The Trouble With Patents
This article was originally printed on gamasutra.com.
Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says that Congress has the power:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Back in 1790, the patent examiners who considered each application were the secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the attorney general. Receiving a patent was a notable honor, reserved for important inventions.
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| Thomas Jefferson has been reading up about our mangled patent system and he's not happy. |
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson defined the criteria to patent as
Any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter.
Today, we say for an idea to be patentable, it must be:
- Novel
- Non-obvious
- Useful
Patents made it possible for great inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, and Thomas Edison to invest their sweat and genius into expensive new creations. With a patent, an inventor has the government’s guarantee that he can sell his innovation for a limited time without competitors being able to copy the product. After all, why spend money on R&D for new, innovative products if knock-off companies can instantly copy them?
“The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”
—Abraham Lincoln
And then something happened. I don’t know exactly when, but patents — especially software patents — have gone off the rails. It took 46 years to reach the 10,000th American patent, but today, there are more than 10,000 patents granted every three weeks. Perhaps patents could be given out as Cracker Jack prizes—after all, the US Patent and Trademark Office already approves more patents per year than boxes of Cracker Jacks sold at Dodger Stadium each year.
A notable change happened in 1991, when the U.S. patent office was no longer funded by the general tax fund and had to start sustaining itself entirely on fees from “customers.” This framed poster at the patent office’s headquarters gives insight into the office’s mentality:
Our Patent Mission:
To Help Our Customers Get Patents
The more patents, the more fees the patent office collects, and the more innovations we stimulate, right? But what happens when big corporations harvest thousands of patents for the sole reason of locking out competitors? What happens when competitors have to merge with each other to actually make anything? What happens when a cottage industry of patent hoarders waits for the right moment to strike, then demands that anyone who makes 3D games pay a tax? Or anyone who makes a spreadsheet program?
Entrepreneurs are faced with a minefield of seemingly obvious things they cannot implement out of fear of patent lawsuits. Meanwhile, IBM was awarded 2,941 patents in 2005, marking its 13th straight year as the #1 company in volume of patents (it had a much better year in 2004 with 3,248 patents).
Method of Exercising a Cat
"A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct."
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| At this exact moment, Amazon's Jeff Bezos came up with the revolutionary 1-Click Buy feature. |
What in the world are all of these patents? It’s not exactly the light bulb or steam engine these days. In 1991, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos patented the “1-Click buy” (patent number 5,960,411). That’s the concept where a website already has your stored credit card info, so you can click on a “buy now” button to buy it in one step. This landmark patent was widely criticized, and Jeff Bezos responded by saying that the patent system, as it stands, is broken.
If he didn’t patent this, his competitors would, and they’d use it against him. Bezos is “playing to win” in the game of business, and I can’t fault him for that, but even he pointed out that the rules of the game itself are broken and need to be fixed.
Patents currently give the patent-holder a twenty-year government-sanctioned monopoly. Twenty years might have made sense in 1790, but it certainly doesn’t in the realm of internet (or game) technology. Bezos said that perhaps three years would be a more reasonable number in the internet sector.
The Game Industry
One notable patent in the video game industry is #6,200,138 (or ‘138, for short). This is Sega’s:
Game display method, moving direction indicating method, game apparatus and
drive simulating apparatus
Here’s a couple lines of that patent, representative of the rest, to illustrate the quality of writing present in this patent:
A game apparatus for executing a game in which a movable object is moved in a virtual space, comprising:
setting means for setting a dangerous area around the movable object;
“Movable object is moved?” If an object is moved, just say so, because it’s clearly movable. “Setting means for setting?” What does that even mean? I’ll spare you the agony of reading through this entire patent, and I’ll just summarize it for you.
Sega made the game Crazy Taxi. Fox Interactive made the game Simpsons Road Rage, a knock-off of Crazy Taxi. Sega sued for infringement based on patent ‘138, which basically says this:
- You drive around in a city, rather than a race track.
- There's an arrow that hovers around, pointing you to where you should go.
- Cars have an invisible aura around them of "danger zone" and a bigger aura around that one called "caution zone." Virtual people in the danger zone jump out of the way. Virtual people in the caution zone stop walking, rather than walk into danger.
- The size and shape of the auras described above can change based on the speed of your vehicle.
Now, Simpsons Road Rage and Crazy Taxi are incredibly similar games, and no one is even denying that. But the concept of driving around in a city where virtual people jump out of the way of your car is not exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said that patentable inventions were to be new and useful, and you can forget about non-obvious. I also don’t think he’d be too happy that no one can make a game where you drive a car around a city with virtual people who jump out of the way…FOR TWENTY YEARS. The big picture of protecting the R&D of entrepreneurs is certainly not served by patents like ‘138.
Neither is it served by Namco’s patent 5,718,632, giving it a twenty-year government-sanctioned monopoly on using mini-games during another game’s loading screen. I don’t know how else to say this, but the idea of putting a mini-game in a loading screen is “obviously obvious.”
This kind of stuff is an insult to actual inventions. Somewhere along the way, patents started greatly hampering the advancement of technology, rather than cultivating it. One belief is that patents such as Sega’s ‘138 and Namco’s ‘632 are so laughable that they would never stand up in court. Well, they are laughable and I don’t see how they could stand up in court because they blatantly fail the test of “non-obvious to a person of average skill working in the field at the time.”
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| This man patented grapes. Now you must pay him. |
But the power of the patent is the power to threaten a doomsday not unlike nuclear warfare. Defending against even the craziest patent lawsuit is more than a $1 million endeavor (or at least that’s what patent lawyers tell me). Hardly anyone can afford to take this gamble, and anyone who does has a chance of losing BIG—a lot bigger than just the $1 million ante required to sit down at the legal poker table. When a patent holder sues for infringement, he’s entitled to reap the rewards of the “infringer’s” past sales. This encourages patent hoarders to wait until their prey hits it big, then sue, so the damages are astronomically (and unpayably) high.
And so the mafia-esque bullies will continue to bully. But what about Sega’s lawsuit over Crazy Taxi? Surely a court would interject some sense into this matter. Unfortunately, Fox Interactive was (somewhat understandably) not willing to stand up to Sega’s hollow patent, and so the patent was never tested. This encourages more bullies to bully more companies and demand protection money, while both sides escalate their nuclear arsenal of patents.
I guess I mixed metaphors of mafia and missiles just then, but the current situation is not unlike a war of mafia families with a dash of escalating nuclear weaponry thrown in, so I’ll let the mixed metaphor stand.
Novel and Non-Obvious
A lot of these problems stem from the way the US Patent and Trademark Office goes about determining what is novel and what is non-obvious. To find out whether something is novel, the patent examiner looks at previous patents and at published works to see if there is a discussion of the idea. The problem is that ideas that are bad, trivial, or completely derivative are not usually discussed in published works. In fact, serious publications (the ones the Patent Office would weigh the most) are the very publications that filter out all the bad, trivial, and derivative ideas, so of course they won’t discuss such ideas.
Just because you might not find any articles about “we could make video game controllers vibrate when the player gets hit by something in the game,” doesn’t mean the idea is novel, or that no one thought of it. In fact, so many people thought of it that probably hardly anyone submitted a serious paper theorizing about this feature ahead of time. It’s so far not even a very good feature, and yet it’s patented, and not by Sony (you’ll notice the lack of rumble in the PlayStation 3 controller).
And then there’s “non-obviousness.” The current test of non-obviousness has many problems, a fact that should be obvious by the sheer number of patents granted on obvious ideas. There is simply not enough emphasis on determining whether a person of ordinary skill would find the idea obvious. But there is also a more subtle problem with the process.
Suppose a group of 100 people of ordinary skill in computer programming separately encounter the same problem. This problem is so easy to solve that there are dozens of solutions. These 100 people submit, say, 45 substantially different implementations that solve this easy problem. Then one of them applies for a patent on a specific implementation.
Currently, that one person could claim that his particular solution to the problem was non-obvious and novel. That is vacuously true, as it’s entirely possible that none else used his particular method. In fact, his particular method might be a worse solution than the other 44 solutions mentioned above. Even though the 45 solutions are collectively “obvious,” this one particular solution is considered non-obvious, so the patent is granted.
But here’s the kicker: after he gets that patent, the courts seem to allow him to enforce it against people who used different solutions to the same problem! That’s right, even if your specific implementation to 1-Click buying is different from Amazon’s, they can still enforce their patent against you.
Courts do not always allow companies to get around a patent by using a different implementation to achieve the same goal. In Amazon’s case, Judge Marsha J. Peckman didn’t even need to review Amazon’s particular implementation of 1-Click buying because she considered any implementation to infringe on the patent. So, even if you developed your (different) particular solution to the 1-Click buying in parallel to Amazon and with no knowledge that Amazon was even working on it, you’re still out of luck.
Ideas for Reform
There’s no hope of reform coming from companies adopting different behavior. Companies are merely playing the game with the broken rules presented to them. Reform must come from lawmakers who restructure the rules of the patent office.
More is not better. In fact, fewer is better. The current test of non-obviousness should be overhauled so that it is actually effective in testing whether something is obvious. That test is supposed to be measured by whether a person of average skill working in the field would think it’s obvious, so I propose that we actually ask them!
Patents need peer review. The current oversight is for patents to go to court and for judges to decide what stands, but as we’ve seen in the Sega case, there is far too much incentive to keep these cases out of court. Oversight should come before the patent is awarded, during a public review period during which anyone can point out the fallacies of pending patents. This would mean that anyone who applies for a patent and is rejected would not be able to keep their idea as a trade secret.
Some would call this a problem, but I think it’s worth it on the whole. Legitimate patent applicants would have to carefully consider the risks of applying, but a public review would hopefully help demonstrate that legitimate patents are, in fact, legitimate. Public review would also eviscerate what I’m guessing is the majority of patent applications, and rightly so. Reducing the number of patents granted each year by 90% sounds about right. And while we’re at it, only certain types of patents should have a twenty-year reach.
After a patent is granted, more oversight is needed as well. Currently, the only recourse is the courts, but a firm (or individual) should be able to challenge a new patent and get re-review, perhaps within six months of the patent’s approval. The fees from these challenges can go towards the funding of the Patent Office, which will admittedly need more federal funding as well, once the approval rate of patents is slashed by 90%.
Open review of patents does have problems, but secret review of patents with no appeal has already thoroughly demonstrated itself to be broken. We could do worse than a little more oversight and transparency in decision-making.
"Other people have invented almost everything already. It becomes more and more dffficult every day."
—Henrik Ibsen, 'The Wild Duck'.
The joke’s on Commissioner Duell, because he should have realized that amazing inventions like 1-Click buy and the method for measuring breasts with a tape measure were yet to be patented in his time.
Method of Bra Size Determination by Direct Measurement of the Breast
"A method of direct measurement to determine cup size of the breast which includes band size measurement by initially measuring the user's chest or torso circumference with a flexible tape measure immediately below the breasts followed by the step of adding five inches to the measured number and incorporating conventional rounding-off procedures."
References
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh011606-story03.html
IBM stuff
http://www.stephenrubin.com/violation.html
The article that started it all.
http://www.around.com/patent.html
Very good article. Note that I took the images and captions of the two silly patents from this site. Maybe this is bad form, but the stuff is public record, so I don’t know.
http://www.ladas.com/Patents/USPatentHistory.html
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/focs00.html
Source that talks about the paradox of getting a patent based on a particular
implementation, but then being able to stop all other implementations in court.
Some sketchy info I used to estimate the Cracker Jacks sold per year at Dodger Stadium.
September 10th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I have my own theory as to how this came about …
http://jergames.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-marcel-duchamp-destroyed-our.html
Yehuda
September 10th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Frankly, I’m of the belief that if you haven’t seen it done and have come up with it yourself, the likelihood that someone can press charges against you is slim.
Furthermore, we also have genres and categories under which a lot of stuff falls so you can afford to have similarity while putting your own variation on that theme.
Otherwise, why hasn’t Capcom sued Midway over Mortal Kombat or whatever company made Guilty Gear (which by the way is a far better game than street fighter can ever hope to be)
September 10th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Actually, now that I think about it, my post is about copyrights and your post is about patents. So ignore my previous comment.
Yehuda
September 10th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I think you will be hard pressed to find someone that disagrees with your point of view. I do think Congress and others have heard your cries. There is a lot of legislation on the table both internally at the patent office and in the house/senate.
My main problem with all this stuff is still that at the end of the day someone has to be the decider. Wherever you end up drawing that line, there will be problems.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:35 am
What a silly world we live in.
September 11th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I love America! ^_^
September 11th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Sirlin;
You make an excellent point, and a fairly frightening one. Copyright is in a similar degree of disarray, if for different reasons.
However, neither issue - copyrighting or over-patenting in the digital era, come close to the nightmarish problems of the biotech era.
If you want to be kept awake at night for a while, do some research into the issue of biotech companies legally patenting genes - specifically, natural human genes.
Now that is insanity.
September 12th, 2007 at 6:53 am
So i might owe someone a percentage of my life earnings because they copywrote or patented my genes?
damnit… why didnt i think of that first?!! its genius!!
September 12th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Hehehehehehe……boobs.
But yeah, the “peer review” is a serious conflict of interest.
Taking Namco’s patent on loading screen mini-games…obviously, they’d get denied if Ubisoft had somebody on the board. Or Sega, SCEA, SCEJ, Capcom. Hell, that goes for absolutely anything in the gaming industry, or anything else. Unless you appoint a totally unbiased committee to review patents for every field patents apply, which you won’t anyway, this won’t work. Because either there will be no review, which is what we have now, or nothing ever will ever get patented. Ever. Because it wouldn’t be in the reviewers’ interests to approve any patent that didn’t benefit them and then alone.
September 13th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
If you want something like an unbiased committee then here’s what you do: nobody on the patent review committee can even touch something like the patent applied for for the duration of the patent (or if it is not granted: for the duration if it had been granted).
They’re tainted just by seeing it, so seeing it is what we restrict.
Easy.
If problematic for other reasons.
Software patents just in general are a Bad Idea. Are we going to patent mathematical equations? Can i patent 2 + 2 = 4? If not, then why are we allowing patents on software since that’s basically the same thing?
September 13th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Winter, who is going to sign up to do that peer review work then? If by merely doing the work you are stonewalling yourself from making any money?
Matematical equations are different from software patents. You can’t patent mathematical formulas, ie laws of nature, because they just inherently exist in the world. Software does not inherently exist. Its man made. The same way the telephone was.
I can sympathize with people arguing that too many things are patented, but to draw an arbitrary line betwee software and hardware patents is utterly ridiculous. For example, imagine if I tried to patent software for doing X, if software is not patentabile, then I just rewrite the claim to be a controller for doing X. Essentially the controller has the software and is patentable. And noone is shouting from the rooftop that physical objects shouldn’t be patentable.
I think too many people forget that the point of a patent is to get a monopoly. They inject some sort of fairness into the mix, basicallyt saying well its stupid that I can’t write a piece of code this way because of a patent. But athats the entire POINT of a patent. Its the same int he ahardware world. You can’t build your heating system a particular way because a patent exists, so you build it a different way, or perhaps if its a particularly good patent, you might not be able to build it at all with that functionality. It has nothing to do with whether its software or hardware.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Good job, Dustin.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:24 am
There are some interesting points made in your article, but in general I’d have to agree that peer review would be difficult or even impossible for the reasons pointed out above. Two other ideas could be to could limit the pool of peer reviewers to those who work in the field but not that discipline (for example, having game patent applications reviewed by people who work on Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop) or set up something more akin to a jury selection process, with a large pool and eliminations available to the patent applicant.
Alternately (and perhaps more realistically) would be to create a series of patent review boards for different disciplines that draw their members from academia. Most people who chose academics for their life’s career have experience in peer review via academic journals and PHD approvals. It could work!
But ultimately you have to bear in mind that massively reducing patents would massively reduce revenue for the patent office and therefore reduce the number of people they employ. And, it’s really really hard in practice to enact any changes that reduce the number of government jobs.
September 14th, 2007 at 7:19 am
@Dustin: It is not clear in what sense a mathematical equality “exists” naturally but an algorithm is “man-made.” In general it is possible to describe the effectiveness of any algorithm as a mathematical equality, or any mathematical equality as the effectiveness of an algorithm (OK, the latter part not so much in many situations involving infinite sets). I would agree that a division between software and hardware is perfectly arbitrary (and in any case ineffective), but a division between mathematical equations and algorithm designs are equally arbitrary. I do not see why you could not patent “2 + 2 = 4″, or at least the use of this fact to achieve a particular end, if it did not fail the obviousness test.
September 17th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Dustin: You aren’t preventing yourself from making money at ALL, just in the areas the patents look at. There would also, of course, have to be compensation of some sort. But if that’s the only way to get patents you can damn well bet companies would be willing to pay for patent examiners. Companies want their patents.
There are some problems with my proposal, but i don’t think this is really one of them.
Also:
Math -> underlying reality as computer science -> underlying hardware
Software may not describe reality but things like algorithms and the various other bits of computer science really are the same thing as math. (Software design would be more like engineering–applied math or applied computer science.)
For instance, can you patent algorithmic methods to store data more efficiently? That’s no different than patenting a way to represent a set of numbers (in fact, patenting a way to represent a set of numbers is EXACTLY what that is) and yet people think that’s perfectly reasonable. In fact, there have been patents granted on that exact thing before and i’m guessing there will be in the future. See, ie, the LZW patent–now expired in the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZW
It screwed people up for a long time and STILL DOES to this day.
The whole TIME LIMITED monopoly aspect of patents is also ridiculous. Software does not operate at the same speed as, ie, car manufacturing. (Even car manufacturing operates on a much faster time frame than it used to, for that matter!) Yet despite that there’s really only talk of the duration of patents going UP, not down.
Furthermore: patents may be good for one very small slice of the “software industry” (as well as anyone else who writes or uses software) but it’s definitely very bad for everyone else. It’s good for the patent holder, but everyone else suffers–and not just in the traditional manner for patents, that being “they can’t use the thing being patented without compensating the patent holder”. It’s bad because, with the rate of patents being granted, it’s impossible to be free from the spectre of patent infringement. If even just ONE of the big patent players (IBM, for instance) started actively prosecuting people who wrote software that infringed on their patents the entire business of writing software would grind to a halt. Even just a threat from IBM that they would start enforcing their patents has been enough to grind lawsuits, etc, to a halt on a couple different occasions. Ensuring that your code does not infringe on patents would require a full-time code auditing department, and more or less every company i know of simply doesn’t have one.
The only reason it APPEARS the software patent system isn’t completely destructive is because everybody is afraid of everybody else.
(Except, of course, for those smaller companies without a strong patent portfolio–they’re S.O.L. by and large.)
September 21st, 2007 at 8:31 am
Winter, I don’t think you quite grasp what you’re proposing. You’re essentially going in a circle around the claim that patents should be done away with, which lacks functionality and fairness to all the companies that already own patents.
Though the entire “Furthermore” paragraph is rendered obsolete by the simple facts that software development hasn’t ceased, and doesn’t look like it will at any time, and that there are still loads of small-time software developers.
October 6th, 2007 at 4:52 am
[…] http://www.sirlin.net/archive/the-trouble-with-patents/ […]
February 5th, 2008 at 5:09 am
There’s a really good podcast episode about software patents:
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
#93
The podcast host talks about one specific patent in an E-book reader that basically reduces display lag by assigning higher priority to the display process: something that’s not only obvious to any programmer, but anyone with a general concept of programming
Good article, but peer review has many loopholes - all the patent laws have to be updated for the 21’st century and not the 18′th.
March 14th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
So what do you think would happen if we got rid of patents altogether?
I wonder if the situation wouldn’t be preferable to the one we have now. Everyone would be able to implement the features they want, even if someone else had already done it - as a consumer, I know that sounds good to me. For example, I like minigames on loading screens. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to do it? I like one-click buy. Everyone should be able to do that, too. If we want to make sure the inventor gets more revenue for the idea than everyone else, just have patents with a duration of, like, six months.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s absurd that I could find a hypothetical, inexpensive cure for cancer, and then mercilessly monopolize it for the next twenty years, when if it were on the open market it might quickly drop to a price affordable by almost everyone?
March 14th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Regarding software patents specifically… yes, some people do think that software falls outside the definition of things that are patentable, and it shouldn’t apply. That said, remvoing patents entirely isn’t a good idea. The whole point of patents is to increase innovation… the reason you give someone 20 years to sell the thing they invented is to make sure they’re willing to invent something in the first place. Using your own example… even if someone does find an “inexpensive” cure for cancer, they probably will have had to spend a ridiculous amount of money to discover that cure, and they deserve to profit financially from doing something that great.
(P.S. That said, there are many issues with drug companies going farther with upholding those monopolies more than is arguably necessary to simply turn a profit… but that’s an entirely seperate issue, and shouldn’t be resolved simply by removing patents altogether.)
March 16th, 2008 at 2:04 am
I think cold turkey is, as usual, a poor way to solve the problem of patents. In the simple terms, the system needs to be somehow altered to be a positive reiforcement loop for inventors. How that can be achieved I’m really not sure, but we might be able to look at the history of trusts for some help. For software, however, I don’t see the benefit of any sort of copyright or patent system. The comparisons to art are undeniable. Artistic expression is often best when artists freely take, borrow, and steal from each other’s work to make their own. What happens when someone paints something that is nearly identical to a previous work? It’s almost always ignored, and if given attention at all, it’s derided. What happens when a painter takes an existing piece and improves upon it or changes it using his own talents? Some criticize it for being “derivative” sure, but most praise it for being inventive.
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 am
@Ryven:
Well, then I’m going to make a bunch of bootleg 360s right now.
August 30th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Great article. Perhaps you wanted to keep your article short and focused on video gaming (those were some great examples), but the problem is much deeper.
Government programs always have unintended consequences. No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, no matter how good your intentions (like to promote the creation of new inventions), government programs always expand beyond their intended scope and do things that its supporters never imagined.
The real solution is not the abuse of patents, but their very existence.
Government is force. All government programs require force to be used. If someone acquires a patent, he has been given the ability to prevent other people from engaging in the peaceful act of selling copies of inventions. He can send those people a very nasty letter ordering them to cease (or telling them to show up in court). And if they refuse, the patent holder can send people with guns to go after them. Imagine, having people with guns breaking into your house, putting you in handcuffs, and carrying you to a 10×10 cell behind bars because of an act that harmed no one; you just wanted to market a product that someone else thought of.
Patents inhibit innovation. Businesses can rest on their laurels for twenty years. They can choose to do nothing new and invent nothing for years, and still rake in money. This is especially troublesome for the drug industry. Drug manufacturers could be making new drugs, but they know they can just profit from the ones they already made for a long, long, time. They can patent a drug, then when the twenty-year period is almost over, they can make a slight modification to an inert part of the substance. This doesn’t change how the drug works, but it creates a “chemically unique substance” and allows them to renew their patent.
I suppose the other utilitarian case against patents, is the fact that they inhibit innovation simply by the fact that if you know of an already existing invention, and you know of a way to improve upon it which will make lots of people better off, you cannot because of patent law.
Imagine that there is a machine that performs radiation therapy on cancer patients. Its performance is affected by a variety of factors and it runs on special software. You notice a flaw in the software, find some way to make it generate fewer errors, or in some way improve it. You make your own version of the software and then market it. Doctors decide to run this newer, better software in their radiation therapy machines, and lives are saved. Radiation therapy machines have been known to kill people when they malfunction (doses that are too large are deadly). You just made a lot of people better off. However, you can’t do that today because of patent law. If you do try to do this, a bunch of people with guns are going to come after you.
I think that all this talk about intellectual property is just silly. It just an artificial construct set up by the government; IP didn’t exist until the government said it did. In a free market, there would be no demand for this crap. If you want to keep your ideas a secret, fine- keep ‘em secret. But as soon as you let it out into the public it should be fair game. If you can’t keep it to yourself, you shouldn’t expect other people to keep it to themselves.
It’s just absurd that a video game controller vibrates only with the permission of Nintendo™©®®™©© (or whoever has the patent, I assume it’s Nintendo), and that anyone else who wants their controllers to vibrate is a criminal. It’s absurd that things as generic as “drive around a city instead of a racetrack” can be used by gaming companies to sue other gaming companies. Imagine how much lost productivity there is because some website owners are afraid to allow their customers to buy products with “one click”. It’s absurd that people can invent things like “1-click buy”, exclude all competition, and not implement it for 4 years (amazon.com was implemented in 1995), and then become the 19th wealthiest person in the world.