> that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle
I disagree with this (and I have no idea if it's true in the majority of cases, but let's stipulate to that for the sake of argument). If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.
> If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.
No. The coincidence of timing is a second-order consequence of the fact that smart people when faced with problems with similar requirements will produce similar solutions. In some cases the requirements are so constrained that not only will the abstract ideas be identical but so will the concrete implementations of those ideas (e.g. write me an optimal 8x8 IDCT for machine architecture X). It is absurd that any reasonably smart fellow who happens to tackle a problem first should be granted a government monopoly on his ideas.
If the goal is public disclosure of knowledge then assuming the problem has any wider relevance it will soon enough be revisited by other similarly smart fellows, so there is little incentive for the discoverer who happened to be first to closely guard his secrets. The gain to society for granting the monopoly in this case is that the knowledge might be disclosed a little sooner than otherwise. The cost is that other and sometimes even smarter fellows cannot develop those ideas further without a license, not even in the context of pure research, never mind business.
That hardly spurs innovation. And as for that, it was never the original purpose of the patent system but is rather a latter-day tacked-on justification for it, but let us suppose that is its principal purpose. Do you see that happening? It's certainly not working in the software world. Elsewhere in the thread there was a reference to a paper debunking some of the classic supposed success stories of patents related to Watt's steam engine and Ford's windshield wipers.
Ah, but now we're just arguing about what constitutes a non-obvious invention. And I would agree that we need better patent examiners making that decision.
Sure, that is a huge and endemic part of the problem. But if that were all, I might believe something of the system could be salvaged. Anyway, this thread has grown too deep already, so let's end it here. Thank you for the discussion.
> that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle
I disagree with this (and I have no idea if it's true in the majority of cases, but let's stipulate to that for the sake of argument). If it's a common occurrence that independent researchers tend to invent similar things around the same time, then it strikes me as a positive thing for the law to bestow some advantage on whoever was first. That would tend to spur innovation and patent disclosures, which is the whole point of the patent system.