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I see this sentiment frequently, but I think it is missing some of the crucial details:

- patents last for 20 years in the us

- trademarks do not have value to the rest of the world. Eg, the name “Kleenex” is (was?) a granted trademark, to help customers identify products from that specific company. “Kleenex” has somewhat become generic, but I don’t think this is really better or worse for humanity in general — it just removes some branding strength from Kleenex.

- copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.

I think the concern about copyright is justified, but I think the others are honestly pretty decent. But of course different people will have different opinions.

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paxys a day ago | parent | next [-]

The big problem is that none of these laws have been updated to deal with digital property. We simply get new interpretations based on the whims of random judges who may not even be familiar with how the technology works. Software patents are the perfect example of this. Digital piracy/lending is another. And let's not even get into AI/LLMs.

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InsideOutSanta a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Patents last too long, given the current speed of technological advancement. 20 years ago, we looked at CRTs, we carried dinky Nokias, and data came on shiny disks. Giving somebody a monopoly on an idea for that amount of time is a huge impediment on the free market.

The other issue with patents is that the whole underlying idea is questionable. You're supposed to give people access to your idea in return for protection. But what is the value of that access? In a lot of areas, the value is zero, since reverse-engineering (or just looking at something) will give you all the information contained in the patent.

I suspect that most patents are giving companies a long-term monopoly on an idea, and providing absolutely no, or close to no value in return.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 a day ago | parent [-]

I think it's the other way around. Patents are hard work, often you make a physical product and you get a measly 20 years. Meanwhile, copyrighted material flows out of my ass and gets 70+ years. Ridiculous. Why bother making anything?

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adrian_b a day ago | parent [-]

I think that you have not read many patents.

There have been patents that are the result of hard work, but there is a deluge of patents that contain only ideas that are so obvious that nobody was shameless enough to attempt to patent them before.

Moreover the majority of patents contain extraordinarily broad claims, which cover many things that the authors of the patent have never succeeded to make, but they include the claims in the patent with the hope that someone else will find a way to make those things and then they will reveal the patent and blackmail those who have actually made a real device.

In the old times, for a patent to be granted there was a condition to present a working prototype embodying the claims of the patent.

Unfortunately this condition has gone a long time ago, otherwise it would have filtered most ridiculous patent claims.

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pinkmuffinere a day ago | parent [-]

These sorts of patents do exist, but they are not made “correctly”. Patents are supposed to contain novel ideas that are not obvious to experienced practitioners in the field. I think I agree with your criticism, except I feel it is a criticism of the execution of the law/system, rather than the law itself.

	▲	ndriscoll a day ago \| parent [-]
		The law itself is broken, at least when combined with trade secret law. When you look at the incentive structure, you see the no one would apply for a patent if they thought it was actually difficult for others to independently figure out or reverse engineer; it's better to simply keep it a secret, and anyone sharing it will be liable for civil action and criminal prosecution. If you believe that others will figure it out on their own anyway, then it makes sense to patent it to deny them the ability to do so. Pretty much the entirety of IP law is a farce. The whole story about wanting to incentivize companies to share their secrets doesn't even make sense. If we want the body of public knowledge to grow, don't legally protect secrets. Make non-competes illegal and make NDAs have a short maximum time limit, and you won't need to do anything special for knowledge to proliferate. The nerds that actually make things tend to like talking about how it works.

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eikenberry a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with patents is not the length, it is that they are being applied to a general ideas and not implementations of those ideas. You patent your mouse trap, not all mouse traps.

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TaylorAlexander a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

20 years is an eternity in terms of innovation. This has an extreme effect compared to the natural state (no IP restrictions). I argue that the effects of patents is actually poorly understood, and most arguments for how they work fail to explain how and why open source works, revealing serious flaws in the foundational theories of IP restrictions.

The sole function of a patent is to restrict innovation. That’s the only direct result of patents. All other claims about encouraging innovation rely on beliefs about secondary and tertiary effects which I believe are incomplete, out of date, and often simply incorrect.

Edit: Even the pure capitalists don’t like it: https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk

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bobthepanda a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

trademark is also supposed to protect against misleading copies of reputable goods.

it's hard to say how enforcing against counterfeiting would work without something that looked like trademark law.

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michaelt a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> copyright lasts life of author +70 years. This is problematic imo.

Personally, I think copyright isn't so bad simply because of what it covers.

A patent can stop me making stainless steel razor blades. At all.

But copyright? I can write a story about a boy wizard going to wizard school and learning from a man with a long white beard and a robe with huge sleeves. The law just says I can't call him Harry Potter.

	▲	pinkmuffinere a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is accidentally a bit misleading. You _could_ write a story similar to Harry Potter without infringing copyright, but it isn’t just the name “harry potter” or some other substring that’s protected. There is a degree of similarity after which you’d be guilty of copyright infringement. I don’t know how that criteria is decided though.