Our first patent troll
The whole patent system needs a good looking at. I'm not a lawyer, but I did manage to get a patent a few years ago. It was for something obvious (math in fact!), but my business partners at the time thought it was worth getting. Haven't used it to troll anyone, and I don't like the idea, but the process did get me thinking a lot about whether patents are a net positive to society.I think they aren't.Having a patent system gives people the wrong impression that there's some special nugget of knowledge that is crucial to creating value. You often hear people who aren't in the entrepreneurial space talk about how they just need a "good idea". In practice, there's very few things that work that way. Every time I've started a business, there's been a lot of work that isn't so much developing "the idea" as much as finding ways to connect it economically the rest of the world. Whereas the naive view would be something like "once we invent fusion, it will be easy to sell".For similar reasons, exclusivity is not necessarily a good way to reward innovators. Essentially my thinking is that innovating is actually only half the work, if even. Say you invent the cure for coronavirus. How useful is that actually, without a plan for making it at scale and distributing it? And what is the chance that the guy who spent his life building cures for viral diseases is also the guy who can build factories and delivery networks? The retort to that may be that the innovator can outsource those things, but why would we give them the exclusive right to do that, when he'd only gotten one piece of the puzzle?Patents also allow incumbents to create costs that deter new entrants. They seem to be so loosely defined that any suitably large corporation that feels threatened can throw them at any other player and the lawyers win, like this article is talking about. It's great that they are fighting but there's a problem if the troll has deep pockets.One big issue that is mentioned is that the troll doesn't need to produce anything working. So basically they don't need to show that they are making anything of value. No customers needs to ever have benefitted from the patent. So somehow the system would still punish an honest player who tries to be useful to other people.Finally, the thesis itself of how patents are supposed to work needs evidence to support it. I don't see any evidence other than thought experiment to say that something was invented because the patent system existed. All I see is that if you can patent something, you do. Not that you try to invent something because patents exist.