Well, there’s plenty of evidence of how patents have delayed innovation until after said patent lapsed, like steam engines, e-ink displays mentioned elsewhere here.
I would like to see any evidence of patents actually helping innovation increase. It should be plainly obvious that the negative side effects ARE actually the main effect.
It’s one of the few things I think the US constitution completely whiffed on, by mentioning patents at all.
where? not this one ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 ) I hope because I questioned it and I'm pretty sure it is false and written by someone who isn't actually even involved in the display industry. That particular post got cited by Boing Boing and multiple blogs and then subsequent HN posts started citing those blogs and Boing Boing. Basically a self-referential citation infinite loop. Please see my comment history. I work in the display industry and I'm not aware of what patent is blocking anything in developing electrophoretic displays.
Okay, my mistake. if there’s no patent there, there’s no problem there.
Kinda proves my point that the absence of patents allows innovation to grow, I have not seen any evidence to the contrary; it’s usually the “but what about the little guy” defense, not mentioning any “little guy” who was helped
I'm trying to understand what you're trying to communicate but I don't get it. Could you elaborate what you're trying to say because it sounds like you're claiming patents are bad (absence of patents = innovation growth) but we know that patents arose initially at least to protect inventors. Anyway we've gone well outside my initial question which was about which eink patent.
hm, didn't see this.
Yeah, I do believe that patents tend to undermine innovation pretty much everywhere, and yes, I do acknowledge that that was not the intent. The intent was to grant a temporary monopoly on an invention, to give an inventor time to 'cash-in'. Unfortunately that means it's effectively 'closed-source': no one else can make improvements to it w/o permission, and so I think a lot of innovation happens when a patent lapses. If that hasn't happened with e-ink displays, cool, then I must've misread something. It's hard to imagine e-ink displays being patent-free however.
I would like to see any evidence of patents actually helping innovation increase. It should be plainly obvious that the negative side effects ARE actually the main effect.
It’s one of the few things I think the US constitution completely whiffed on, by mentioning patents at all.