What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong? | Techdirt - 0 views
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Scott Walker points us to a fascinating paper by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, suggesting that some of the most basic theories on which the patent system is based are wrong, and because of that, the patent system might hinder innovation.
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numerous other research papers and case studies that suggest that the patent system quite frequently hinders innovation, but this one approaches it from a different angle than ones we've seen before, and is actually quite convincing. It looks at the putative putative theory that innovation comes from a direct profit motive of a single corporation looking to sell the good in market, and for that to work, the company needs to take the initial invention and get temporary monopoly protection to keep out competitors in order to recoup the cost of research and development.
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the paper goes through a whole bunch of studies suggesting that quite frequently innovation happens through a very different process: either individuals or companies directly trying to solve a problem they themselves have (i.e., the initial motive is not to profit directly from sales, but to help them in something they were doing) or through a much more collaborative process, whereby multiple parties all contribute to the process of innovation, somewhat openly, recognizing that as each contributes some, everyone benefits. As the report notes: This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.
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patents are designed to make that sort of thing more difficult, because it assumes that the initial act of invention is the key point, rather than all the incremental innovations built on top of it that all parties can benefit from.
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the report points to numerous studies that show, when given the chance, many companies freely share their ideas with others, recognizing the direct benefit they get.
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Even more importantly, the paper finds that due to technological advances and the ability to more rapidly and easily communicate and collaborate widely, these forms of innovation (innovation for direct use as well as collaborative innovation) are becoming more and more viable across a variety of industries, which in the past may have relied more on the old way of innovating (single company innovative for the profit of selling that product).
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because of the ease of communication and collaboration these days, there's tremendous incentive for those companies that innovate for their own use to collaborate with others, since the benefit from others improving as well help improve their own uses. Thus, the overall incentives are to move much more to a collaborative form of innovation in the market. That has huge implications for a patent system designed to help the "old model" of innovation (producer inventing for the market) and not the increasingly regular one (collaborative innovation for usage).
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no one is saying that producer-based innovation (company inventing to sell on the market) doesn't occur or won't continue to occur. But it is an open policy question as to whether or not our innovation policies should favor that model over other models -- when evidence suggests that a significant amount of innovation occurs in these other ways -- and that amount is growing rapidly.