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Just last night I read about Ineos Bioenergy, the company that beat my company to get the job to convert Vero Beach's Mount Trashmore into chemicals and fuel, closing up shop in Vero Beach because the price of natural gas and syngas has made biofuels cost-prohibitive.
To own it means doing with it what you want.
To take what another owns without consent is theft.
Legalized theft is still theft.
The issue comes down to your own time and whether or not you own your time...and hence your life (and the products thereof).
This is the metaphysical basis of Objectivism and individualism.
The highest bidder wins my time.
I suppose I am a capitalistic prostitute (of sorts).
Not a bad gig...as long as there are an abundance of "Johns" !
The rub will come when government decides that my time belongs to them. đŹ
You are a free agent with a skill set.
Of course, the highest bidder wins your time.
You make money to advance yourself, perhaps to also feed a family.
Only socialists would think anything about you belongs to them.
And all that little bit ain't hard for old dino to figure out.
One might validly argue about the government's implementation of that protection, but to argue against the right because of improper implementation is simply ignorance.
History is actually quite rife with independent innovation. The main problem with patents is that they fail to recognize or account for this. Let us say you and I working entirely without each other's knowledge or assistance devise a way to make Galt's Motor. A patent is awarded to whomever gets to the patent office and files first. The one who is second gets the right to benefit from their own, independent hard work and mental effort revoked or refuted. In other words, his IP is effectively "stolen" simply because of arbitrary paperwork for the government. This is why IP is not the same as RP. You and I can not independently produce the exact same physical car - we can produce two separate instances of a car even if they are identical. Yet we do so quite a bit of the same idea being developed by multiple people.
The patent system does not reward and incentivize invention, it rewards and incentivizes publishing it in exchange for a government monopoly granted through the use of force. It is easy to say patents are all about letting you benefit from your work and effort, as long as you ignore the very real world phenomenon of independent work, discovery, and invention.
The idea behind the patent system in U.S. is explicitly stated as an privilege grant of a temporally limited monopoly in exchange for the knowledge becoming public and usable at the end of the granted monopoly. At that time most innovation was not "published" - it was a competitive advantage to know how to do something better than someone else. The thinking at the time was that the "freeing" of this IP from behind closed doors would spur innovation after the monopoly expired. It is an open question as to how much this effect has occurred because doing genuine comparisons is difficult and few are motivated to do it.
The patent system we have right now in the U.S. is frankly terrible. As some have mentioned it is truly expensive, which favors the corporates, and "patent trolls" at the expense of the individual innovator. There is no objective way to determine when a patent should expire - it is far too broad of a category. Yet lifetime patents are against the intent of releasing the knowledge into the public domain spurring innovation - especially in an era where that may be 80 or more years.As our rate of innovation increases, the value of a patent producing additional innovation decreases quicker. yet the presence of the patent can still be used to prevent others from benefiting from their own effort.
Further with the rise of the Internet and with Patents needing to be made public by nature, they create a risk to a would-be patent holder in that people from other nations, such as China, can see them and run with them without benefiting the patent holder - even harming them under the system.
And that isn't even going into what the government has done to thousands of us who have essentially had our patent confiscated for "national security" concerns.
I think those of us who do innovate (or at least try/hope to) want the patent system because we want to reap the reward of been gable to force others to pay us more - and in same cases prevent competition. But we also lose sight of the problems inherent to the basic idea as well as the tradeoffs such a system creates. The first casualty is the independent inventor. The second is the one who obtained the patent.
But we can't be objective about it by ignoring those aspects and proclaiming patents to be the savior of inventor.
1st of all property rights are not based on scacity, they are based on creation. Second of all there almost no examples of simultaneous invention. The US patent office had a procedure for that situation until several years ago. The argument for eliminating it, was that they almost never occurred.
I did a google search on that and the word patent and found a Microsoft patent 5664133 which almost exactly matched this made-up example. The specific patent is for context sensitive menus, not menus in general. It was file in 1996.
Now as near as I can tell, I wrote code that did exactly what the patent described in 1989 as part of a graphic application that was pre-windows. At the time it seemed an obvious way to handle the problem and not particularly innovative, yet almost a decade later Microsoft got a patent on it.
Now, you can say that I am not competent to read the patent because I'm not a patent lawyer. But then, how does someone write software? Do I have to have you vet each of the 500 plus menus in the million lines of code?
If you are referring to the changes made in the early 2000's those were done in accordance with international treaty, not due to a "lack" of independent invention.
There is a significant difference between "simultaneous" and "independent".
In software we have quite a lot of independent invention of the same thing. Of course, you even admit it happens by saying "almost". Which only admits it does in fact happen, in which case your argument is that because it "only" prevents some people it is OK to dismiss it entirely.
Generally you only hear about the big ones where independent invention occurs, like say the telephone, radio, or the polio vaccine, the airplane, jet engines for airplanes; though there is an argument of copying a patent application to be made regarding the telephone. The smaller ones where someone is screwed over but over something which does not rise the level of the above fly under the radar.
The data on patent lawsuits actually show that multiple independent invention (MII) is more common than the opposite, with over 90% of patent lawsuits showing it. When you look at the true "sole inventor" cases most of them were essentially accidents and thus more of a discovery than an invention. There is actually quite a lot of research indicating that MII is quite commonplace, dating back to at least the 1920's that I know of. It actually makes sense that you'd have MII because in a even time period people generally have the same understandings, tools, and often the same problem to overcome.
What is rare is the overturning of a patent by someone else by showing they actually invented it first, and just as rare are lawsuits which assert copying caused the infringement. Even more rare is a verdict that coping was involved.
Interestingly, nobody seems to argue that in the realm of copyrights and trade secrets, independent invention is acknowledged and a legally valid defense against allegations of copying. over my entire career in the IT field, I've always been advised by the IP lawyers to never look to see if my possibly-patentable idea has already been patented but instead just apply for it and hope nobody notices if it has. The reason given is that doing so would effectively eliminate any claim to have independently invented it.
MII isn't limited to technology, either. We see it in science quite often. Indeed science is replete enough with it there is a law about it called (IIRC) Steigler's Law which basically states that no eponymous scientific discovery is actually named by the first to discover it.
It happens so much that it is the norm rather than the exception. For one example which would get you started on the data, consider this work http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf... which was undertaken to determine the extent of the "copying" problem in patent law. It found that copying is very rare, and that between 90 and 98% of all claims were actually about independent invention.
Consider also the comparison to Trader Secret law. Under that law I can invent something and tell nobody how I do it. If you do the same, that is fine. But it does not stop there. You can also simply reverse-engineer my product and make it yourself and I have no claim against you. However, if you send someone into my factory and then duplicate what I do I can sue and will normally prevail. Incidentally, if you can duplicate Coca-Cola they have nothing on you - they have avoided patenting it so the formula remains a secret.
With patent law, the assumption is that since patents are published, you had to have dug into the vast archives, sifted through tons of garbage, found my patent, then copied it. Yet as seen above even that allegation is rare - with the exception of the pharmaceutical industry. So no, DB, you are wrong to label the truth as propaganda and wrong to say it never, or even rarely happens. It happens from the big ideas such as telephones, FFT, color photography, and light bulbs down to the lesser known such as SIP and a while slew of software and IT related inventions.
And with regard to property rights based on creation, so we don't have a right to own land? I disagree with that as well, but am more interested in getting some dinner then having that side discussion at the moment. ;)
I also notice that while you were choosing to insult someone who disagreed with you, you also avoided the thrust of the argument to focus on one (or two, maybe even three?) historical incidents - namely that independent invention is not rare as you claim, but as shown by data and research to be the norm rather than the exception.
As the post made clear your position is so outrageous that it is clear that you are not interested in reason.
But the framers of the Constitution were more interested in knowledge being disseminated to the populous than anything about the profit of inventors.
So the real question lies with length of patent. Does thinking a patent should have a shelf-life disqualify one from being a true Objectivist?
This started under Bush 2 when he appointed Jon Dudas (not a patent attorney or technical) as the head of the patent office. Technical Dudas' actions were illegal in multiple ways. There was at least one lawsuit against the patent office on point.
The next director of the patent office changes this, but the attitude remains in many parts of the patent office and may be the attitude of the new director of the patent office.
Also, to respond to dbhalling, people can bequeath property (including intellectual property) to others. Should that apply to patents? Is there a problem with someone who did not "earn or create" the property that was bequeathed to them owning something like that? This can spiral a lot of ways. Does it matter if the intellectual rights were purchased as opposed to being a gift? Purchased would imply that someone "earned" the intellectual property, while a gift does not. The benefit of the gift is only truly "earned" by the giftor. He might have satisfaction from making that gift, and he earned the right to do that. Once that person ceases to exist however, there is no more benefit to the giftor since he is dead. So does that mean that the giftee (who didn't earn or create anything) should be able to retain the right to that patent that can cure cancer? See where I am struggling here?? Hope I am making some sense. Once again, I am trying to decide what is "right", not necessarily what the law says.
PS--- I granted ownership of several patents to GM and Delphi during my working career. So, I know "intellectual property" is created. I've done it. But that does not make it right. No one should be able to prevent others from using useful technology.
Once the patent is granted, the government is giving the patent holder a monopoly enforced by the police powers of the government, resulting in higher prices for the patented goods.
I am not happy with the current patent system at all. Its expensive, requires patent lawyers who charge high fees, and is populated by patent trolls who never plan on actually making anything, but just keeping others from the fruits of THEIR thought processes.
Its government granted monopolies to those who pay the entry fees to get the government protection, not necessarily protecting the ones who actually did the inventing.
I will accept patent lawyers have to perfect certain skills to work the system in accordance with its rules, and if you want monopoly protection, you have to pay the piper
I just dont see how this is fair at all under the current system.
If any good comes from the patents, its that it encourages others to get around the patents, which does nothing to preserve the intellectual property of the original patent holder at all.
And the rise of Non-Practicing Entities, or NPEs, in the patent litigation s merely an expression of it. Yes, to most the idea of coming up with something and then sitting on it to do nothing is fundamentally problematic. But any discussion of the facts of what a patent provides and any realization that it does in fact do what you, I, and many experts have stated - prevent independent inventors from benefiting from their own work - is apparently to be against patents, capitalism, and objectivism. This is the first I've personally seen a discussion here where the non-looters argue as if they are looters - via dogma, unsupported assertion, and fallacies and insult. The system is perfect, don't question its perfection by showing that it causes harm and has significant flaws.
Patents are all about being "first" to the government, to prevent other people from benefiting from their independent ideas and effort - not protecting your right to profit from your invention. Many profit from their inventions aplenty without patents, which is clear evidence that patents are not a requirement to profit. As you've correctly stated, a patent is a government grant of a power to prevent others from profiting from their own work. In fact, if you reverse engineer the formula for Coca-Cola, or do Edison-style experimentation to "discover" it on your own, and then patent it, you can force Coca-Cola to stop making it - or to pay you whatever sum of money you want to be allowed to keep profiting from their independent invention.
In her assertion that patent rights are natural and not a grant of government, Rand was wrong. She was a actually wrong on some pretty key aspect of the US Patent system. For example, up until recently the system was first to invent, not first to file. She didn't object that patents created a monopoly, only that it was OK that the first one to get to the USPTO "wins" the right to profit from their work. At that time the USPTO had an "interference proceeding" which handled what to do if A invents something before B but B got to the USPTO first. So her argument was not actually about who actually invented something, but who filed paperwork with the government first. Thus it wasn't about the race to invent, but the race to prevent. Yet that was not the system in place at that time.
But that isn't the case today. By changing to FTF in 2013 that process was avoided and instead the USPTO application is now considered sole evidence of who was "first" (mostly). The argument for it was that it would bring the USPTO in accordance with other parts of the world. This act explicitly recognized that independent invention does in fact occur.
There is no basis for a natural right to prevent someone from doing what you are doing. There is a basis for natural right to profit from your idea, but not to prevent someone else from profiting from their independent idea and effort - even if it is the same idea. Patents are a system of rent seeking, of this there is no doubt - it is what they are are explicitly designed to do. Even the SCOTUS has explicitly recognized and stated that patents are grants of monopoly in the United States. When you dig into the actual research you find that the arguments around it are the yes it is a government granted/enforced monopoly, yes it raises prices (see: is a monopoly), does penalize whomever was not first to get the patent paperwork, and raises the cost of innovation, but that the "social good" of the patent eventually (used to be 10, now is 20 years) becoming open to the public for use outweighs the cost of the rest. In other words, then social ends justify the means.
If opponents of taking a factual view of the patent system were at least honest about it, it would be tolerable. But to say that the problem simply doesn't exists despite all evidence that it does - and none that it does't, is simply irrational. I have much more respect for someone who says "yes, that is a problem and I don't have an answer to it" than one who's stick their head in the sand and says "no, the system is perfect, it doesn't have flaws like that - all the independent invention doesn't exist. Heck, I have more respect for "yup, it sucks to do all that independent work, come up with the same idea and then because I beat you to the office, you do not get to benefit from the product of your mind and hands because I get to profit more by preventing you from doing so."
Khaling is right about one thing though, our system was the strongest in the world - when it was FTI. And it is weakening - in part due to FTF.
When I invent things (which I do regularly), I have to look at the various ways to profit from my inventions- and I consider how I would market it, what improvements might be made on it by others, which I would call "marketplace" methods of intellectual property protection.
Government monopoly protection is expensive, lengthy, and can be overthrown by patent appeals which I may not be able to defend against.
I just feel uncomfortable with the current system, but I cant say what I would do about it if I were King, for example, and could rewrite it. In the meantime, I deal with the issue mostly outside of the legal system, and depend on the 'marketplace' defenses as well as continual improvements to keep myself going.
I am not a fan of the apparent voting thing that goes on in this forum or any other actually. Even if I am in the basket of deplorables.
I would say that in todays fast moving world, a 20 year monopoly isnt what it used to be. Someone like me will come along and invent around a patent in not much time now anyway. Maybe they work for apple and samsung so they can trade patent infringements with each other to try and keep others from using any of their patents, but for lone inventors I dispute they do much.
In my mind I also look at the gross inefficiencies in the US goverment's protection of individual rights that I really wonder about the cost benefit analysis of patent protection. I have generally relied on my ability to just dodge and weave as competitors come in with copycat items. Generally the competitors dont understand the "why' behind doing things a ceretain way, and the make inferior products. By then, I introduce something better and keep the business.
The major challenge today is from China, where they not only copy, but actually improve on our products at a much reduced cost. They are quite inventive themselves, although most americans think they just copy and make inferior products. They are getting better each day, and we americans need to watch out !!
Look at the promises of social security, medicare, obamacare, personal safety here in the USA, the outright stealing of money through inflation. I saw a documentary on Netflix about American Genius, and their point was that the wright brothers found for years and years to keep Curtis from infringing on their flight patents. Eventually the federal government allowed Curtis to use the patents during world war II, after which the patent terms was expired anyway. It would have been more effective for the Wrights to concentrate on improvements to their patents (like Curtis did) instead of wasting time and money securing the protections of the government.
I have more trust in looking for free market protections and continuing inventiveness than some sort of government "protections" that cost me a fortune and are fleeting.
I may not be using your definition of monopoly, for which I apologize. But, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....
This is perhaps more relevant in the software industry where there are many patents on relatively obvious technical solutions that any experienced practitioner could and often has independently developed. This information is organized in such an obscure manner that a software engineer simply has to hope that no one sues them for "using a menu to select system options".
By the way, I made that up, but I can't really tell how much US5664133 applies to any program -- and it was the first hit on google searches.
Now the likelihood of us both coming up with the same idea depends on how unique the idea is. Supposedly the patent office is supposed to only patent ideas that are not obvious. If it really is inspirational, you are unlikely to come up with it. If it is obvious to anyone in the field, then lots of people will come up with it independently.
Now we come to software. Until the 1990's software patents were rare. One of the most famous from that era was the LZW compression patent -- and having implemented that algorithm after the patent expired I can honestly say I don't think there is a snowball's chance in hell that I would ever have come up with that on my own.
When the rush to patent began in the 1990's many patents were issued for solutions that had long been in common use. This isn't supposed to happen, but the patent office faced an impossible task. How do you know if the algorithm that is described is present in any one of thousands of products all covered by trade secret and limited distribution. So patents get issued for existing art.
As I pointed out in another part of this discussion, I was able to toss of the idea of a patent on pop-up menus and find a microsoft patent on context popup menus that was granted years after I wrote one -- and I was by no means inspired in doing so. It was routine.
I can't find it anymore, but one of the patents that you have obtained for a customer involves managing the flow of bits from communications using a circular buffer with the beginning and ending byte and bit offset stored. That's a well known approach to handling a flow of data with no distinct message break. I implemented one of those in the 1980's -- although I had it expand the buffers on overflow (which wasn't mentioned in your patent). I admit I had bytes not bits since that was the organization of my data but whenever I need a bit oriented offset I keep it in the three bits as described. I am by no means the first one to build a circular buffer.
The âindependent creationâ argument, by itself, seriously undercuts the concept of patents being property rights. Man has a fundamental right to the product of his own mind. This right is not contingent upon whether someone previously had the same innovative idea or came up with the same invention.
I know that similar things happen anyway but at least there is some protection.
Of course as long as you are not selling the product you have the right to make and use anything that you can produce. But as soon as you want to sell it the first guy to patent deserves his cut.
You say that âas long as you (the subsequent inventor) are not selling the product you have the right to make and use anything that you can produce.â As far as I know, neither patent law nor the philosophy behind alleged patent rights allow for this exception. And by making such a statement, you are in effect admitting that my independently created invention is a product of my own mind.
Requiring me to perform patent research before using or selling my product is an initiation of force, regardless of how little or how much time such research takes.
The rest of your post consists of assertions with no evidence. You claim that the first person to come up with the idea or invention deserves government-enforced exclusivity on the implementation of that idea for a period of time determined by that same government. No he doesnât. No one deserves special privileges that violate the rights of others.
So my position is that if you didn't come up with it first the No it is not a product of your mind and that the person who originally came up with it, can "afford" the rare one offs of someone building one for personal use. But that it would be theft for that person to market the product.
Both patent law and its philosophical underpinnings regard subsequent inventors as having no rights to the manufacture or distribution of their product. You are presenting your own definition of a patent, which attempts to get around the glaring deficiencies of the standard definition by allowing an exception in the case of an âindependent inventorâ. And in doing so you are contradicting yourself.
If the invention created by the second inventor is indeed the âproduct of his own mindâ, then the case for granting special privileges to the first inventor collapses. Man has a right to the product of his own mind. This right is not contingent upon whether someone previously had the same idea or came up with the same invention.
So you say that the invention created by the second inventor is not the âproduct of his own mindâ. But if that is true, then your entire case for making any exception for the second inventor collapses. If the invention is not a product of the second inventorâs mind, how is he entitled to any kind of special treatment apart from those who did not invent the product?
When you are engineering devices or producing drugs the situation is significantly different.
My definition of Competition: Two or more individuals dependent upon each other to be the very best they can be.
I think that we are going to have to agree to disagree.
Good night. I am going to bed.
I am all for less government but this is a perfect example of what a government should do in protection of its people.
As to your issue with my acceptance of a person making something for personal use. It really comes down to the person making a one off item has so little effect on the person holding the patent as to be not worth the bother.
This is why Alexander Graham Bell goes down in history as the inventor of the Telephone and Elijah Grey goes down as a minor foot note.
As to marking up or down. I haven't done any of either. Until this post here I have been posting from my phone.
I do agree that the originator of a discovery, idea or invention should be given acknowledgement for coming up with it first.
No one opposes patents per se (though I have met people who oppose copyright). But there are many such as myself who believe that there need to be reasonable limits on intellectual property awards -- not only on their duration, but on what they prohibit competitors from doing without permission -- because when original owners have the right to ban derived works for decades or longer, that power can be and often is used to prevent more innovation than the patent enables.
It's even worse when IP awards are retroactively extended for decades longer. That obviously can't cause any new inventions whatsoever.