Patent Trolls
Matthew Yglesias:
Yglesias » And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Patent Trolls: One line from last night’s speech that really left me cold was this: “No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs.”... [T]he quantity of patents the government hands out to inventors and entrepreneurs is measuring two different things simultaneously. One is how many new ideas do inventors and entrepreneurs send in patent applications for. The other is how loosey goosey does the patent office get about what it deems patentable.... [By] 21st century standards Isaac Newton should have patented calculus (“A Method For Using Fluxions To Determine Instantaneous Rate of Change”) and then waited patiently until Leibniz published his superior method and then sued the pants off anyone who tried to take a derivative without coughing up a hefty license fee. But would that world have been a better place? The issue isn’t really so much the rents that Newton would have thereby extracted (I’m not going to begrudge one of human history’s greatest geniuses a fortune) but the barriers to entry that would have been created as a secondary consequence. A world in which smart people have access to the stock of existing human knowledge and are free to apply it in new ways is a world of competition and innovation. A world where you need to consult with an army of lawyers first isn’t. If you ask the people who care most about promoting entrepreneurship in America about this they kind of shrug, concede that the patent system is hopelessly broken, and then confess to despair that it can or will be fixed...
