Patents are out of control, and they’re hurting innovation (2017)
I have a patent, so I've touched the system a bit.It doesn't make any sense. There's no way reading a patent helps anyone understand anything, because the whole thing is done by lawyers, not engineers. Even reading the patent I applied for does not explain to me, the person who came up with the idea, of how it works. (Long story, not willing to get into it.)The whole idea needs some kind of evidence that it works. We can all imagine that maybe if there weren't patents, certain things wouldn't get invented. But that experiment happens in people's heads, and the outcome depends on how they are invested. And it's not easy to come up with reasonable evidence, there would be a lot of confounding issues, such as whether patents themselves stop certain beneficial things from happening.From what I can see a huge amount of innovation is called off due to patent uncertainty. I have a friend who is an inventor in the medical field, and quite a lot of the ideas he comes up with are junked because he's found some patent in a database that sounds too similar. At the same time he has to pay a tax to the lawyers on a bunch of low probability inventions.It should just be a free-for-all. You see someone with a better mousetrap, you make a better mousetrap. You compete on actually bringing it to market, which is not the same thing as whatever you think the innovation is. Surely that creates the most value for society, or at least should be the default until the quite high hurdle of evidence for patents is cleared.Won't that mean nobody thinks about better mousetraps? No, people will just think of better mousetrap production-and-marketing ideas compatible with this legal environment instead of what we have now.