Surely you dont mean for EU member states, since the patent would now be cancelled.
For other countries, with different legal systems? The ruling wouldn't be binding as precedent of foreign courts doesn't bind and the law on what makes a valid patent is different. Maybe it looks kind of bad, but so does cancelling your patents right before they are ruled invalid.
IANAL, but precedents are generally not binding in Europe (Poland at least) - they just serve as an argument. From that perspective it doesn’t matter much if it’s the same or a different country.
> In the US, the Broad Institute has also been selling licenses to use CRISPR.
Including patents owned by MIT, no? It feels like this could use a disclosure and some additional context to understand where the incentives here are. I've walked away feeling like I know less after having read this.
"But they make innovation thrive by providing an incentive to blah blah blah".
Not anymore in this day and age. Money comes mostly from the government, anyway, and plenty of really smart researchers would just be happy to put out their stuff out for the public benefit (and already do, btw). Even if they didn't the current patent system ends up giving them like 1% of profits, lol.
The business case for "but I want to protect the market I created" can be sufficiently solved with trade secrets and trademarks. Patents sound nice in theory, but in practice they only hinder innovation, the opposite of what they're supposed to do.
How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
Do you think that companies doing research see a benefit in being able to patent their innovations? I.e. do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
> From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds. Of course I'm likely in a different country to you, and mine has very explicit grants and tax benefits for R&D, but even when we were partnering with IBM we didn't patent the work I was doing (for a production homomorphic encryption implementation in 2014).
So I dunno. There are other mechanisms that can arise that still get yourself a job and paid without stifling innovation the way patents currently can do today.
The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.
> Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds
But I didn't argue that you must file patents in order to do research, or even to be well paid. I argued that the existence of patents incentives research, and that I wouldn't have been paid as much if my work (chip design) didn't lead to patents being granted.
> The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.
Most companies reach a certain point and engineering teams get messages from lawyers to schedule meetings "to learn about what you're working on". Those meetings are fishing expeditions to try and see what is patentable. Then they repeat this every once in a while.
So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".
That does not match my experience in any company I worked at.
We would solve problems and when we had a decent solution we would discuss with our management whether they thought it was noteworthy enough to start the internal patent application process.
The stage of development at which a patent was pursued depended on how much of a breakthrough it was.
Of course you don't design something "exclusively to patent it". It would make no sense -- a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI.
>a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI
Lol. 99% of patents are cruft. And I'd be wildly surprised if revenue from patent licensing at the companies you worked at was more than a single digit percentage; mayyyyyybeeee Qualcomm but am too lazy atm. to dive through their financial statements.
Patents provide value well beyond whatever royalties you may get from them.
Just think for a moment: why would a for-profit company go through the cost of filing a patent application if they didn't expect to obtain a return? Seriously, give it a moment. Those IP lawyers aren't cheap. It works even if only a small percentage of patents provide the lion's share of the revenue.
Look at any settlements between multinationals and see the role that patents play at the negotiation table, for instance.
Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.
To answer your (rhetorical) question, it is common to file patents for moat-building purposes, i.e. to prevent competition. This is one reason lots of obvious and frivolous patents are filed, and why some companies have cultures that encourage filing as many as possible. There is not necessarily a direct return in the case where you stifle competition, (or threaten to), though it's good for the bottom line.
Alternatively, you have patent trolling which gets a return not through direct use of inventions, but through litigation. It's again not so much that the invention has value but that it interferes with value generation in a way that helps profits. Both cases are abuse of the system, and both cases are common. I'm sure those are the kinds of patents that GP referred to as "cruft."
A patent can only "stifle competition" when the invention has market value. Therefore, the company that filed that patent had produced something valuable in the first place. I argue that they deserve to benefit from it.
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
Inventions with market value are protected by trade secrets and only trivial and tedious part are patented around this true secret. In that case, nobody knows the true secret by reading you 1000000 patents. But, if they independently invent it again, some methods involves in this process can easily violate one of the 1000000 patents.
All that suggests is that patents produced by academia have a really crappy ROI. Not surprised at all, given how little incentive academia has to produce marketable products.
Also, you directly contradict yourself when you state that (1) patents unfairly enrich their holders and (2) patents provide a poor ROI. Which way is it?
Example of what you said earlier -- you keep commenting under two different accounts.
>> [ME] Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
> [YOU] The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that
I suspect both are true, for different types of patents.
Tons of low-quality, generic software patents are good for extracting small settlements. Especially when the firm wielding said patents can dissolve and reform overnight to dodge negative judgements, there's very little downside.
Separately, funding serious research purely for the purposes of creating high quality patents does not seem like a winning proposition.
Unsure of where creating patents in the normal course of business and using them for M&A leverage or for tit-for-tat deterrence falls on ROI scale.
Of course you do, when you start a project you know how you're going to do it. Even if you never done it before and it might fail, you know what you're going to try, so you know from the outset if it's patentable or if your attempt is based on someone else's approach so it's not patentable.
> when you start a project you know how you're going to do it
In my experience that has only been true for the simplest tasks I've been assigned to do. The only examples that come to mind are stuff I did as a junior developer. YMMV, of course.
As my career progressed more towards the R part of R&D, uncertainty skyrocketed.
>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
20+ years and counting.
>Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that. (But a very weak one, tbh).
>What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
On academia, the effect would be negligible. For some business it would matter, of course, but the immense majority of research is publicly funded anyway.
>I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
As much as I like capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money. I would never put their interests over the interests of what's good for society. But to each its own.
The argument of "why would I invest 1B in R&D to develop a drug that can be copied the next day it goes into the market" is valid only on a first, and very shallow, glance. That "1B drug" is actually a several trillion drug which was 99% subsidized by the work of researchers in public institutions. I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich". They're in for the money and if they don't make money, boo hoo, why should I care?
Richard Stallman had it right with the GPL, I wish something similar existed in science. You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets? Go for it! But do it on your own, with a tech tree that belongs to you.
>>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
> 20+ years and counting
I took a moment to search for Morales Tapia in Google Patents and could not find any matches. You do have an impressive resume, though.
> I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich".
Is PCR patented, or was it at some point? Companies constantly pay patent royalties for inventions that they want to use, whether the patent is held by an academic institution or not.
If the inventors of PCR wanted to receive royalties from it, patent law was there to help them achieve just that.
I truly don't understand how somebody who works in research isn't familiar with this process.
> You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets?
Loud YES! And it only recently came off patent. This was really important for thermalcycler companies such as Bio-rad, which probably wouldn't be the name it is without those patents.
And it is not like patents prevent academics from doing research, either, as there are academic exceptions. In fact, the patent filing process forces the inventors to disclose how their invention works in detail, which makes it easier for academics to build on those ideas if they want to. It's only commercial applications that are really bound by IP licensing agreements, to my knowledge.
I really like capitalism but the benefit of some particular private companies and/or private individuals over others is of no real importance for me. I'm (almost) a free market absolutist.
At least the patent system is completely broken. At least 90% of the granted patents are bullshit.
I myself am the "inventor" of a nonsense patent. There is prior art and it lacks any significant new step not obvious for anyone trained in the field. At the time I was working in a big European corporation being the market leader of their field. R&D was required to submit all new product features we were working on. The patent department distilled that into patents, even though we told them there is prior art.
Being the market leader we first got it accepted in our home country, then also in EU and US. Only Japan rightfully rejected it. Well, they were our not so successful competitors.
One of the reasons I don't want to work for corporations anymore. I vaguely remember some presentation that corporations have the traits of criminals. Should dig that out again...
There's a movie "Corporation" (2003) that makes an argument that the corporations behave like psychopaths (in a medical sense i.e. the diagnostic criteria).
The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.
If I don't build it myself and can exploit myself, I get nothing and somebody else gets everything, so why shouldn't I just shut up completely? If I contribute something to the design of nuclear power plants, that the nuclear plant people would never come up with because people from my field, whatever that is, don't look at their stuff, then I obviously can't build my own nuclear power plant to compete with them.
The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
The fact that Open Source Software exists at all, and is a thriving activity in the world of software development by thousands of people everywhere (not that it doesn't have it's problems) means that no, for lots of people an incentive to share their knowledge isn't needed any more than knowing they are making the world a bit better with their contribution. Not everything is about incentives and money, money, money.
Yes, but developing things can involve substantial investment. It's not just a hobby.
If I want to design a new type of pump, we're probably talking about a lot of work, and probably paying people to machine it and maybe paying an expert in another area to do some engineering work on some aspect of it.
The world as a whole is not like software. Furthermore, new things require groups of people getting into them. If we look at deep learning research, how much is from hobbyists?
There is some, from people trying to get PhD student places at groups that demand impressive work and there are some dedicated hobbyists that are part of organisations, but most of the work is commercial or from universities. This is required to get masses of people to spend time on a problem.
Open source is a thing because it's the most rewarding path. The respect I earn giving my software away is worth a lot more than any money I could hope to earn selling it. It's not possible to sell software. I also don't want to be in the business of managing other people's personal data, and get regulated to death, which makes SaaS not an option. All the paths to making money on your own in software are packed with stress, sociopaths, and landmines with little hope of striking gold. Software by its nature wants to be free, and most of the ways that exist to change that feel unnatural to me. It's much better to just live frugally and build things you love that you give away. Maybe this isn't the way things should be. If we had a sane and just economic system, then maybe I'd be an entrepreneur. I'm simply following incentives, and express no opinion on what's best or how the system ought to be.
It probably happens much more frequently that someone thinks about a new thing... and then finds out that someone else got a patent for that already. So you can't even use your own ideas, if someone else independently had the same idea before you. Even if the idea is something really simple, like: "here are two well-known things, but how about using both of them together?"
>The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.
99.9999% of people in the world who do not hold rights to a patent and still do what they like disagree.
>The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
This is one of those scenarios where one cannot really tell if OP is being honest or satirical.
> Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
... assuming you have the money to defend your patents (or even just find violations). Also, Bigco will just patent adjacent things like production processes and then force your company to trade. How many "small guy" patents were there in the recent years? It just does not fit to our world anymore.
Yeah. While reading the article (having by-passed all those pop up messages first), I had this feeling that dramas are part of every layer of life. I felt a little sad but couldn’t explain why.
Thanks for your clarification!
It works when you are catching up. Japanese companies used the same strategy post-WWII. And a lot of other countries, Japan is just a striking example as it was so visible and quick. “Made in Japan” went from derogatory to a sign of quality in about a generation.
Surprisingly when you are in the lead and others have to catch up, IP protections sound much better.
When you are in the lead anything that puts others down is good. That doesn't mean the system needs it to operate. Why would we need a system that protects the country in the lead?
I am not arguing about morality or justice. I am just saying that it is unlikely to happen, as the countries which value IP protection have the most to lose from abolishing it. The people in these countries might have different feelings but I don’t think this is going to be a deal breaker any time soon either way.
Personally, I won’t claim much because I haven’t done any survey. IP protection itself sounds reasonable, but guardrails are needed because the incentives to bullshit are quite strong.
The US industrial revolution was based on it: Samuel "Slater the traitor" memorized designs from a factory he worked at in England and became rich after bringing them to the US.
> Wasn't this derogatory vs. quality more of a stereotype though?
Yes, but not entirely. Japanese cameras, for example, were basically cheap ripoffs of German models up until after WW2. Japanese motorbikes were infamous for being cheap and flimsy in the 1970s to 1980s. Same for the cars, being a Toyota was not a good thing before the 1990s. Sure, there was some inertia and this kind of reputation takes time to shake off. The changes in product quality were gradual and a bit earlier than the changes in perception by the market (the Western European one, at least).
> Japan has long history of craftsmanship so I imagine they made high quality stuff for a while.
So does China. The main thing is that the exports we see are the stuff made cheaply in factories, not the bespoke items crafted from raw materials by an artisan in their workshop. Japanese companies are happy to build on the cheap as well.
And Chinese factories can make very high quality goods, if they put some effort in quality control. I am willing to bet that at some point they’ll be undercut and will go upmarket for a larger and larger slice of their exports.
In my experience it’s usually a reference to the difference between pre- and post-WWII Japan.
Once Deming made it over there and sold the idea of statistical quality control they were at the forefront of manufacturing rather than a laughingstock.
There are possibly also longer term repercussions from abolishing patents in that people or companies will naturally instead protect themselves via keeping trade secrets instead. This will probably result in some inventions being lost to history instead of being on the public record once the patent expires.
How useful are patent records for rebuilding technology?
I imagine that patent is not a recipe, but description used identify infringements.
If goal is only to identify infringements, then I would leave bunch of stuff out of patents. (Later I could fill new patent for same thing just describe those parts that were left out in the first one)
In theory the patent is supposed to describe everything necessary to reproduce the invention. If something is left out that is critical then there isn't really any invention there and the patent shouldn't be awarded. I understand that in practice some patents are written in such a way to make this difficult.
Yeah, trade secrets will become bigger, so? You need to expose the product. Or the process, things get reverse engineer. Overall, the net effect will likely be positive if monopolies end.
You mean other countries patents, right? Chinese companies are happy to enforce their own IP rights and Chinese courts will enforce foreign patents in some cases.
The Netherlands was the last country in Europe to introduce patent law AFTER Philips stole bulb manufacturing technology from Edison (Philips is now a huge patent holder and actively steals ideas from startups to turn them into patents).
If you can't innovate, buy (or steal) someone else's invention, and use a government granted monopoly (i.e. patent) to prevent anyone else from innovating further and making a better version.
Maybe patents provide an incentive to be innovative, but they also create a barrier to innovating on top of technology that is protected by patents.
Some people remembering things and going elsewhere and using what they remember seems a little different from copying of millions of documents and schematics and plans.
I'd say it is the same difference between a police officer remembering a license plate for the getaway car of a bank robbery, and having pervasive automatic surveillance tracking everywhere everyone goes.
Yes, I guess it is very efficient to not need to spend any money on R&D, and just steal from those who do spend the money.
Will anyone spend money on R&D in this efficient world when the result is you just go out of business because you can't compete against anyone who does?
What defines what is and is not "valid" property? The entire concept of property itself only exists because it's a useful fiction. Prehistoric hunter gatherer societies might have had a loose sense of clan ownership over e.g. hunting grounds but the idea that you could parcel up an acre of land and own it would likely have seemed bizarre. Yet today some people spend their entire waking lives tracking who owns what properties
> What defines what is and is not "valid" property?
There are several ways to answer this provided it isn't rhetorical.
One approach is to examine how society collectively decides what counts as property. These decisions aren’t neutral or universal — they’re shaped by the power and interests of those who benefit most from them. I hope it's clear that there is a contradiction present between: "property is universal" and those who benefit most from property being true are those with the most property.
Historically, the ruling class has established what counts as “valid” property by embedding their preferences into law and enforcing them through two major systems: ideology and force. You and I are taught to accept these definitions through societal institutions like schools, media, and legal systems. These institutions present ideas like patents or private property as natural or universal truths, making alternative ways of thinking seem unrealistic or unthinkable. For instance, when people say things like, “Patents protect natural rights,” or “Every other system has failed,” they’re reflecting this conditioning — whether or not they personally benefit from it.
The concept of property is enforced through systems of control, like courts, fines, and even imprisonment. If someone challenges the validity of a patent, they stand to face financial penalties or legal repercussions. The idea of “valid” property isn’t just a belief — it’s something actively maintained through both persuasion and coercion.
Ultimately, those who gain the most from these systems (like corporations or wealthy individuals) have the power to shape both the ideas we accept and the rules we follow. They turn their interests into societal norms through a feedback loop of belief and enforcement. The system sustains itself by creating the reality it envisions - "hyperstition" is where our collective belief makes something real.
lets start that to be stolen, the thing needs to be tangible. and property needs to be a tangible thing. and by stealing, preventing from accessing also counts.
Perhaps the Chinese industrialists are rewarding the IP holders the same way video gamers do: with exposure. And after all, we’ve been informed many times: information wants to be free. And we’ve been reminded as well: if they weren’t going to pay in the first place this isn’t revenue lost.
When you don't defend something like a property, profit goes out of building it. And that's the opposite of what we want to do in a capitalist society. Building intellectual property is a positive-sum thing. It makes humanity better. This is something we want to reward, make profitable.
Yep, in 2021 the FBI was opening a new China related investigation every 12 hours. China steals billions of dollars worth of industrial knowledge and secrets from the US every year through industrial espionage.
I feel like this is missing the why of it all.
They aren't cancelling the patents because of some ethical medicine-must-be-free reason. They are cancelling them because they are about to be revoked. A sort of, you-can't-fire-me-if-i-quit-first move.
But why? Is there some sort of precedent they are seeking to avoid? Is this just them giving in the towel and looking to avoid further legal fees? Why are they cancelling instead of just letting the process play out?
They might be trying to avoid discovery which voids side agreements concerning confidentiality and possibly collusion / cooperation. Such conditions coming to light might undermine defense of the same / related patents in other jurisdictions.
Hypothetically, and IANAL.
Edit: I'd say the article supports this interpretation.
If the EU patent is revoked in court in EU, the court in other country almost certainly will revoke the equivalent patent in their country because the precedent.
Which other country? Surely you dont mean for EU member states, since the patent would now be cancelled.
For other countries, with different legal systems? The ruling wouldn't be binding as precedent of foreign courts doesn't bind and the law on what makes a valid patent is different. Maybe it looks kind of bad, but so does cancelling your patents right before they are ruled invalid.
There are still national patents possible even if you don't need them once you have a European one.
IANAL, but precedents are generally not binding in Europe (Poland at least) - they just serve as an argument. From that perspective it doesn’t matter much if it’s the same or a different country.
(may be wrong here)
Maybe if the patent was revoked instead of cancelled it has different legal implications for that procedure
> In the US, the Broad Institute has also been selling licenses to use CRISPR.
Including patents owned by MIT, no? It feels like this could use a disclosure and some additional context to understand where the incentives here are. I've walked away feeling like I know less after having read this.
The patents are owned by the Broad, not MIT. The Broad is affiliated with MIT and Harvard, but is independently governed and its IP is its own IP.
Yes, the Broad Institute of MIT is licencing CRISPR patents owned by Broad.
Patents shouldn't exist at all, IMO.
"But they make innovation thrive by providing an incentive to blah blah blah".
Not anymore in this day and age. Money comes mostly from the government, anyway, and plenty of really smart researchers would just be happy to put out their stuff out for the public benefit (and already do, btw). Even if they didn't the current patent system ends up giving them like 1% of profits, lol.
The business case for "but I want to protect the market I created" can be sufficiently solved with trade secrets and trademarks. Patents sound nice in theory, but in practice they only hinder innovation, the opposite of what they're supposed to do.
How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
Do you think that companies doing research see a benefit in being able to patent their innovations? I.e. do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
> From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds. Of course I'm likely in a different country to you, and mine has very explicit grants and tax benefits for R&D, but even when we were partnering with IBM we didn't patent the work I was doing (for a production homomorphic encryption implementation in 2014).
So I dunno. There are other mechanisms that can arise that still get yourself a job and paid without stifling innovation the way patents currently can do today.
The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.
> Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds
But I didn't argue that you must file patents in order to do research, or even to be well paid. I argued that the existence of patents incentives research, and that I wouldn't have been paid as much if my work (chip design) didn't lead to patents being granted.
> The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.
I completely agree with that.
Most companies reach a certain point and engineering teams get messages from lawyers to schedule meetings "to learn about what you're working on". Those meetings are fishing expeditions to try and see what is patentable. Then they repeat this every once in a while.
So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".
That does not match my experience in any company I worked at.
We would solve problems and when we had a decent solution we would discuss with our management whether they thought it was noteworthy enough to start the internal patent application process.
The stage of development at which a patent was pursued depended on how much of a breakthrough it was.
Of course you don't design something "exclusively to patent it". It would make no sense -- a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI.
>a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI
Lol. 99% of patents are cruft. And I'd be wildly surprised if revenue from patent licensing at the companies you worked at was more than a single digit percentage; mayyyyyybeeee Qualcomm but am too lazy atm. to dive through their financial statements.
Edit: I was off by 2%. See [1].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/2017/11/13/in-todays...
Patents provide value well beyond whatever royalties you may get from them.
Just think for a moment: why would a for-profit company go through the cost of filing a patent application if they didn't expect to obtain a return? Seriously, give it a moment. Those IP lawyers aren't cheap. It works even if only a small percentage of patents provide the lion's share of the revenue.
Look at any settlements between multinationals and see the role that patents play at the negotiation table, for instance.
Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.
To answer your (rhetorical) question, it is common to file patents for moat-building purposes, i.e. to prevent competition. This is one reason lots of obvious and frivolous patents are filed, and why some companies have cultures that encourage filing as many as possible. There is not necessarily a direct return in the case where you stifle competition, (or threaten to), though it's good for the bottom line.
Alternatively, you have patent trolling which gets a return not through direct use of inventions, but through litigation. It's again not so much that the invention has value but that it interferes with value generation in a way that helps profits. Both cases are abuse of the system, and both cases are common. I'm sure those are the kinds of patents that GP referred to as "cruft."
A patent can only "stifle competition" when the invention has market value. Therefore, the company that filed that patent had produced something valuable in the first place. I argue that they deserve to benefit from it.
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
Inventions with market value are protected by trade secrets and only trivial and tedious part are patented around this true secret. In that case, nobody knows the true secret by reading you 1000000 patents. But, if they independently invent it again, some methods involves in this process can easily violate one of the 1000000 patents.
>But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
Incorrect. Patents actually have a really crappy ROI.
1: https://thelogic.co/news/universities-earned-just-75-million...
All that suggests is that patents produced by academia have a really crappy ROI. Not surprised at all, given how little incentive academia has to produce marketable products.
Also, you directly contradict yourself when you state that (1) patents unfairly enrich their holders and (2) patents provide a poor ROI. Which way is it?
Example of what you said earlier -- you keep commenting under two different accounts.
>> [ME] Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
> [YOU] The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that
I suspect both are true, for different types of patents.
Tons of low-quality, generic software patents are good for extracting small settlements. Especially when the firm wielding said patents can dissolve and reform overnight to dodge negative judgements, there's very little downside.
Separately, funding serious research purely for the purposes of creating high quality patents does not seem like a winning proposition.
Unsure of where creating patents in the normal course of business and using them for M&A leverage or for tit-for-tat deterrence falls on ROI scale.
I've been consistently arguing for #2. None of the statements I wrote suggest that patents provide a significant financial (#1) or social benefit.
>Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.
Wrong again, [1].
1: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/qcom/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
Meh. Things have changed since I left the company. Back then it was the majority of revenue.
Also, your data doesn't differentiate between chips and services, so it may well still be the case that IP revenue trumps chip sales.
Well you wouldn't know something is patentable from the outset, that's the whole point.
Of course you do, when you start a project you know how you're going to do it. Even if you never done it before and it might fail, you know what you're going to try, so you know from the outset if it's patentable or if your attempt is based on someone else's approach so it's not patentable.
So you know you are going to invent something totally novel before you invent it?
You either don't understand what 'novel' or 'patentable' means.
> when you start a project you know how you're going to do it
In my experience that has only been true for the simplest tasks I've been assigned to do. The only examples that come to mind are stuff I did as a junior developer. YMMV, of course.
As my career progressed more towards the R part of R&D, uncertainty skyrocketed.
A huge chunk of corporate bio R&D now goes into finding workaround reimplementations for patented publicly funded research.
Just opening public research wouldn't help us get remuneration from overseas use though unfortunately.
And making sure you don’t accidentally violate a patent when you’re just going down the most obvious path
>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
20+ years and counting.
>Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that. (But a very weak one, tbh).
>What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
On academia, the effect would be negligible. For some business it would matter, of course, but the immense majority of research is publicly funded anyway.
>I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
As much as I like capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money. I would never put their interests over the interests of what's good for society. But to each its own.
The argument of "why would I invest 1B in R&D to develop a drug that can be copied the next day it goes into the market" is valid only on a first, and very shallow, glance. That "1B drug" is actually a several trillion drug which was 99% subsidized by the work of researchers in public institutions. I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich". They're in for the money and if they don't make money, boo hoo, why should I care?
Richard Stallman had it right with the GPL, I wish something similar existed in science. You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets? Go for it! But do it on your own, with a tech tree that belongs to you.
>>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
> 20+ years and counting
I took a moment to search for Morales Tapia in Google Patents and could not find any matches. You do have an impressive resume, though.
> I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich".
Is PCR patented, or was it at some point? Companies constantly pay patent royalties for inventions that they want to use, whether the patent is held by an academic institution or not.
If the inventors of PCR wanted to receive royalties from it, patent law was there to help them achieve just that.
I truly don't understand how somebody who works in research isn't familiar with this process.
> You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets?
Ew.
> Is PCR patented, or was it at some point?
Loud YES! And it only recently came off patent. This was really important for thermalcycler companies such as Bio-rad, which probably wouldn't be the name it is without those patents.
So what was this guy complaining about, then?
And it is not like patents prevent academics from doing research, either, as there are academic exceptions. In fact, the patent filing process forces the inventors to disclose how their invention works in detail, which makes it easier for academics to build on those ideas if they want to. It's only commercial applications that are really bound by IP licensing agreements, to my knowledge.
It was an opinion. I explicitly wrote "IMO" in there.
If you don't like it I couldn't care less :^).
> It was an opinion. I explicitly wrote "IMO" in there.
Ctrl-F "IMO". No matches. Oops.
Ctrl-F "opinion". No matches. Oops.
And I'll leave this conversation here because neither of us is bothering to follow HN commenting guidelines at this point.
Good luck with your research and I hope that if you apply for a patent it will be granted sells well.
Bio-rad was founded 72 years ago, what are you talking about?
> As much as I love capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money.
As much as I love boxing, I don't really sympathize with athletes smashing each other's heads in.
I don't really get what point you're trying to make, if any.
“private companies and/or private individuals making money” is the core and quintessential foundation of capitalism.
Oh, I see. Yeah that could be worded better.
I really like capitalism but the benefit of some particular private companies and/or private individuals over others is of no real importance for me. I'm (almost) a free market absolutist.
A capitalist free market inevitably leads to monopolies.
Yes! Hence why I wrote "(almost)" there.
Some regulation is needed to make things fairer, and actually better. But in my preferred mix of capitalism, patents wouldn't be a thing.
At least the patent system is completely broken. At least 90% of the granted patents are bullshit.
I myself am the "inventor" of a nonsense patent. There is prior art and it lacks any significant new step not obvious for anyone trained in the field. At the time I was working in a big European corporation being the market leader of their field. R&D was required to submit all new product features we were working on. The patent department distilled that into patents, even though we told them there is prior art.
Being the market leader we first got it accepted in our home country, then also in EU and US. Only Japan rightfully rejected it. Well, they were our not so successful competitors.
One of the reasons I don't want to work for corporations anymore. I vaguely remember some presentation that corporations have the traits of criminals. Should dig that out again...
There's a movie "Corporation" (2003) that makes an argument that the corporations behave like psychopaths (in a medical sense i.e. the diagnostic criteria).
The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.
If I don't build it myself and can exploit myself, I get nothing and somebody else gets everything, so why shouldn't I just shut up completely? If I contribute something to the design of nuclear power plants, that the nuclear plant people would never come up with because people from my field, whatever that is, don't look at their stuff, then I obviously can't build my own nuclear power plant to compete with them.
The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
The fact that Open Source Software exists at all, and is a thriving activity in the world of software development by thousands of people everywhere (not that it doesn't have it's problems) means that no, for lots of people an incentive to share their knowledge isn't needed any more than knowing they are making the world a bit better with their contribution. Not everything is about incentives and money, money, money.
Yes, but developing things can involve substantial investment. It's not just a hobby.
If I want to design a new type of pump, we're probably talking about a lot of work, and probably paying people to machine it and maybe paying an expert in another area to do some engineering work on some aspect of it.
The world as a whole is not like software. Furthermore, new things require groups of people getting into them. If we look at deep learning research, how much is from hobbyists?
There is some, from people trying to get PhD student places at groups that demand impressive work and there are some dedicated hobbyists that are part of organisations, but most of the work is commercial or from universities. This is required to get masses of people to spend time on a problem.
Open source is a thing because it's the most rewarding path. The respect I earn giving my software away is worth a lot more than any money I could hope to earn selling it. It's not possible to sell software. I also don't want to be in the business of managing other people's personal data, and get regulated to death, which makes SaaS not an option. All the paths to making money on your own in software are packed with stress, sociopaths, and landmines with little hope of striking gold. Software by its nature wants to be free, and most of the ways that exist to change that feel unnatural to me. It's much better to just live frugally and build things you love that you give away. Maybe this isn't the way things should be. If we had a sane and just economic system, then maybe I'd be an entrepreneur. I'm simply following incentives, and express no opinion on what's best or how the system ought to be.
It probably happens much more frequently that someone thinks about a new thing... and then finds out that someone else got a patent for that already. So you can't even use your own ideas, if someone else independently had the same idea before you. Even if the idea is something really simple, like: "here are two well-known things, but how about using both of them together?"
>The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.
99.9999% of people in the world who do not hold rights to a patent and still do what they like disagree.
>The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
This is one of those scenarios where one cannot really tell if OP is being honest or satirical.
> Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
... assuming you have the money to defend your patents (or even just find violations). Also, Bigco will just patent adjacent things like production processes and then force your company to trade. How many "small guy" patents were there in the recent years? It just does not fit to our world anymore.
> against Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT
Bear in mind: this article is published by a magazine that belongs to MIT.
Yeah. While reading the article (having by-passed all those pop up messages first), I had this feeling that dramas are part of every layer of life. I felt a little sad but couldn’t explain why. Thanks for your clarification!
Partial bribery of the court? Two Nobel Laureates have to cancel their patents that excluded the "obvious" Protospacer Adjacent Motifs (PAMs).
Great find, that site was missing in my etc/hosts collection.
What a sad fucking world. I like what China does in the regard to patents. That is exactly what patents deserve.
It works when you are catching up. Japanese companies used the same strategy post-WWII. And a lot of other countries, Japan is just a striking example as it was so visible and quick. “Made in Japan” went from derogatory to a sign of quality in about a generation.
Surprisingly when you are in the lead and others have to catch up, IP protections sound much better.
When you are in the lead anything that puts others down is good. That doesn't mean the system needs it to operate. Why would we need a system that protects the country in the lead?
I am not arguing about morality or justice. I am just saying that it is unlikely to happen, as the countries which value IP protection have the most to lose from abolishing it. The people in these countries might have different feelings but I don’t think this is going to be a deal breaker any time soon either way.
Personally, I won’t claim much because I haven’t done any survey. IP protection itself sounds reasonable, but guardrails are needed because the incentives to bullshit are quite strong.
The US industrial revolution was based on it: Samuel "Slater the traitor" memorized designs from a factory he worked at in England and became rich after bringing them to the US.
Wasn't this derogatory vs. quality more of a stereotype though?
Japan has long history of craftsmanship so I imagine they made high quality stuff for a while.
> Wasn't this derogatory vs. quality more of a stereotype though?
Yes, but not entirely. Japanese cameras, for example, were basically cheap ripoffs of German models up until after WW2. Japanese motorbikes were infamous for being cheap and flimsy in the 1970s to 1980s. Same for the cars, being a Toyota was not a good thing before the 1990s. Sure, there was some inertia and this kind of reputation takes time to shake off. The changes in product quality were gradual and a bit earlier than the changes in perception by the market (the Western European one, at least).
> Japan has long history of craftsmanship so I imagine they made high quality stuff for a while.
So does China. The main thing is that the exports we see are the stuff made cheaply in factories, not the bespoke items crafted from raw materials by an artisan in their workshop. Japanese companies are happy to build on the cheap as well.
And Chinese factories can make very high quality goods, if they put some effort in quality control. I am willing to bet that at some point they’ll be undercut and will go upmarket for a larger and larger slice of their exports.
Up until mid-1970s Japanese goods were about where Aliexpress is now.
In my experience it’s usually a reference to the difference between pre- and post-WWII Japan.
Once Deming made it over there and sold the idea of statistical quality control they were at the forefront of manufacturing rather than a laughingstock.
There are possibly also longer term repercussions from abolishing patents in that people or companies will naturally instead protect themselves via keeping trade secrets instead. This will probably result in some inventions being lost to history instead of being on the public record once the patent expires.
How useful are patent records for rebuilding technology?
I imagine that patent is not a recipe, but description used identify infringements.
If goal is only to identify infringements, then I would leave bunch of stuff out of patents. (Later I could fill new patent for same thing just describe those parts that were left out in the first one)
In theory the patent is supposed to describe everything necessary to reproduce the invention. If something is left out that is critical then there isn't really any invention there and the patent shouldn't be awarded. I understand that in practice some patents are written in such a way to make this difficult.
Yeah, trade secrets will become bigger, so? You need to expose the product. Or the process, things get reverse engineer. Overall, the net effect will likely be positive if monopolies end.
If history is any clue, China will aggressively enforce its own patents against poorer countries by 2060 or so.
Several countries already went through this cycle.
You mean other countries patents, right? Chinese companies are happy to enforce their own IP rights and Chinese courts will enforce foreign patents in some cases.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-su...
https://www.adhesivesmag.com/articles/101029-medmix-files-pa...
...steal them from the Americans?
They learned from the best
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Germany did the same with book rights which helped them to become an industrial and scientific powerhouse.
The Netherlands was the last country in Europe to introduce patent law AFTER Philips stole bulb manufacturing technology from Edison (Philips is now a huge patent holder and actively steals ideas from startups to turn them into patents).
If you can't innovate, steal.
History shows us you copy first to build a foundation, refine and then innovate.
This was Japan's recent-ish narrative arc too, after all.
This is the proverbial standing on the shoulders of Giants, which we all do every day
If you can't innovate, buy (or steal) someone else's invention, and use a government granted monopoly (i.e. patent) to prevent anyone else from innovating further and making a better version.
Maybe patents provide an incentive to be innovative, but they also create a barrier to innovating on top of technology that is protected by patents.
Some people remembering things and going elsewhere and using what they remember seems a little different from copying of millions of documents and schematics and plans.
what's the difference? that they didn't use paper for schematics? it's the same process, isn't it?
I'd say it is the same difference between a police officer remembering a license plate for the getaway car of a bank robbery, and having pervasive automatic surveillance tracking everywhere everyone goes.
You do not like efficiency??
Yes, I guess it is very efficient to not need to spend any money on R&D, and just steal from those who do spend the money.
Will anyone spend money on R&D in this efficient world when the result is you just go out of business because you can't compete against anyone who does?
You can't "steal" what wasn't valid property to begin with - even if the law likes to pretend it is valid property.
What defines what is and is not "valid" property? The entire concept of property itself only exists because it's a useful fiction. Prehistoric hunter gatherer societies might have had a loose sense of clan ownership over e.g. hunting grounds but the idea that you could parcel up an acre of land and own it would likely have seemed bizarre. Yet today some people spend their entire waking lives tracking who owns what properties
> What defines what is and is not "valid" property?
There are several ways to answer this provided it isn't rhetorical.
One approach is to examine how society collectively decides what counts as property. These decisions aren’t neutral or universal — they’re shaped by the power and interests of those who benefit most from them. I hope it's clear that there is a contradiction present between: "property is universal" and those who benefit most from property being true are those with the most property.
Historically, the ruling class has established what counts as “valid” property by embedding their preferences into law and enforcing them through two major systems: ideology and force. You and I are taught to accept these definitions through societal institutions like schools, media, and legal systems. These institutions present ideas like patents or private property as natural or universal truths, making alternative ways of thinking seem unrealistic or unthinkable. For instance, when people say things like, “Patents protect natural rights,” or “Every other system has failed,” they’re reflecting this conditioning — whether or not they personally benefit from it.
The concept of property is enforced through systems of control, like courts, fines, and even imprisonment. If someone challenges the validity of a patent, they stand to face financial penalties or legal repercussions. The idea of “valid” property isn’t just a belief — it’s something actively maintained through both persuasion and coercion.
Ultimately, those who gain the most from these systems (like corporations or wealthy individuals) have the power to shape both the ideas we accept and the rules we follow. They turn their interests into societal norms through a feedback loop of belief and enforcement. The system sustains itself by creating the reality it envisions - "hyperstition" is where our collective belief makes something real.
lets start that to be stolen, the thing needs to be tangible. and property needs to be a tangible thing. and by stealing, preventing from accessing also counts.
No, there's no logical reason for that restriction.
I don't think the world is a net better place with no IP or copyright laws.
I do think the world is a net worse place with IP and copyright laws.
Perhaps the Chinese industrialists are rewarding the IP holders the same way video gamers do: with exposure. And after all, we’ve been informed many times: information wants to be free. And we’ve been reminded as well: if they weren’t going to pay in the first place this isn’t revenue lost.
It'll be a better place when IP and copyright laws have reasonable term limits.
There may be a net benefit from some class of patents, but that's very far from clear.
Drugs and chemical processes are the most obvious candidates. And there's some heavy empirical evidence against the later.
I would have agreed if only nobel difficult to find things were patented.
A better world wouldn't need them, but yeah, you're right.
We won’t know until we try it out.
Public ownership of capital assets has been tried, and tried, and tried... with the same results.
You can pretend to ignore the idea originally coined by Aristotle, but you can't will it into reality.
There is a huge difference between all capital assets being public, and not considering ideas to be a capital asset.
We do, tangentially. IP laws are enforce differently across the world and across timeperiods, and the differences make for wonderful experiments.
Think of pop music expansion in the Napster era as an example.
Yet successful pop artists are drowning in money.
I have really hard time having sympathy with massively multi-millionaires like Metallica bashing people ripping their stuff.
Even in countries with stronger IP, unknown artists are struggling. So restrictions are hardly an efficient solution
When you don't defend something like a property, profit goes out of building it. And that's the opposite of what we want to do in a capitalist society. Building intellectual property is a positive-sum thing. It makes humanity better. This is something we want to reward, make profitable.
Nonsense, it's anti-competitive. It works against the theoretical benefits of the private economy.
Maintaining monopolies through artificially raising the barier to entry for their competition (patents) is the exact opposite of capitalism.
Opposite of free market. Capitalism = private ownership and profit from ownership.
[dead]
Many candles can be lit from one.
Not so good for the people selling matches.
What would be the world if we hadn't "stolen" so many discoveries from China, specifically where would be the USA (gunpowder, print, et al)
I assure you. We waited 25 years after the invention of gunpowder before co-opting it.
More like 350 years.
I would say not dramatically different, since most of these fundamental discoveries were found by multiple people around the world.
bullshit.
movable type are not used in china until oil based ink and metal casting technology mature in Europe.
> ...steal them from the Americans?
... who stole from the Europeans.
Yep, in 2021 the FBI was opening a new China related investigation every 12 hours. China steals billions of dollars worth of industrial knowledge and secrets from the US every year through industrial espionage.
Billions a year seems like a great deal for the US, compared to the benefit it gets from trading with China.
You'd need to be claiming it's worth trillions a year in order to even consider cracking down on it.
[dead]
Now if only China would share all that stolen knowledge
How's that going
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649354