Including patents owned by MIT, no? It feels like this could use a disclosure and some additional context to understand where the incentives here are. I've walked away feeling like I know less after having read this.
Bear in mind: this article is published by a magazine that belongs to MIT.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-su...
https://www.adhesivesmag.com/articles/101029-medmix-files-pa...
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Germany did the same with book rights which helped them to become an industrial and scientific powerhouse.
They aren't cancelling the patents because of some ethical medicine-must-be-free reason. They are cancelling them because they are about to be revoked. A sort of, you-can't-fire-me-if-i-quit-first move.
But why? Is there some sort of precedent they are seeking to avoid? Is this just them giving in the towel and looking to avoid further legal fees? Why are they cancelling instead of just letting the process play out?
For other countries, with different legal systems? The ruling wouldn't be binding as precedent of foreign courts doesn't bind and the law on what makes a valid patent is different. Maybe it looks kind of bad, but so does cancelling your patents right before they are ruled invalid.
Think of pop music expansion in the Napster era as an example.
This was Japan's recent-ish narrative arc too, after all.
"But they make innovation thrive by providing an incentive to blah blah blah".
Not anymore in this day and age. Money comes mostly from the government, anyway, and plenty of really smart researchers would just be happy to put out their stuff out for the public benefit (and already do, btw). Even if they didn't the current patent system ends up giving them like 1% of profits, lol.
The business case for "but I want to protect the market I created" can be sufficiently solved with trade secrets and trademarks. Patents sound nice in theory, but in practice they only hinder innovation, the opposite of what they're supposed to do.
Do you think that companies doing research see a benefit in being able to patent their innovations? I.e. do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
I have really hard time having sympathy with massively multi-millionaires like Metallica bashing people ripping their stuff.
Even in countries with stronger IP, unknown artists are struggling. So restrictions are hardly an efficient solution
Surprisingly when you are in the lead and others have to catch up, IP protections sound much better.
20+ years and counting.
>Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that. (But a very weak one, tbh).
>What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
On academia, the effect would be negligible. For some business it would matter, of course, but the immense majority of research is publicly funded anyway.
>I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
As much as I like capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money. I would never put their interests over the interests of what's good for society. But to each its own.
The argument of "why would I invest 1B in R&D to develop a drug that can be copied the next day it goes into the market" is valid only on a first, and very shallow, glance. That "1B drug" is actually a several trillion drug which was 99% subsidized by the work of researchers in public institutions. I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich". They're in for the money and if they don't make money, boo hoo, why should I care?
Richard Stallman had it right with the GPL, I wish something similar existed in science. You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets? Go for it! But do it on your own, with a tech tree that belongs to you.
So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".
I myself am the "inventor" of a nonsense patent. There is prior art and it lacks any significant new step not obvious for anyone trained in the field. At the time I was working in a big European corporation being the market leader of their field. R&D was required to submit all new product features we were working on. The patent department distilled that into patents, even though we told them there is prior art.
Being the market leader we first got it accepted in our home country, then also in EU and US. Only Japan rightfully rejected it. Well, they were our not so successful competitors.
One of the reasons I don't want to work for corporations anymore. I vaguely remember some presentation that corporations have the traits of criminals. Should dig that out again...
We would solve problems and when we had a decent solution we would discuss with our management whether they thought it was noteworthy enough to start the internal patent application process.
The stage of development at which a patent was pursued depended on how much of a breakthrough it was.
Of course you don't design something "exclusively to patent it". It would make no sense -- a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI.
Lol. 99% of patents are cruft. And I'd be wildly surprised if revenue from patent licensing at the companies you worked at was more than a single digit percentage; mayyyyyybeeee Qualcomm but am too lazy atm. to dive through their financial statements.
Edit: I was off by 2%. See [1].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/2017/11/13/in-todays...
> 20+ years and counting
I took a moment to search for Morales Tapia in Google Patents and could not find any matches. You do have an impressive resume, though.
> I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich".
Is PCR patented, or was it at some point? Companies constantly pay patent royalties for inventions that they want to use, whether the patent is held by an academic institution or not.
If the inventors of PCR wanted to receive royalties from it, patent law was there to help them achieve just that.
I truly don't understand how somebody who works in research isn't familiar with this process.
> You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets?
Ew.
Just think for a moment: why would a for-profit company go through the cost of filing a patent application if they didn't expect to obtain a return? Seriously, give it a moment. Those IP lawyers aren't cheap. It works even if only a small percentage of patents provide the lion's share of the revenue.
Look at any settlements between multinationals and see the role that patents play at the negotiation table, for instance.
Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.
Just opening public research wouldn't help us get remuneration from overseas use though unfortunately.
Alternatively, you have patent trolling which gets a return not through direct use of inventions, but through litigation. It's again not so much that the invention has value but that it interferes with value generation in a way that helps profits. Both cases are abuse of the system, and both cases are common. I'm sure those are the kinds of patents that GP referred to as "cruft."
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
Loud YES! And it only recently came off patent. This was really important for thermalcycler companies such as Bio-rad, which probably wouldn't be the name it is without those patents.
If I don't build it myself and can exploit myself, I get nothing and somebody else gets everything, so why shouldn't I just shut up completely? If I contribute something to the design of nuclear power plants, that the nuclear plant people would never come up with because people from my field, whatever that is, don't look at their stuff, then I obviously can't build my own nuclear power plant to compete with them.
The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
Hypothetically, and IANAL.
Edit: I'd say the article supports this interpretation.
And it is not like patents prevent academics from doing research, either, as there are academic exceptions. In fact, the patent filing process forces the inventors to disclose how their invention works in detail, which makes it easier for academics to build on those ideas if they want to. It's only commercial applications that are really bound by IP licensing agreements, to my knowledge.
... assuming you have the money to defend your patents (or even just find violations). Also, Bigco will just patent adjacent things like production processes and then force your company to trade. How many "small guy" patents were there in the recent years? It just does not fit to our world anymore.
If you don't like it I couldn't care less :^).
I really like capitalism but the benefit of some particular private companies and/or private individuals over others is of no real importance for me. I'm (almost) a free market absolutist.
99.9999% of people in the world who do not hold rights to a patent and still do what they like disagree.
>The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
This is one of those scenarios where one cannot really tell if OP is being honest or satirical.
Wrong again, [1].
1: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/qcom/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
Personally, I won’t claim much because I haven’t done any survey. IP protection itself sounds reasonable, but guardrails are needed because the incentives to bullshit are quite strong.
Incorrect. Patents actually have a really crappy ROI.
1: https://thelogic.co/news/universities-earned-just-75-million...
Drugs and chemical processes are the most obvious candidates. And there's some heavy empirical evidence against the later.
Also, you directly contradict yourself when you state that (1) patents unfairly enrich their holders and (2) patents provide a poor ROI. Which way is it?
Example of what you said earlier -- you keep commenting under two different accounts.
>> [ME] Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
> [YOU] The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that
Once Deming made it over there and sold the idea of statistical quality control they were at the forefront of manufacturing rather than a laughingstock.
If I want to design a new type of pump, we're probably talking about a lot of work, and probably paying people to machine it and maybe paying an expert in another area to do some engineering work on some aspect of it.
The world as a whole is not like software. Furthermore, new things require groups of people getting into them. If we look at deep learning research, how much is from hobbyists?
There is some, from people trying to get PhD student places at groups that demand impressive work and there are some dedicated hobbyists that are part of organisations, but most of the work is commercial or from universities. This is required to get masses of people to spend time on a problem.
Ctrl-F "IMO". No matches. Oops.
Ctrl-F "opinion". No matches. Oops.
And I'll leave this conversation here because neither of us is bothering to follow HN commenting guidelines at this point.
Good luck with your research and I hope that if you apply for a patent it will be granted sells well.
Maybe patents provide an incentive to be innovative, but they also create a barrier to innovating on top of technology that is protected by patents.
Tons of low-quality, generic software patents are good for extracting small settlements. Especially when the firm wielding said patents can dissolve and reform overnight to dodge negative judgements, there's very little downside.
Separately, funding serious research purely for the purposes of creating high quality patents does not seem like a winning proposition.
Unsure of where creating patents in the normal course of business and using them for M&A leverage or for tit-for-tat deterrence falls on ROI scale.
Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds. Of course I'm likely in a different country to you, and mine has very explicit grants and tax benefits for R&D, but even when we were partnering with IBM we didn't patent the work I was doing (for a production homomorphic encryption implementation in 2014).
So I dunno. There are other mechanisms that can arise that still get yourself a job and paid without stifling innovation the way patents currently can do today.
The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.
But I didn't argue that you must file patents in order to do research, or even to be well paid. I argued that the existence of patents incentives research, and that I wouldn't have been paid as much if my work (chip design) didn't lead to patents being granted.
> The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.
I completely agree with that.
Yes, but not entirely. Japanese cameras, for example, were basically cheap ripoffs of German models up until after WW2. Japanese motorbikes were infamous for being cheap and flimsy in the 1970s to 1980s. Same for the cars, being a Toyota was not a good thing before the 1990s. Sure, there was some inertia and this kind of reputation takes time to shake off. The changes in product quality were gradual and a bit earlier than the changes in perception by the market (the Western European one, at least).
> Japan has long history of craftsmanship so I imagine they made high quality stuff for a while.
So does China. The main thing is that the exports we see are the stuff made cheaply in factories, not the bespoke items crafted from raw materials by an artisan in their workshop. Japanese companies are happy to build on the cheap as well.
And Chinese factories can make very high quality goods, if they put some effort in quality control. I am willing to bet that at some point they’ll be undercut and will go upmarket for a larger and larger slice of their exports.
I imagine that patent is not a recipe, but description used identify infringements.
If goal is only to identify infringements, then I would leave bunch of stuff out of patents. (Later I could fill new patent for same thing just describe those parts that were left out in the first one)
Will anyone spend money on R&D in this efficient world when the result is you just go out of business because you can't compete against anyone who does?
In my experience that has only been true for the simplest tasks I've been assigned to do. The only examples that come to mind are stuff I did as a junior developer. YMMV, of course.
As my career progressed more towards the R part of R&D, uncertainty skyrocketed.
There are several ways to answer this provided it isn't rhetorical.
One approach is to examine how society collectively decides what counts as property. These decisions aren’t neutral or universal — they’re shaped by the power and interests of those who benefit most from them. I hope it's clear that there is a contradiction present between: "property is universal" and those who benefit most from property being true are those with the most property.
Historically, the ruling class has established what counts as “valid” property by embedding their preferences into law and enforcing them through two major systems: ideology and force. You and I are taught to accept these definitions through societal institutions like schools, media, and legal systems. These institutions present ideas like patents or private property as natural or universal truths, making alternative ways of thinking seem unrealistic or unthinkable. For instance, when people say things like, “Patents protect natural rights,” or “Every other system has failed,” they’re reflecting this conditioning — whether or not they personally benefit from it.
The concept of property is enforced through systems of control, like courts, fines, and even imprisonment. If someone challenges the validity of a patent, they stand to face financial penalties or legal repercussions. The idea of “valid” property isn’t just a belief — it’s something actively maintained through both persuasion and coercion.
Ultimately, those who gain the most from these systems (like corporations or wealthy individuals) have the power to shape both the ideas we accept and the rules we follow. They turn their interests into societal norms through a feedback loop of belief and enforcement. The system sustains itself by creating the reality it envisions - "hyperstition" is where our collective belief makes something real.
Some regulation is needed to make things fairer, and actually better. But in my preferred mix of capitalism, patents wouldn't be a thing.