What would the world be like if all patents were banned tomorrow?
And by no patents, I mean that all current patents were suddenly void and anyone could produce products as they please. Would it improve innovation or be the end of the world as we know it?
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M$6 Answers
I think patents are much over-rated, esp in fields like software.
Do you real think any company will think.... "Gee I can't get a patent, so I will stop developing new products and see what happens?" If they did, they'd be out of business PDQ.
They would of course think about all the stuff that companies already think about... how can we extract the most value from our innovations, how can we get customers to be loyal, how can we prevent people discovering our trade secrets etc.
Sure there would be some changes in the way companies and industries are structured. A company like ARM that lives more or less by selling IP alone would get acquired by the Intels or Nokias of the world, rather than continue as a stand-alone entitiy.
A pretty telling take on patents is in this essay by Paul Graham:
http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
In a nutshell he says...
For startups, patents hardly matter as they don't have the financial muscle to defend them legally anyway, and frankly brilliant execution is worth a heck of a lot more than an original idea most of the time.
Meanwhile, large companies just use patents to protect themselves from people that would sue them, not because they think having a .patent intrinsically makes them a lot of money
Most always when there is any conflict over patents between large companies, it doesn't have a lot to do with the patents themselves, and is settled out of court.
Abolishing patents overnight certainly wouldn't be the end of the world as we know it.
Nor would it be a huge boost to innovation, but what it might do is allow some existing innovations to be used in applications that need to be very low cost to have a market at all. For example, making medicines for the very poor.
It's an interesting topic and a big question, but that's about all I have time to say right now.
You can read some more of my patent related thoughts in these answers...
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/how-will-the-palm-pre-get-around-apples-very-comprehensive-patents-on-multitouch-and-gestures
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/what-should-i-know-about-provisional-patents-on-software-what-do-people-think-of-legalzoom-s-review-service
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M$There will be inventors forever as there is always a way to make the world a better place. No inventor gets an idea or works the kinks of the idea out because they want a patent. They think of getting the patent after the fact. That means innovation is not effected by patents.
What is effected by patents is the extent to which innovation is brought to market. Sticking with a manufacturing example for purposes of this answer, it is very expensive to retool a factory or build one from scratch. When someone has a brilliant idea that's worth investors backing, the investors will only do it if they can realize a better than average return for their money. Otherwise they'll keep them in CD-s or T-Bills or whatever they can make money in. Without the protection of a patent, there could not be a "reasonable assumption" that their venture could be successful. It's already a higher than usual risk because the idea is innovative. Compound that with the risk of someone else beating them to market, or undercutting their price because they have no patent protection, and no investor will touch the deal.
(CDs and T-Bills are mentioned only as an example of a non-patent related way to make money and not necessarily as a good investment vehicle.)
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M$
I agree with most of what you said, but I don't think lack of patents would bury the ideas. I believe it would create a bigger market for micro-production. Think of building for a new innovation similar to a "micro-brew". Limited runs could be completed with minimal expense to test the market, profit from these runs would be used to upgrade that shop.
Though I even wonder how much of that would be needed.
Robotic technology already makes modern factories spectacularly flexible. The robots that make cars can make toys, cookie cutters, sculptures, furniture, appliances, and countless other things . . . for them the biggest upgrade is software.
I think healthcare R&D may come to a standstill unless the government provides huge subsidies.
Patents keep our economy and research competitive. I do believe that maybe 20 years may be too long to keep a patent and certain patents deemed of great public interest can have shorter terms like 5 or 10 years. But getting rid of patents altogether may be good for consumers in terms of generating more competition in the products we already have but in terms of innovation it's ultimately bad for us.
One exception may be fast moving industries like computing and software which develop so fast anyway that keeping exclusivity on something for a long time may have little to no effect on return. There's many more factors in play like marketing. And of course in tech and computers, it's not only about the idea but about the execution. People will gravitate toward the better built, more user friendly product which is not necessarily dependent on a patent to make. It's more dependent on how good the design and programming teams may be.
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M$
Why would innovation come to a halt? The process of inventing greatly predates patent law.
To address your specific concern about medicine.
" . . . less than 5 percent of medicines on the World Health Organization's list of essential drugs are under patent."
http://www.ip-institute.org.uk/pdfs/Perceptions%20of%20IP.pdf
But the thing is for drugs the patent lets the Company recoup the R&D costs before others can step in.
Great answer. The patent lawyers would also ultimately starve as well .
The reason drugs are cheap in other countries is government subsidies. They are below market value. For example in Canada, France, Spain, UK, drugs are very inexpensive because they are subsidized. I'm not making a case for or against subsidies but that's just the reality.
The point I was trying to make is that the world benefits when patents expire. The huge cost of R&D is a symptom of the patent problem.
Companies producing would still strive to produce new things, thus there would be motive to have employee groups that specialize in finding existing data, as well as research teams designed to apply that data in new ways.
There would be a greater pool of knowledge, thus it is easier to build and experiment off of each other's ideas. This would create a spectacular effect on R&D because it would eliminate redundant work, and shave the cost of effective R&D by a spectacular amount. I see the frightening cost of R&D as a spectacular waste, the best minds in the world are working in little bubbles for different companies usually doing complimentary or completely redundant work. There is are many reasons the US has the most expensive healthcare in the world, I happen to think our laws have a lot to do with that.
In this country we have more lawyers than scientists.
To look at it another way if patent laws were taken to a logical extreme, imagine what the world would be like if someone owned the idea of penicillin or worse antibiotics as a whole.
95% of those medicines are over 20 years old. This means the patents they had if any have expired. I skimmed the list. The medications are very old. (Examples diazepam (valium), aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen...) And why not? The fact that they're old isn't bad. They're tried and true and there's staples but there's many conditions that need new medications because the old ones don't quite make the grade yet. That argument about the WHO list was deliberately misrepresented (not by you but the paper you cited) because it means nothing. Old medications' patents are obviously expired.
http://www.who.int/medicines/publications/essentialmedicines/Updated_sixteenth_adult_list_en.pdf
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M$
Actually, patents protect idea thinkers from being preyed upon. If there weren't patents, anyone could use their ideas and never have to pay them a dime.
Patents also protect the "rich companies" who help the idea thinker see his dream become real precisely because they are rich enough to be able to afford to manufacture the patented item.
I think this would shift wealth from inventors to producers at first, but as producers look for things to produce they would monetise think tanks and content providers. These groups would try to be the first to improve technology or use existing technology in an innovative way.
This is close to my heart as I have a shelved invention. It is an improvement on an existing technology and would thus be legally murky water from a patent perspective. It may or may not even work, but I will not spend my money to test the idea if I fear I am going to face a lawsuit the moment I try to produce or sell the idea. This is a situation in which patent law is actually shutting out innovation, and I strongly doubt I am the only person in the US in this situation.
To silence those who believe that innovation would be destroyed it is best to remember that the process of inventing producing new ideas vastly predates the origin of patent law, and a spectacular number of people are now innovating in Open Source projects even though these projects don't enjoy the same protections a patent would give.
I think society could continue to thrive without patent laws.
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M$
The trick is to patent the innovative portion of your idea, not the elements that include parts of a prior patent. Have you talked to a patent attorney or joined an inventors support group to get the full story on what options you have?
I am under legal advice to bury the idea, or more accurate to say I was advised that there is a risk for conflict. It's effectively a significant gamble.
The courts would decide the outcome if the company(s) involved decide to bring a suit, he thinks the idea is secure, but admits it is not a very safe bet. They would have the best team of lawyers money could buy, I'm just a middle class guy.
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I should clarify my position too, while I am very bullish on no patents, I think the idea would be a very tough sell to a society that has had them for a very long time. For this practical reason I favor and support the idea of short patents ex. 5 to 10 years.
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M$
Some more thoughts for you...
1) Not all innovation is motivated by financial gain or carried out by companies anyway, not by a long way.
Hardly any of the core tech of the internet for example. e.g. The protocols to make the World Wide Web possible were invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee, and given away to the world for free.
Even for profit companies like AT&T / Bell Labs gave away Unix and C to the world for free.
Actually surprisingly few of the innovations that have the most profound effects on the world come from profit-motivated companies. (Though a lot of smaller ones that add up to a lot of value do.)
So, yes if the world wants innovation, it'll find other ways to make it happen at places like CERN and MIT instead of inside big for profit companies.
2) Most of the time there is more than one way to do a thing.
As in my answer about the Palm Pre, the fact that Apple gets patents doesn't do a lot to hinder Palm from making a pretty similar device. Given people will find other ways to deliver the same benefits, a lot of patents aren't that big a deal in terms of financial gain.
It's not Apple's patents that made iPhone a success and the Palm Pre virtually a non-entity in market terms.
3) In the few instances where a patent is about something really important, and there actually is no other way to deliver the benefits, it's doubtful if one company having a monopoly for a long time is such a great thing.
Imagine for example that there is one and only one viable treatment for Alzheimer's, and the patent on it is owned by company X. This is great for company X, but is it really best for the world? It means a lot of people will get screwed for a lot of money, and people that don't have the money won't get treated.
Now if you could argue that there's no way the treatment would ever have come into existence without allowing a company to get a monopoly of it, then you might say that is the lesser of two evils.
But there are other ways to do these things. For example in the same ways that we get research done in particle physics, the same ways that Bill Gates has discovered to incentivise unprofitable malaria research, or the ways the Dept of Defense gets lots of cutting edge R&D done by private companies.
So overall, I'm pretty sure that innovation as we know it wouldn't come to an end if patents were abolished.