The broader issue is that the USPTO will let you patent anything. They have a long review process, but so many stupid things get approved that the agency is a sad joke.
The use of kittens was specifically specified by lobbyists as they knew that would make it impossible to change the procedure. Who’s going to vote against kittens? Squee!
"A method comprising: obtaining an input sequence having a first number of inputs arranged according to an input order; processing each input in the input sequence using an encoder recurrent neural network to generate a respective encoder hidden state for each input in the input sequence; and generating an output sequence having a second number of outputs arranged according to an output order, each output in the output sequence being selected from the inputs in the input sequence, comprising, for each position in the output order and beginning at an initial position in the output order: generating, using the encoder hidden states, an attention vector for the position in the output order; generating, using the attention vector, a softmax output for the position in the output order, wherein the softmax output scores each position in the input order; determining, using the softmax output, a pointer to a particular position in the input order; and selecting, as the output for the position in the output order, an input from the input sequence that is located at the particular position in the input order identified by the pointer."
Why does the USPTO do this? Is it a technical problem or a political one?
I remembered reading a story from the early industrial era, about an inventor who challenged another inventor's validity of patent and pressured the patent office to hold a demonstration for verification before believing the invention is true.
Software patent is probably a culprit that makes some of the previously impossible patents possible by doing it on a computer. But I don't think it can explain everything. Why has the USPTO became something beyond stupid nowadays? I don't think the patent office verifies anything these days, they only log everything and left all the actual business to courts, I'm not sure it's the best system. Is it because the model of a centralized patent office simply doesn't scale well for the tremendous amounts of patent? Or because of lobbyists? Or both (e.g. patent office doesn't scale well and the lobbyists and patent lawyers exploit it to apply stupid patents)?
Defining de novo property interests without physical bound inherently creates a vested rentier class interested in the persistence of those properties.
New entrants to a field generally oppose patents. Incumbants generally support them.
I've watched numerous firms (Oracle, Microsoft, Google) transition from one side of this dynamic to the other. It's a tragic inevitability, in the classical Greek sense.
The (further) tragedy of the tech world is that it thinks this is a problem only with, take your pick, software or information-technology subjects. The problems with (and debates over) patents go far further back. Arguably, patents delayed the start of the Industrial Revolution by 25 years, as England awarded extensions to James Watt for his steam engine.
Which may, of course, mean we merely postponed the inevitable global warming by a couple of decades.
The histories of light bulbs, phonograph, telephone, radio, television, and more, are other arguments against patents.
On the flip side, Watts developed his engine using financing from a coal industrialist, John Roebuck. Would he have secured that financing in the absence of a potential monopoly profit on his engine?
The examples you mention illustrate the importance of patent rights to securing financing that bankrolls R&D. Bell had investors who pressed him to patent the telephone. Edison’s research was bankrolled by a series of contractual arrangements with companies like Western Union—where patent rights protected technology that he was demonstrating and trying to sell to Western Union. He also sold patent rights to Jay Gould. His Menlo Park R&D lab tested 3,000 lightbulb designs before filing the first patent. The same month as that patent filing, Edison founded what would become General Electric using financing from JP Morgan and others. Although you didn’t mention flight—the famous Wright-Curtis lawsuit actually involved two patent holders. Curtis was bankrolled by, among other people, Bell, and had its own aircraft patents. See here’s for more of the history: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=4980020990931060...
Patents almost certainly delay the widespread adoption of a new technology. That’s the whole point. But the counter-factual scenario is not, as you suggest, what would have happened had the invention not been patented, but what would have happened if patents had not been available. Would the alternative means that exist to finance R&D (government spending, mostly) have produced the invention in the same time frame?
Also, there is the problematic fact that monopolies are, for a time anyway, good for innovation. Someone else might have invented the telephone. But Bell’s monopoly ended up inventing the transistor, C, and UNIX. Someone else might have invented the copier. But Xerox’s monopoly ended up investing the GUI, email, and networking. GE, IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, Xerox, HP, Google-these are all companies that added way more to the state of the art during their quasi monopoly periods than at inception.
Roebuck could also have had the foresight that such a machine would increase demand for coal, making him a nice profit. I don't think this is a particular compelling example.
People will make money somehow or another, but it’s not clear to me that we want to encourage these indirect monetization models. That’s basically the Android business model—don’t make money selling the OS, make money selling the data collected when people use the OS. It’s better for Watts to have had a temporary monopoly on engines than to encourage schemes where investors try to profit from a general increase in coal use.
Steam power, light bulbs, telephone, radio, aircraft, television, and numerous other inventions were very much in the Zeitgeist, and the fact of numerous patents being filed (or warred over) means that at best the benefits you describe are at best zero-sum: the benefits accruing to one party are those which are denied another. From an investment standpoint, this means that any such backing becomes a gamble: will an innovation pay off if a patent can be successfully filed with primacy (see Bell vs. Gray: https://www.princeton.edu/ssp/trips/data/scientificamerican0...), given primacy, and defended.
James Watt through 1800 sold a total of 500 steam engines, all low-pressure vacuum-action (the work stroke came from the condensation phase, not from the recovery steam-entry phase), with typical ratings of 20 kW, several times greater than typical watermills of the time. Most were restricted to pumping water. Watt obstructed mobile applications (ships or rail).
Expiry of his patents saw high-pressure steam engines with far higher power, mobile applications (ships, rail), tremendous increases in power (to 1,000 kW by 1850). Innovations meant both larger and smaller engines were available -- the former capable of powering large factories, locomotives, and ships, the latter for small point-of-use power sources. Much as large and small electric motors provide both raw capacity and very specific localisation.
General history of steam and specifically of Watt's obstruction of innovation are covered well in Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization, pp 235ff.
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms notes that few of the early industrial innovators, Watt included, made much return based on either patent royalties or patent-era sales, looking at key inventors of the early Industrial Revolution: John Kay (flying shuttle), James Hargreaves (spinning jenny), Richard Arkwright (spinning frame), Samuel Crompton (spinning mule), Reverend Edmund Cartwright (power loom), Eli Whitney (cotton gin), and Richard Roberts (power loom, machine tools).
Of the list, Kay, Hargreaves, and Roberts died in poverty. Crompton and Cartwright were granted substantial payments by acts of Parliament (£5,000 and £10,000 respectively), Whitney made money through arms sales to the U.S. government, and of the lot, only Arkwright earned significant wealth, half a million pounds, after his patents stopped being honored by other manufacturers.
The case against patents generally is made in "The Case Against Patents", by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
It's truly amusing that you should mention Unix. I'll just quote from Wikipedia as the facts are very well established:
The Unix operating system was first presented formally to the outside world at the 1973 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, where Ritchie and Thompson delivered a paper. This led to requests for the system, but under a 1956 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, the Bell System (the parent organization of Bell Labs) was forbidden from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services", and was required to license any patents it had upon request.[6] Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product. Bell Labs instead shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping.[6] Ken Thompson quietly began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disks, each accompanied by – according to legend – a note signed, "Love, Ken”.[12]
That is, AT&T were specifically enjoined from making profitable use of their inconvenient operating system, which instead developed under a general sharing and collaborative model of development, some at AT&T, much at Berkeley, MIT, and other (mostly academic) sites, and through such publications as Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code.
Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1935) details numerous instances and methods of such dirty tricks, including specifically use of patents in obstruction of innovation, and is rapidly becoming among my favourite references to these:
wow i violated this patent years ago when I made a microsocial network that used an email gateway to interact with users via sms. guess I should have patented it first ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The latest example:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/someone-suing-companie...