This is exactly the wrong way to be moving. We should be properly enforcing our laws on megacorps, not just shrugging and throwing them out entirely because it's just toooooo haaaaard to actually stop these companies from breaking them.
Without patent protection, any individual or small business that comes up with something new and (currently) patentable would have no recourse whatsoever. The megacorps could just start producing whatever it is as soon as they find out about it, and outcompete the actual creator with massive economies of scale and the ability to take a loss effectively forever on any given product.
Sure, if you live with an 1800s era mentality about who invents things. This is no longer the era of Thomas Edison and the individual inventor. If our laws don't meaningfully reflect the way our lives are lived now, they won't be useful frameworks. I think your proposal may be about 2 centuries behind the times.
>Without patent protection, any individual or small business that comes up with something new and (currently) patentable would have no recourse whatsoever. The megacorps could just start producing whatever it is as soon as they find out about it, and outcompete the actual creator with massive economies of scale and the ability to take a loss effectively forever on any given product.
It seems like they do this anyway, and patent protections mean high prices for consumers on patent-protected products. Given that in the mid-2020s, the corporation:individual ratio patents is ~18.5:1 (up from 4:1 in the 1970s), I see the benefit gradient being more pro-consumer by getting rid of them.
You're describing the system as it exists today, where the powerful have been allowed to run rampant, suppressing competition, for decades. Not to mention the loss of trust in the patent system as a whole, due to things like software patents being transparently corruptions of the system.
If it were possible for an individual to profit from their patent today as they would have in the 1970s, it's much more likely that people would seek patents.
I figured the ratio would be even more distorted like 1000:1.
Can’t imagine individuals getting patents unless they’re owners of a small business. Even then, don’t see how they’d have sufficient resources for defending them.
Except that the purpose of patents is not to be "pro-consumer", at least in the US Constitution, it's to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
The purpose is to provide an incentive to creators to reveal their inventions and make them available to the public and other creators, instead of keeping them as trade secrets.
>Except that the purpose of patents is not to be "pro-consumer", at least in the US Constitution, it's to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Perfect reason to abandon patents. American innovation has ascended to the top of the species; it doesn't need additional protection.
> American innovation has ascended to the top of the species
What on earth does that mean and how is it relevant? Are you trying to say that there is no more "[P]rogress of Science and useful Arts" left to be made?
Patents protect the innovators; American tech is the best on the planet; the bust humans have to offer, in aggregate (whether measured by patents or money generated by them). There is obviously progress to be made, I just believe that American technologists no longer need patent protections. We are not a small upstart country anymore; we have scaled.
In fact, not only have we scaled as a country and an economy, we are now in the enshittification + rent seeking phase of capitalism, which is precisely why patent protections should be discarded.
To the contrary, innovation is proceeding full speed, despite patents. The only thing patents are doing is 1. enriching the lawyers on creation, 2. restraining law abiding innovators in country (meaning all other countries will proceed to ignore it anyway), 3. give the advantage to all other countries, and 4. enrich the lawyers again if they can find one of the in-country infringements to pursue (again ignoring all the others).
None of these outcomes is beneficial. The system is broken and antiquated. Ditch it.
Honestly, this would have pretty positive effects on costs of medicine, replacement parts for machinery, etc. It definitely hampers the regulatory capture moat that these companies build.
