I find this dubious and that the amount of information in biopharma is way greater. Their patents are not an unholy mess, which leads me to assert that it is possible to do this better.
No, but the financial design of the industry is wildly different. "Small" companies in the software-industry sense are difficult-to-impossible to create in pharma, for reasons largely unrelated to their patent situations -- you can't really have a true garage startup for pharma, because even getting to the starting line requires a good deal of money. So the money to research, submit and fight patents exists in a way that it doesn't for bootstrapping software startups.
Moreover, without patents much of the pharma industry *couldn't exist* -- the cost of entry is so enormously high that, without the promise of patents, nobody would enter it. That's exactly what patents are for, in a way that has never been especially true for software and is even less true today.
There's also a difference in defining the scope of a patent. The problem with software is that it is so very *squishy* -- it's often hard to state precisely what problem a given innovation solves (which is part of why software patents weren't even legal until relatively recently; they were considered a non-sequiteur to the whole patent concept), and the "process" being described is necessarily relatively vague if you're going to produce a patent that is more than a glorified copyright (which is why software patents are dominated by the sorts of useless flow charts that the rest of the industry stopped using decades ago). I'm skeptical that there is a straightforward technique for properly defining software patent scope, at least in the general case. It's telling that such a large fraction of software patents are obvious, over-reaching bullshit.
It's unclear to me why inventors in this domain are any more or less deserving of these grants than inventors in any other domain.
And that is *precisely* what I'm arguing against. "Deserving" has *nothing to do with it* -- the question is, is it in the best interest of society that this specific field be patentable? I say no: because software is so cheap to create and to innovate in, it requires far less *incentive* to innovate -- and providing that incentive is the sole purpose of the patent system. You're making exactly the category error I'm talking about when I talk about people speaking in terms of "rights". It's not about rights or deserving: it's about an overall societal good being fostered by providing this monopoly within a given field.
In the software case, it's unnecessary *and* it retards innovation, by providing a mechanism whereby giant companies can obliterate small ones -- not by out-inventing or out-competing them, but by out-suing them. Buying up gigantic warchests of patents is a central part of the business plans of many of the big companies -- The Economist, for one, has devoted non-trivial space over the past few years to describing this effect, and the way that it is gradually squashing the small and innovative part of the software economy.
Software patents (indeed, business process patents in general) are both harmful and unnecessary. Is it possible to devise a system that addresses both of those? Maybe, but like I said, I'm skeptical...
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Re: So...
Date: 2019-06-05 12:14 pm (UTC)No, but the financial design of the industry is wildly different. "Small" companies in the software-industry sense are difficult-to-impossible to create in pharma, for reasons largely unrelated to their patent situations -- you can't really have a true garage startup for pharma, because even getting to the starting line requires a good deal of money. So the money to research, submit and fight patents exists in a way that it doesn't for bootstrapping software startups.
Moreover, without patents much of the pharma industry *couldn't exist* -- the cost of entry is so enormously high that, without the promise of patents, nobody would enter it. That's exactly what patents are for, in a way that has never been especially true for software and is even less true today.
There's also a difference in defining the scope of a patent. The problem with software is that it is so very *squishy* -- it's often hard to state precisely what problem a given innovation solves (which is part of why software patents weren't even legal until relatively recently; they were considered a non-sequiteur to the whole patent concept), and the "process" being described is necessarily relatively vague if you're going to produce a patent that is more than a glorified copyright (which is why software patents are dominated by the sorts of useless flow charts that the rest of the industry stopped using decades ago). I'm skeptical that there is a straightforward technique for properly defining software patent scope, at least in the general case. It's telling that such a large fraction of software patents are obvious, over-reaching bullshit.
And that is *precisely* what I'm arguing against. "Deserving" has *nothing to do with it* -- the question is, is it in the best interest of society that this specific field be patentable? I say no: because software is so cheap to create and to innovate in, it requires far less *incentive* to innovate -- and providing that incentive is the sole purpose of the patent system. You're making exactly the category error I'm talking about when I talk about people speaking in terms of "rights". It's not about rights or deserving: it's about an overall societal good being fostered by providing this monopoly within a given field.
In the software case, it's unnecessary *and* it retards innovation, by providing a mechanism whereby giant companies can obliterate small ones -- not by out-inventing or out-competing them, but by out-suing them. Buying up gigantic warchests of patents is a central part of the business plans of many of the big companies -- The Economist, for one, has devoted non-trivial space over the past few years to describing this effect, and the way that it is gradually squashing the small and innovative part of the software economy.
Software patents (indeed, business process patents in general) are both harmful and unnecessary. Is it possible to devise a system that addresses both of those? Maybe, but like I said, I'm skeptical...