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from the it-wasn't-supposed-to-be-this-way dept.
From a Wired article:
The unspoken reality is that the U.S. patent system creates a market so constricted by high transaction costs and legal risks that it excludes the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses and prevents literally 95 percent of all patented discoveries from ever being put to use to create new products and services, new jobs, and new economic growth.
Even the most dramatic estimates of the social cost of abusive patent litigation range in the low tens of billions of dollars. But according to a new study by the distinguished economists Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution and Hal Singer of the Progressive Policy Institute—a study I [Jay Walker] helped to fund—liberating patent licensing from its litigation-focused costs and risks would enable tens of thousands of currently-dormant inventions to be commercialized and conservatively add up to $200 billion a year in increased output to the U.S. economy. That’s at least ten times bigger than the litigation problem, and directly impacts job creation.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05 2015, @11:47PM
>by offering an incentive to inventors, not by punishing them.
Who is getting "punished"? The inventor is _not_ the one losing anything he had before - the _society_ is. The people are losing the use of something, most likely pretty obvious, for full 20 years. Only because some overworked drone at USPTO rubber-stamped an application written by some corporaite lowlife.
And if you want to talk "expected revenue", you need to ground your expectations in reality, first. If it's more advantageous for a business to avoid your invention altogether for 5 years, then either it isn't that much useful in the first place, or you are that much delusional in setting the licensing cost.
>then I don't see any incentive for the inventor to publish the discovery.
Then I guess you do not see any free and open source software, too. And do not see this website, as well. ;-)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:09AM
You forgot or just chose to ignore the premisses I set for the "case story": independent, small (but genuine) inventor?
This would be true for "rational players". Personally, I have some doubts when applying the rationality of presumption to today's corporations.
If you relax the "rationality" requirement for the problem, everything boils down to "who - of the two players - can survive longer: the corporation or the inventor?"
Oh, com'on! While both copyright and patents pertain to the so-called "Intellectual property", they do have specific but relevant differences (e.g. the cost of delivery the value to the end-users: while both require a creative "intellectual" effort, the cost of producing/distributing copies of the software and the cost of manufacturing a product are quite disproportionate).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:31AM
"This would be true for "rational players"."
So you want patents to exist under the assumption that corporations aren't rational?
"If you relax the "rationality" requirement for the problem"
So your argument is that patents are bad if people and corporations are rational but since they aren't then patents could potentially be a good thing under certain irrational conditions. You can use this logic to justify a very wide possibility of laws.
"You forgot or just chose to ignore the premisses I set for the "case story": independent, small (but genuine) inventor?"
The world doesn't have to operate under your hypothetical case stories and laws shouldn't be based on any random person's hypothetical case stories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:34AM
"You forgot or just chose to ignore the premisses I set for the "case story": independent, small (but genuine) inventor?"
The premise you gave is a very unlikely one. The premise you quoted is much more likely (and evidenced, given the fact that most patents don't even make it to product).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 06 2015, @01:38AM
Ah... Ok... (long way to a "nation of makers" you reckon. Wouldn't be nice to get there, though?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 06 2015, @02:47AM
The premise that patents will be used to encourage inventions by helping the independent inventor is what's unlikely.