http://www.farceswannamo.homestead.com/altpatsys.html

Hopefully, this document at least demonstrates that there are other options besides either the current patent system or no patent system at all.

Of course, your arguments about the ways the current patent system provides a barrier for researchers are powerful and may well be true.

My point is that these same arguments apply with equal force against all developers of all products and all processes with the same force.

By having academic types, who tend to be articulate and self-aware, exempted from the patent system in their own careers, we fail to really appreciate the damage the patent system is doing to the less articulate and policy-driven.

The whole patent system needs fixing (I think primarily by a major revamp of obviousness law –perhaps by being eliminated altogether — perhaps creative ways of reducing transaction costs). If Prof. Posner had had to negotiate licensing fees back in 1973 to use the Coase theorem in his commercial product (a textbook), then you better betcha boots the patent system would be in much better shape (or perhaps gone) now. He would have made it so. He is a very capable man.

Alternatively, maybe Coase’s licensor would have commissioned the book (in substance) back in 1963. That is how the current patent system would have you believe things work — maybe that hypothesis is valid or can be made valid with some systemic tweaks.

Thought is thought, accelerating thought is accelerating thought. Field of technology distinctions act as if there is no Newtonian-like universal law of intellectual inertia — as if eggheads like torts professors respond to ecomic incentives and transaction costs differently than the nameless drones who create new designs for washing up fluid bottles. Worse yet, distortions caused by uneven application of the patent system obscure any universals and thereby prevent the patent law from developing in ways that give all people who live by their wits the push on those wits that Jefferson insisted it should.

Doug Lichtman rightly points out that incentives should be provided for developers to make their work available. However, the underlying assumption that patents will provide that incentive in our current economic system appears to be unsupported. At both the individual and institutional level, the practice of patenting often increases the cost and overhead of exchange thereby actually work against the intended outcome.

At the macro level, approximately 1 in 100 patents have economic value of any sort (e.g. used in licensing or litigation). After the famous examples of lucrative wins at a few top research universities (PCR at Berkeley) many universities try to emulate the success by setting up their own “office of technology liaison” (they go by various names) to handle IP issues including convincing researchers to patent their work (with rights assigned to the University) as well as licensing IP assets to commercial entities. The last numbers I saw indicate that very few if any of these offices actually generate enough licensing revenue to cover the costs of their (legal) staff.

Worse yet, at the micro level these offices create policies which expressly prevent researchers from sharing their (unpatented) work with others in order to protect the patent rights of the University. For an associate professor looking to get tenure, filing a patent looks like a barrier rather than an incentive. A costly, unfamiliar, and time-consuming process, filing for a patent just detracts from their objectives (publishing) with highly unlikely and uncertain rewards. Furthermore IP rights become real sticking points in collaborative work across institutions. In this environment, most research tools do sit on the shelf or at best follow the graduate students to their next institution without too much concern for IP issues.

Yes the issue of providing appropriate incentives is too complex to handle here. The answers probably lie more in the realm of markets that radically reduce transaction costs and other barriers to exchange rather than discussions around the current patent system.

My torts professor made a point of telling us that the theorem (1959) was slow, not fast to catch on. If this is true, maybe the slowness was the result of Coase’s employer perceiving itself as unable to stake out a Kitchian patent claim. Maybe if Coase’s employers had a money incentive, it wouldn’t have taken the theorem 14 years to show up in a legal text.

Of course, this stakeholder argument is often given to support the patent system in other contexts. Why would that not be valid in the market for books and articles? Transaction costs? Why would an author’s employers incur a greater helping of transaction costs than any other manufacturer or service provider?

I think academic publishing is an area where the traditional field-of-technology-non-neutrality has made us miss an important opportunity to optimize the patent laws as a whole. Of cousre, now that State Street has called the “printed matter” exception into question in the US, we may be getting this particular opportunity back.

This has been a major concern in NZ science policy – that NZ scientists are great at basic science, but not at moving them through to market, and that that is probably related to that traditionally scientists were just paid for doing the research.

There are other methods of transferring science, e.g. Coase’s Theorem didn’t need patenting to really transform economists’ ideas about property rights. And model farms have been a good way in NZ of transferring knowledge about farming research to farmers. And patent-owners can, in at least some circumstances, gain money more from suing infringers than from selling the goods themselves. But patents and grants are not perfect substitutes, they place different incentives to researchers.

I did not claim otherwise. 🙂

Your idea is so new to me (would you be able to patent it?), that I wanted to make sure I understood you correctly.

Of course, the key is showing that this-or-that advance was really forthcoming. But in the case that the advance really were independently forthcoming, then I don’t see why monopoly rights amount to more than “rent.”

If that shifts duplicative research fron AIDS drugs to toys, then let the good times roll!