1. Make patent applications free of cost, so anyone can play unless they start clogging up the system.
2. Applicants must wait 2^n days between applications, where n is the applicant's number of rejected applications within the past 1,000 years. Non-human persons must be at least 1 year old before applying.
3. Examiners are paid approximately the nation's median income, but also receive rights to 1% of license fees for patents they approve. If an approved patent is ever overturned in court, the examiner is fired and loses all future royalties for any other patents they approved. Those royalties then go to the patent office. Budget surpluses go toward scientific research or maybe education grants.
4. Patents assigned to biological human inventors expire after 20 years. Others expire after 5 years.
Patents are ideas... if you can think of it... so can someone else.
Patents were intended to protect someone's investment into an idea. Today, they just serve as cash cows.
With no patents, a company would be forced to continuously innovate and stay ahead of the curve -- which would replace their patent warchest with a warchest of talented individuals and innovators instead.
Indeed. The growing free software & hardware communities, and the numerous companies they spin off, are an existence proof that patents aren't a requirement of a working economy. They aren't going away any time soon until free hardware makes up a larger proportion of the market, because the current patent holders have too much to lose, and can buy politicians who will keep propping up the current system. So, start more successful free hardware companies that ignore the patent system, gradually rendering patents less relevant and less damaging.
Eliminating patents altogether may be better than what we have now, but I think there is a sweet spot to be found where they encourage more private investment and publication of research than there would be with no patent system.
The idea that patents are not necessary, useful or relevant in today's society is childish. Patents still play a very key role is spurring innovation and allowing innovative players to profit off of their development and creation of new products.
Clearly the system is broken to the point that people patent anything just so they can sue others who meet the general ideology of the patent. Clearly this is not what the spirit of patenting was designed for. A system overhaul is more appropriate than to rid all patents.
> Patents still play a very key role is spurring innovation and allowing innovative players to profit off of their development and creation of new products.
The entire idea of capitalism is to have fierce competition between companies -- patents, by design, allow one company to innovate once, then nobody else can make something similar. That seems, very anti-competitive (and open for abuse as evidenced by today's "patent wars").
If nobody could "squat" on an idea, then instead of innovating once, you would have to continuously innovate to stay in the lead of your industry.
If you need to pay billions of research cost for something that can be immediately copied, you simply don't do the research. There's plenty of cheap more or less useless improvements instead.
We already see that in medicine, where R&D has become so ludicrously expensive for many actually needed drugs that people would rather create a new ED pill.
Capitalism & "free markets" (as if!) fail as a motor of progress, per se. The only thing they're good at is extraction of wealth. That's why we have government regulation in the first place - to direct the efficiencies created by the market place.
You mean pharmaceutical, not "medicine". The reason why the costs have gone up is because big pharma has become so bloated and top heavy they can't even fart straight. They no longer even develop new drugs, they buy little, fleet-of-foot companies that do. You know: the ones actually trying to _make_ something: the ones competing.
How did they get that way? Because of the patent system.
Your narrative actually supports the opposite position. Why would big pharma companies buy "little, fleet-of-foot companies" if they could simply wait for those companies to develop a drug, copy the formula, then bury those companies using their huge advertising budgets? The winning strategy in a world without patents in an industry with high R&D requirements is to never develop anything new, but spend all your money on advertising and building an efficient outsourced manufacturing operation.
Just look at the PC industry, where the technology is all open and commoditized. Acer, Lenovo, Asus, etc, own the market, nobody makes any real money, and nobody tries to innovate because new designs are easily copied and margins are razor-thin.
Your argument only works when you have large lazy incumbents that the patent system created in the first place. In a world without laws that say you own ideas, these large lazy incumbents don't exist.
Manuel Navia[0] would likely disagree. To an extent, at least.
The fleet-footed companies you talk about, generate at best, lead compounds. Turning those leads to INDs (investigational new drugs) and then actual "medicine" is totally controlled by the FDA and is a multi-year, multi-million dollar endeavor, that is well beyond the ken of the fleet-footed operators. Many of these drug candidates fail late in the game, after 5-10 years of human trials, sinking the investment of time and effort with them. Meanwhile the patent clock is running and a drug that hits the market has far less than the 20 year patent term to recoup the costs and generate revenue to discover and groom the next life saving drug.
I read some article a while ago explaining that a lot of these costs are inflated by the drug cartels, er, I mean big pharma. And that a lot of regulations are there to create artificial barriers to entry and are promoted by big pharma for this reason. It comes all of one piece: patents encourage lazy encumbancy which encourages regulation, which encourages patents.
Problem: Garage-Inventor Bob's patent will be thrown out, because if it gets challenged Bob will probably lose since he has no big pockets nor legal clout. (Not because the idea itself is good or bad.)
Later, SuperMegaCo will submit a marginally different formulation of the same basic thing, and it'll get approved because they're probably going to win any long expensive court-battles.
Yeah I'm not sure. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if I made a hidden commutativity assumption that would surface if I tried to justify treating multiplication as repeated addition like that.
Renting your residence to vacationers is antisocial now. Ok.
I have to wonder what proportion of Airbnb's transactions ever cause any kind of disturbance to anyone. If it's the rule rather than the exception that "vacationers" turn out to be party animals who tear up the place, it's surprising that tenants in prosocial environments would even continue to take that risk.
Let me clarify... the noise is one thing, the constant flow of people another, and the issue of not feeling/being secure yet another (and not the least). Add to that the effects it has on rents and available apartments, and you might see my point that regulation of illegal short-term sublets by tenants in an apartment building is indeed in need of regulation.
When I was an apartment dweller, the noise, constant flow of people, and feeling of insecurity (and silverfish) went with the territory because that's the type of place I could afford. If I had been in a nice, quiet apartment with pleasant neighbors, I would have been wary of being evicted for violating the lease unless the risk of my "guests" causing a problem was very low.
That's why I have to wonder what the real situation is. I see a few complaints about disturbances with nothing being done by the landlord (which is what I'd expect at my old slum apartment), but nobody complaining about being evicted for using Airbnb (which is what I'd expect if a tenant were to turn a nice apartment building into a party hotel, as some complainers insinuate).
In any case, this seems like a problem that already has a resolution: Evict people for subletting if the contract prohibits it, regardless of whether the customers were found on a web site or in the back alley.
I feel bad derailing this thread further, but you know bloody nothing about me.
My comment was on-topic. grkvlt's was not, regardless of what he thinks I meant with that one pronoun (which was wrong, anyway).
Maybe you should realise that sane women, just as much as sane men, don't think pronouns will "solve" sexism. If I'm referring to a specific person, I'll be specific. If it's some random imaginary person, it's none of your bloody business what pronoun I choose.
Sure, but if I were to strip away the inflammatory comments, I'd still be left with the question of why you chose to assume the journal editor was female. Since this is unusual in the physics world, it sort of looks like you have an agenda. Therefore, it would have been more helpful to use gender neutral language, rather than simply flipping the gender over and hoping that makes up for it.
It does nothing to counteract the most harmful effects of prohibition: law enforcement resources squandered on crime associated with production/distribution, loss of goodwill between law enforcement and "criminals" involved with drugs, convicted offenders losing basic rights and access to resources that would help them to come clean and contribute to society, artificially inflated prices that also lead to crime and divert commerce from other sectors of the economy, users ingesting tainted drugs or switching to more harmful but more accessible drugs, ...
I don't want the FCC to have any authority over the Internet. I don't want the FCC giving $25,000 fines to web sites that publish dirty words or wardrobe malfunctions. If "fast lanes" ever really become a problem requiring government intervention (which to my knowledge they haven't yet), it should be in the form of direct Congressional action and very limited in scope.
Nobody can compete with Netflix because it's nigh impossible to match the breadth of their content licensing, and it will take an enormous marketing investment to displace their brand. (Even Amazon and Google have weaker brands to the extent that they compete with Netflix.)
"Fast lane deals" would/will be an expense for Netflix and give smaller competitors a slight advantage in that respect (if they can get the content and publicity, and improve the experience for users).
If ISPs degrade their services to the point that it's impossible to deliver streaming video without paying fast-lane protection money, that's something that could be resolved directly by lawmakers. E.g., prohibit marketing "up to 100 Mbit" if users can't even stream 2 Mbit video reliably. They could call the service "1 Mbit plus Netflix" or similar. This wouldn't grant any new authority to unelected FCC censors.
That's the whole reason Netflix buying fast lanes. Comcast throttled netflix to the point of being unreliable. The whole issue started with malicious throttling.
I'm not convinced title ii is the answer. But I am convinced that fast lanes don't make for good internet. Its unfortunate that this isn't a competitive industry because then consumers could just resolve the issue through their purchasing decisions.
With the rising prominence of sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, etc., I wouldn't rule out the possibility of appealing to Google's pathos in the near future. E.g. blog farms badmouthing competitors without even the hassle of building natural-looking links.
1. Make patent applications free of cost, so anyone can play unless they start clogging up the system.
2. Applicants must wait 2^n days between applications, where n is the applicant's number of rejected applications within the past 1,000 years. Non-human persons must be at least 1 year old before applying.
3. Examiners are paid approximately the nation's median income, but also receive rights to 1% of license fees for patents they approve. If an approved patent is ever overturned in court, the examiner is fired and loses all future royalties for any other patents they approved. Those royalties then go to the patent office. Budget surpluses go toward scientific research or maybe education grants.
4. Patents assigned to biological human inventors expire after 20 years. Others expire after 5 years.