Item — HN Reader

Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long.

But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to invent something they can copy.

3 comments

> Patents incentivize investment in R&D.

In theory or in real life?

In real life, although the amount of incentive is different in different industries; and if one's main experience is in an industry where the amount of incentive is low, it's easy to imagine it's the same everywhere

In real life.

Yet an ungodly amount of money has been pouring into AI R&D

The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.

Not all inventions can be effectively kept secret, and patents also have the benefit that what would otherwise remain secrets gets published.

I’m not in favor of the current patent landscape, but doing away completely with them would likely be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Obviously. Yet on balance, the ones that can't be kept secret may not be significant.

I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.

Literally any product you send to the consumer can be reverse-engineered at comparatively low cost. The world doesn’t just revolve around server-side software.