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Patents Hurt Innovation
According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate.
Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents.
The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility.
Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.
In the study, Torrance and Tomlinson explain how patents have been wrongly justified as a way to encourage invention. The justification has been that by excluding others from duplicating an invention or process, the patent owner is more likely to spend time, energy and resources on their product. However, past studies have proved otherwise. Data collected from PatentSim further substantiates these findings.
Photo by USPTO.
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Dale Halling on July 11th, 2009 8:33 am
The empirical evidence does not support this study. The richest countries in the world have the strongest intellectual property laws. The poorest countries have weak or non-existent intellectual property laws. Unless this study can explain this, it is inherently flawed.
Should Patents be Abolished? – Scarcity
There have been a number of suggestions that patent should be scaled back or outright abolished. For instance, Stephen Kinsella has written a book, Against Intellectual Property, and Tom Palmer has written and article, “Are Patents and Copyright Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects.” Many of these critiques suggest that property rights are based on scarcity and intellectual property rights are not subject to scarcity.
The article “Scarcity – Does it Prove Intellectual Property is Unjustified?” (http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/22/scarcity-%e2%80%93-does-it-prove-intellectual-property-is-unjustified/) suggests that property rights are not based on scarcity but on the “labor theory of property” first proposed by John Locke. The labor theory of property explains criminal law, how property is to be allocated and intellectual property law. The “scarcity” theory of private property does not explain criminal law and does not explain how property should be allocated. According to its proponents it does explain why there should not be intellectual property law. Trading scarcity for the labor theory of property is like trading the theory that “what goes up must come down” for Newton’s Law of gravity. The fact of the matter is that the proponents of scarcity have confused cause with effect. A system of private property results in efficient allocation of resource, but it is not the reason for private property – it is the effect of private property.
Is the conception of ideas and inventions subject to scarcity? See http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/25/scarcity-and-intellectual-property-empirical-evidence-for-inventions/
Is the distribution of ideas and invention (technology diffusion) subject to scarcity? See http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/25/scarcity-and-intellectual-property-empirical-evidence-of-adoptiondistribution-of-technology/
Business Genome on July 11th, 2009 6:42 pm
Very interesting post. Patents have become such a part of our culture that it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Thanks for this refreshing take. It seems to fall in line with the idea of innovation through collaboration taking place in companies like British Telecom and Cisco, and on websites like Linkedin. Patents may isolate us in a way that no longer works in our newly connected world.
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