[pvn]

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Being first to market is big advantage, true. It may be enough for big companies. What of the small guy? How does he create a distribution scheme to get his product out there?

That's his problem. You want to subsidize poor competitors?

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Who is subsidizing him? We are granting him a monopoly; the subsidy is so indirect i dont think you can call it that with a straight face. The point is patent helps avoid a situation where the only ones who benefit from an invention are those who can distribute it. incentive incentive incentive

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Are you kidding? You're giving the patent holder free access to a *huge* force apparatus that keeps other people from competing with him. That's a gi-freaking-gantic subsidy.

The motivation is meaningless. Do you seriously think the ends justify the means?

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As soon as a big company saw it, it would be swept up with their version, marketed everywhere, done at low cost,

OH NOES LOW PRICES!

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stop [censored] trolling. you are taking this out of context. yes, while that product would be flooded in the markets at low cost, the point is that the development of another innovation like that might not come out because of lack of incentives. obv low prices are nice, but again, two words: incentive and freeriding.

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If the product doesn't appear, oh well. That sucks, but assuming a conclusion (we need innovation XYZ) then micromanaging your way to it by coercing others is not a justifiable course of action. And while you rail against "freeriding" you advocate a system where patent-holders get to do exactly that.

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Im not saying you should be concerned about trade secrets. Im saying that patent helps facilitate free flow of technological information.



By placing restrictions on what people can do with that information? Where was the big problem with information sharing before patents?

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I dont think its accurate to say that patent lets someone sit on their invention.



Why not? It's verifibly true. Of course, one can sit on an invention without a patent, too. But with a patent, one can forcibly prevent someone else from implementing that idea even if the other party developed the idea independently.

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Ill deal with both these here because they are somewhat related.

As for the information sharing, i don't know for sure what the state of information sharing was before the implementation of patent law. I imagine very low; what incentive would one competitor have to share the inner workings of his invention with a competitor? However, I'm sure most inventions back then were not very difficult to reverse-engineer. For common household things information was probably easy to acquire, for big manufacturing type things, maybe more difficult but not impossible. Today, I think that information sharing would be very difficult to achieve in quite a few cases without patent. A competitor would have to reverse engineer some given product, and in the case of industrial machines, access to one in order to reverse engineer it might be very difficult indeed.

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This directly contradicts your earlier argument:

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What of the small guy? How does he create a distribution scheme to get his product out there? As soon as a big company saw it, it would be swept up with their version, marketed everywhere, done at low cost, and the poor fool would be out of the market in no time.

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So which is it? Easy or hard?

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IN SUCH CASES the competitor may be forced to develop the product by themselves. Patent helps avoid what is a redundant use of resources in re-inventing something. Resources can then be put into technological ADVANCEMENT and not redundant R&D.

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Oh wow. Not that. All sorts of competitive pursuits are "redundant". Should they all be forcibly eliminated? You're just a step away from a full-blown centrally-planned economy.

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Granted it doesn't solve the problem where two companies simultaneously develop a product only to have one file for the patent first. But I don't think that this happens all that often.

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Wait, I thought elimination of duplication was important. Now it's not?

And it does happen a LOT. Even for things that are huge leaps forward. Calculus was developed simultaneously and independently by both Newton and Liebnitz. And calculus is a lot more complicated than 99% of things that get patents. Cf. telephones.

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I said that patent doesnt necessarily let you sit on an invention because of cases of compulsory licensing. However, even without that, it is inefficient to spend money securing a patent only to exclude all others from using it. You are going to at least want to license it. Even patent trolls license.

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But they don't have to. And in fact, many don't. But if your argument really is about efficiency, then you're going to have to re-forumulate how you handle the two independent inventors scenario, since there's a huge amount of "wasted" effort there.

AGAIN, PLZ DONT TROLL. i would like to hear a longer, coherent argument from whoever

lol just thought pvn's title should be "patent troll"

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You sure throw that word around a lot. You should probably check the forum rules.