Patently Unethical · Friday August 03, 2007 by Crosbie Fitch
Conley said 6384 days ago :
Do you have a solution? How do small inventors keep from being exploited without some form of protection. I agree 100% that patents suck (especially in software) and last far too long in a society that progresses exponentially, but what other options are there?
Perhaps you could say that the inventions success in a patent free world makes the inventor more marketable even if it is exploited, but I think that is only a mediocre view/solution. I have not read Against Intellectual Monopoly, so maybe I will read that later. Maybe they have a better solution.
Conley said 6384 days ago :
New thought: perhaps patents should not really be treated different than copyright. Then you could lump a cc by-sa model on them. What do you think?
Crosbie Fitch said 6384 days ago :
Remember, the purported objective of patents is not to prevent inventors being exploited, but to encourage them to publish knowledge useful to mankind.
An inventor may greatly enjoy a commercial monopoly, but their enjoyment doesn’t sanction the surrender of many other inventor’s liberty to commercially exploit their own inventions (that may coincidentally overlap with the inventor who filed first).
We are all toolmakers and bound to come up with similar tools as mankind’s technology progresses.
The problem that patents were supposed to solve is the peculiar case when an inventor has a very useful invention, and can commercially exploit it whilst keeping the invention secret, and yet believes that this would provide greater revenue than could be obtained by selling the invention. Sometimes they do sell it, but it remains a closed cartel.
In the early days of the industrial revolution I suspect it was feared that some of these secret inventions could be lost from human knowledge when the inventors died, taking their secrets with them.
It was considered that if a monopoly was granted, thus simulating the effect of the published invention remaining secret, then this monopoly (and constraint upon everyone else) was worth ensuring that the invention joined mankind’s technological repertoire.
“Look. Publish your invention and we’ll pretend it’s still your commercial secret – for a few years. Or so.”
The funny thing is, patents don’t actually solve the problem people say they do.
Inventors still keep those inventions secret that they can commercially exploit without disclosure. I should know. My father was an inventor and he had several machines that could churn out wire based components for electronic equipment a hundred times faster than anyone else. But, he didn’t patent these designs, because there was no point in doing so. And now he’s dead, and I don’t even think I have all the designs.
So, the only things people patent are those things that reveal their own design, i.e. the sort of thing that would end up being mass produced by the manufacturer who was most competitive in terms of value for money.
But, without patents, such things would still be designed and manufactured, and inventors would still publish their inventions of easily mass produced items. Just as I still write comments like these – despite everyone being able to mass produce them far more effectively than I could by charging a penny a month for my hand printed circular.
Let’s imagine there were no patents and someone invented the bread slicing machine.
1) Because there are no patents, the inventor realises it’s all a lost cause, gets depressed, commits suicide, and we enjoy unsliced loaves for another century until someone else thinks there must be an easier way of mass producing sandwiches if only they didn’t have to employ so many people to slice the bread.
2) They keep it secret, but they believe they can make more money churning out tons of ready sliced loaves, than selling the secret of how they do it. They die wealthy, but the secret of mechanised bread slicing is lost to mankind forever. This is because people were actually quite happy slicing their own bread. Supermarkets flew their loaves of bread out to China for cutting, before flying them back to put on their shelves, as this was considered cheaper than the cost of developing a mechanical contraption.
3) News of sliced bread spreads far and wide. Loaf cutting labourers the world over quake in their boots at the realisation of an imminent career change and the agony of reskilling. A cartel of bakeries offer the inventor big spondulicks to reveal the secret design. OR they develop their own machine, that is actually quite different, but nevertheless comparably effective.
The argument that patents encourage knowledge transfer is bunkum. Patents are highly commercially advantageous to the PATENTEE and perhaps give the nation a leg up with respect to some products, i.e. the equivalent of a subsidy obtained from taxation, that then enables the nation to become a bulk exporter in this product with respect to other nations who didn’t grant a monopoly on it to anyone, or if they were really silly, granted a monopoly to the foreign patentee.
Patents suspend the public’s liberty in order to privilege the inventor, because the King probably believes such a favour is in the nation’s interest, and damn his peasant’s trifling loss of liberty.
But, remember, we don’t care how much the inventor would enjoy such a privilege. The point is, our liberty is not to be doled out just because someone reckons they could profit from its suspension. Not only does there have to be equity, there has to be consent. With patents, there’s neither. We don’t get secrets published that are so valuable they remain secret, just the ones that would have been published anyway, and there’s absolutely no consent.
Many people readily grasp the purpose of patents, but it’s not so easy to grasp why patents are unethical. It’s as if simply understanding how patents work, is enough to justify them.
The real issue of contention is not our desire to encourage inventors to publish their secrets, but the means by which we encourage them.
It is unethical to offer to tie the hands of all other potential inventors and manufacturers to give the publisher of the invention a commercially lucrative monopoly as compensation.
As with any property that people may desire, it is usual and ethical to invite the inventor to offer their invention (that they would otherwise keep secret) for sale in a free market. If it’s sufficiently desirable, they’ll receive compensation in proportion to its value. If no-one wants it, well, they may as well publish it anyway.
Patents arose in an age in which tieing other people’s hands to exploit their lack of freedom was considered quite an agreeable practice. It’s no longer agreeable to those it affects (the public), and it’s time it ended.
For further reading, I highly recommend Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.