Patent-ability

I just listened to Planet Money's latest podcast, The Case Against Patents, and had several comments on it.  (And perhaps I should preface this by mentioning that I'm a regular reader of TechDirt, and if you search for patents there, you'll find a lot of problems with the system.  And probably links to the works of the economists interviewed for the show.)

My biggest problem with the podcast has to do with the language used.  In particular, referring to working from someone else's patent as "stealing".  It isn't stealing; nothing is being taken.  And if I invent something, and can't use that idea better than someone reading my patent, I deserve to lose the possible opportunity cost losses from that person using that idea.  That opportunity loss is the only thing "taken", and under no circumstances should that be referred to as stealing.

Further to that point, developing a patent is roughtly one percent of the cost of developing a product.  If I develop that patent first, I've got a leg up on doing that other 99%; I've started first.

And frankly, if the market opportunity itself isn't enough incentive, in its own right, to turn that idea into a product, then the idea isn't worth a patent anyway (or shouldn't be).

And a note on drugs: putting the government more directly in charge of choosing directions would certainly have some downsides, but here's one upside.  There would be development on antibiotics again; right now, there's almost nothing, because it doesn't pay well enough.  They'd rather develop drugs for chronic conditions, because it forces people to keep buying the drug.

Also, the governments review all the studies that drive approval forward already, so the government knows how it's done.

There's another benefit as well.  When studies show bad side effects, they are sometimes re-done to try to avoid those showing up (which is one of the reasons we get things like Fenphen and Ephedra going on the market, even though they'll sometimes kill people.  Not the only reason, but it does happen).  When those studies are re-done, the government usually doesn't see the bad studies until after the fact (if ever).  If the government is directly running the studies, they'll see all of them.

Patently Obvious

[This, also, I wrote a couple of days ago.  Not only that, but I also did not anticipate a verdict coming back so quickly.]
I've been getting more and more educated on the patent system for the past several years, and I must admit, the more I find out about it, the less needed I think it is.

So it's with some ambivalence that I look at the current battle royale between Apple and Samsung (over phone and tablet appearance, mostly). I do favor Apple products. The Samsung models just have no interest for me (largely for software reasons).

So you'd think I'd be happy to see what's happening, as Apple seems to have a very strong case (I was pretty skeptical until some of Samsung's internal documents came out). And short-term, I'd rather Apple get more money, I suppose.

But I think the loser in this will inevitably be the consumer; I think it'll lead to fewer choices, and it will strengthen software patents, which I have to admit to being particularly strongly against (I think I've just about always been against software patents; definitely, I've been against them for far longer than I've even considered whether the whole system is broken).

I've just never heard of a software patent that I thought was truly innovative.

And again, since patents are legal monopolies, the inevitable loser of bogus patents are the consumers. It slows down innovation, and subjects truly innovative companies to costly suits by patent trolls (and others, but especially by trolls).

Update:  Now that the verdict is in, and Apple has won (though the award dropped nearly to a third of what Apple was asking), yeah, I don't find myself too happy about what happened.  Lots of lawyers made lost of money, and less went into technological innovation.  Just not a win for anyone (except, perhaps, for Apple.  And I'm not even certain that they did; it might have removed some of their motivation for further innovation.  We'll have to wait and see on that one).

Of course, there's also the fact that this will certainly get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.  Maybe the Supremes will knock out the patents.  We can hope.  Because again, the appeals benefit no one but the lawyers.

Needed: Patent #1

Some friends were over yesterday for a small party. One of them fairly recently became a contractor for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), and another asked him what the first patent was. The one friend had no idea, but it got me curious.

So a short search today yielded this patent. The patent itself isn't really all that interesting (except, perhaps, to historians of farm machinery (at least, I think that's what it applies to)), but there is a small curiosity about the inventor himself (J Ruggles, who, I presume, is not John Ruggles), and more interest in the year of issue, 1836.

This would imply, at least, that despite the Constitutional support for patents, that there were none issued for almost fifty years. So how necessary is the incentive of that 20-year government-granted monopoly?

Update: I apparently searched a bit too quickly. I missed that there was more than one series of numbers. The pre-1836 ones are numbered X000001-???. The first one was issued in 1790, and went to Samuel Hopkins for a process involving potash and pearl ash (?). Interestingly, signed by George Washington himself. I wonder what the last patent signed by the President was.

Patent as invention stifling

I read this post over at Techdirt with some curiosity. The interesting part, to me, isn't the case itself, but rather that the judge implicitly recognized that patents actually stifle innovation (if only for "short times").

I've been moving more and more over the past few years to feeling that the entire patent system is useless. It started with the realization that there is no societal benefit to software and business method patents (where an idea, rather than an implementation, is patented), but more and more I'm feeling like there is no benefit to any patents.

And the "short time" bit? Well, if the judge feels that twenty years is a short time, then I would posit that he hasn't been paying much attention to how quickly technology is moving forward these days.