Patents and innovation

EWeek's Jim Rapoza is writing about patents and innovation in his article Innovation: Don't Get Me Wrong. Having thought long and hard about this before, and the problems our current patent system is causing I couldn't resist posting a reply to his article especially since my "unpatent database" idea has been discussed here before. Here is what I wrote with a bit more detail because space eWeek comments are limited in length.

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For a long time I've pondered the same dilemma [patents and innovation]. I know the economic argument in favour of patents, that having them encourages people to invest time and more importantly money into research and creating new ideas, and then having a protected period to recoup those costs. However I actually believe that argument now applies to a tiny, tiny percentage of ideas patented.

I believe that the vast majority of patents are applied to ideas people just have with little or no effort to create them beyond some thought, and that by and large such ideas are obvious and could be replicated by almost any expert in a given field. Many times I have thought of original ideas, written it down and found someone had implemented the exact same idea a few years later.

This leads me to conclude that by far the greatest effect of patents is to stifle innovation. People do not pursue ideas because the believe they have to get a patent, or they just don't care to, and hence many ideas are lost. Or people patent obvious ideas and then implement or productize them badly so the idea is underutilized or completely wasted. These are both bad for society at large.

Think about it - there are over six billion people on this planet, and millions must come up with ideas every day but do nothing with them. If even a tiny percentage of those ideas were original and good that is still thousands of inventions going to waste every day.

So, what if people could just donate their invention to society for free exploitation, with no strings attached? It would establish a kind of copy-left for ideas, you can use it but can take the idea an further restrict it. There would soon be a vast pool of ideas out there for people to work with and everyone would have a chance to exploit such ideas equally.

My suggestion is someone like the FSF, EFF, or some other open source group create a "un-patent" database for people to file their ideas into and for others to search in. We'll soon have a huge database of all kinds of ideas - not all good, some really bad, many obivous and some perhaps already patented. But unpatenting an already patented idea does no harm - it has no legal effect on an already patented idea. Putting something in the unpatent database establishes no legal right at all other than preventing someone establishing a patenting on that idea. This is because someone cannot patent an idea that has already been published in the public domain.

So the effect is the this will prevent a huge number of obvious ideas (like hyperlinks) from being patented by companies just because they have pots of money to patent everything in site. It will effectively narrow the utility of patents down to only those ideas that are truly non-obivious and trivial. Ones that take lots of original thought, research and investment - those are the ones that deserve patents (if at all) and those are the ones that wont turn up in the "un-patent" (or perhaps Open Source Invention) library. All obvious and trivial ideas will end up in the unpatent library which is readily searchable and exploitable by all.

Furthermore, because so many ideas will be found in the unpatent library people will waste less money patenting obvious ideas, or fighting patent suits from people who did so. You'll virtually be guaranteed that if you do extensive original research and come up with some new invention that it wont be in the unpatent library and that patenting it will be worthwhile and that patent will be worth defending. In addition companies will not be bought and sold based on worthless and indefensible patent portfolios which are maintained only as bargaining power to fend off other patent suits.

The upshot: less money wasted in litigation, more money spent on innovation, more obvious ideas widely and efficiently implemented and available to everyone. Yes - everybody wins!

Just my $0.02c - its my idea but I'm throwing it out there to the public domain hoping that someone will run with it. I don't want any money for the idea - its obvious isn't it, just give me credit assuming I'm the first to think of it.