Patents and Innovation

You're misunderstanding the purpose of patents. They're not a reward to be granted for every useful invention. Patents exist only to be an incentive for innovation. In almost every case where several inventors are competing to get the invention ready to patent, there is enough natural incentive that the patent is not necessary. In those cases, granting a patent can just as easily slow down the pace of technological progress, by forcing every inventor that didn't get the patent to either stop wor

Patents are an incentive to invent something new, with the knowledge that you alone will be able to profit from that thing for some period of time.The idea is that this incentive will benefit society with these inventions more than it will cost society in reduced competition.Looking at the software market today, I think it's pretty clear that the incentive that patents create for software innovations is not needed and that the cost that they create greatly outweighs the benefits. I can no

Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy. In aggregate they slow down innovation significantly by carving a huge moat around every new advancement. Without patents, there’s still loads of natural incentives to innovate. The difference is that instead of fewer larger leaps, there would be many more smaller leaps. You can always make money if you develop a new technology in secret and then start selling it before your competitors have any chance of going in to production.

The point of patents is not to protect anyone, but to encourage innovation. It has become quite clear that patents make innovation harder (is impossible to create anything anymore without taking a big risk of infringing someone else's patents, and those with patents only use them to slow their progress by their competition, and to avoid having to compete/innovate until their patent expires).

I thought patents were an incentive to invest in research and development. Without patents, anyone who invests in research is at a disadvantage because when they come up with something good, their competitors can copy them at no cost.

There are two common ways to justify patents:1. They help the public by encouraging inventors to publicly document their inventions2. They protect and encourage inventors by giving them control over intellectual propertyYou've taken Position 1, which I find to be a very weak argument in favor of patents.The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results would still have been achieved onl

Most of the time, I don't think you do. I think innovation is still going to happen anyway. For example, I think companies would have still made mobile phones and furthermore I think they would be better without patents because one maker wouldn't be arbitrarily restricted from using some idea-that-was-going-to-happen-anyway-because-the-time-was-right because another patented it. What is lost in monopolies is more than made up for in reduced overhead and ability to move quicker and come

Patenting is everything. Until that is fixed - innovation is a tarpit.

Seems like an argument against the idea that patents encourage innovation.

I am not disputing that patents provide the recognized inventor a period of monopoly rights which allow that person higher profits for the patent period. What I argue is that this system as implemented does not actually increase the rate of innovation as we are typically told. I argue that in fact this system dramatically slows the rate of innovation. This occurs because every patent benefits one individual while a thousand others are now prevented from discovery along the same lines as the awar