Patents: Good, Bad, Whatever?

[Herpusderpus]

I think Patents do more good than harm. They give people a reason to invent. Why would I want to invent a new type of shoelace protector if Reebok is just going to rip it off 10 seconds later?

Money doesn't work well as incentive for invention. Internal rewards do, passion, curiosity and self-expression. Money is, however, good incentive for tedious labor. People that invent with the intention of making money only come up with crap like Snuggies, anyway, and not anything useful.

[Spabafoofka]

It depends upon the economic structure of the society where patents are being granted.

However, I do not believe that society can progress creatively or successfully with excessive intellectual bounds being 'blocked-in' as far as new ideas go.

WAFFAGOOFADOO!

[Cosmopoles]

Money doesn't work well as incentive for invention. Internal rewards do, passion, curiosity and self-expression. Money is, however, good incentive for tedious labor. People that invent with the intention of making money only come up with crap like Snuggies, anyway, and not anything useful.

And if the development costs of new inventions could be paid for with passion, curiosity and self expression that would be fine. But last I checked, "I've got no money but I'm really passionate about this" is not what people want to hear when you are trying to buy things off of them.

[New Rogernomics]

If you are to remove patents and copyrights then you will have to provide a system with the same level of rewards, or innovation will suffer; possibly donations and privileges regarding publication (i.e. a set period till work can be copied) for the publishers, for inventors the same kind of thing. Hazy area so I am going to go with the status quo, but as a whole I don't mind either way but saying that I don't like the stronger copyright enforcement corporations are trying to push on society at the moment.

[The Cat-Tribe]

'Nuff said.

[Norstal]

So what do you think, NSG? Are patents a good thing? Does the good outweigh the bad? Does your ethical code allow you to support them even if the good outweighs the bad?

No patents are not good. They are violations of intellectual liberty. It is the epitome of arrogance to assume that you not only have exclusive rights to the only unique thought in the world regarding a particular idea but that you also have exclusive rights to that unique thought forevermore. Patents are disgusting.

No. That's not what patents are. You can make a game based on Simcity 4, but in no way can you make Simcity 5 or Simcity 9/2.

[Sibirsky]

In an unregulated competitive market, if you spend $1,000,000 on research for a revolutionary new gizmo, there is absolutely nothing stopping every other firm worldwide to copy and produce your gizmo without spending all that cash on R&D. As a result, if you all sell the same number of them, they'll all be richer by $1,000,000. Thus for a profit seeking firm, there is no incentive to produce new technology. The ramifications for this are that once an industry has attained long run equilibrium, it will be static with no new technology being produced in that field.

Wrong.

[announcer voice]

In the red corner, we have the HD-DVD. Developed by Toshiba. With additional support of Memory-Tech, NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft, and 67 others.

In the blue corner, we have the Blue-ray Disc. Developed by Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung and others.

Lets get ready to rumble!
[/announcer voice]
Innovation would continue. Instead of one firm investing only their own money, for only their own benefit, we'd see associations form. Like what happened in the HD video disc format war.

[SteevyT]

In an unregulated competitive market, if you spend $1,000,000 on research for a revolutionary new gizmo, there is absolutely nothing stopping every other firm worldwide to copy and produce your gizmo without spending all that cash on R&D. As a result, if you all sell the same number of them, they'll all be richer by $1,000,000. Thus for a profit seeking firm, there is no incentive to produce new technology. The ramifications for this are that once an industry has attained long run equilibrium, it will be static with no new technology being produced in that field

Innovation would continue. Instead of one firm investing only their own money, for only their own benefit, we'd see associations form. Like what happened in the HD video disc format war.

Why not spend no money and just copy the other firm so you can sell the product for less since you have no research and development costs?

[Sibirsky]

Innovation would continue. Instead of one firm investing only their own money, for only their own benefit, we'd see associations form. Like what happened in the HD video disc format war.

Why not spend no money and just copy the other firm so you can sell the product for less since you have no research and development costs?

By the time it takes you to reverse engineer the product it would have gone down in price.

[Miasto Lodz]

If you are to remove patents and copyrights then you will have to provide a system with the same level of rewards, or innovation will suffer;

It wouldn't suffer, otherwise the shareholders would rip the CEO's heart out and pee into the left atrium because of lack of new products and lost profits.
Did innovation suffered after BSD/Unix, x86, communication protocols or Arduino?

[Diseased Imaginings]

Wrong.

[announcer voice]

In the red corner, we have the HD-DVD. Developed by Toshiba. With additional support of Memory-Tech, NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft, and 67 others.

In the blue corner, we have the Blue-ray Disc. Developed by Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung and others.

Lets get ready to rumble!
[/announcer voice]
Innovation would continue. Instead of one firm investing only their own money, for only their own benefit, we'd see associations form. Like what happened in the HD video disc format war.

not wrong. In your example, you are referencing oligopolistic industries, e.g. high tech firms. There are only a few of these in the world, and they operate under different circumstances and assumptions compared to perfectly competitive and and monopolistically competitive firms.

in order for monopolistically competitive firms to successfully collude (as you are suggesting as a solution for non-patent research incentives), you'd have to see the re-implementation of guilds. These would be almost impossible to sustain in a monopolistically competitive market, as it would require the coordination of thousands of firms. The incentive to break the pacts and undercut the competition would be very high, and most firms would cease to cooperate very quickly. Even in ologopolistic markets, cartels are notoriously short lived.OPEC, the most famous ologopolistic cartel, has ceased to cooperate numerous times over the years:

The result that OPEC producers have not succeeded in
colluding in recent years is consistent with:
• Marcel and Mitchell (2006); Sperling and Gordon (2007)
• the state-owned companies that comprise OPEC have juggled
multiple objectives, economic and otherwise
=> have not acted so as to maximize joint profits
• Lin (2009)
• simulations of the basic Hotelling model
• a monopolistic market structure better explains the world oil market
than perfect competition does prior to the 1973 Arab oil embargo
• perfect competition fares better after 1973

source: http://nepinstitute.org/get/Mar_2011_OP ... ns/Lin.pdf

besides, guilds are hardly a preferable alternative to short legal monopolies. The formation of a guild would, in effect, produce one large market monopoly, leading to less output and higher prices for everyone.

[SteevyT]

Why not spend no money and just copy the other firm so you can sell the product for less since you have no research and development costs?

By the time it takes you to reverse engineer the product it would have gone down in price.

It's not that hard to take something apart and put it back together. I've done it several times with parts of my car.