The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes.

With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.

So I was an intern at Merck MANY years ago and they had this interesting comparison.

Most companies only publish medical research findings on blockbuster drugs once both are true:

1. Production has started

2. A patent has been filed

The reason for this is that they want to maximize the amount of production time under patent b/c that maximizes revenue.

If you are the researcher, that means you have to wait until all of the production setup is ready to go.

Merck took a different stance.

There, the patent was filed as soon as the researcher was ready to publish. This meant that there was less time under patent for production but was much better for the researcher as they got their findings out earlier.

The thinking was that being able to publish earlier would attract better researchers and in turn would lead to better drugs, more revenue, more profits.

This was in the late 1990s so not sure how this plan worked out as I haven't been in pharma since that era.

Would be interesting to hear from other folks more knowledgeable.

You could probably take a competitor closing in on a patent and destabilize them by taking just enough of their R&D and feeding it though an LLM to reach a motivated conclusion, then publishing that transcript. I wonder if we'll see an increase in corporate espionage as a result of this powerful new tactic evolving.

You spend billions to get a drug from concept to approval - and then once you've invested all that money, someone else can just sell it too, free loading on all the studies you ran? Why would anyone invest in drug studies?

I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.

What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.

That's interesting, but I'm a little skeptical about pharma. Right now there are a lot of really potentially-promising molecules that pharma isn't really interested in bringing to market because they can't patent them. I don't know though, maybe the game changes if nobody can patent drugs, but then I think you'd need to make FDA approval a lot cheaper.

Patents are an incentive to encourage an inventor to lay out an invention or process in exchange for the state protecting that process, we did this because there have been in the past inventions that have been lost, that were valuable largely because the inventor died without documenting what they did (keep in mind the first patent was issued in 1331[0], this is old law)

The complicating factor is that as time passes our ability to reverse engineer has grown, however I'm not sure that invalidates the need for patents, the question is whether the new patents are being assessed well from a novelty / inventiveness perspective

-[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

>my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes

at the time patents were debated, a key part of the proposal was to encourage the transfer "trade secret knowledge" to the public good while still protecting the inventor. this is not an "encourage innovation" argument, it's to stop knowledge from dying with a secretive inventor, knowledge such as glass or metallurgical techniques, formulas, etc.

the inventor also benefited from this patent protection because they could expand their business unlimited by maintaining a small inner circle who knew the secret.

I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

I could be into that

Patents have been mostly a pride checkbox for me, but at the same time being able to get credit for something you could never build is interesting. I’m less supportive of the loose monopoly part though, that seems to be the real issue dampening innovation

Everyone hates patent trolls (non practicing entities who dont implement the idea themselves), but practically its an extremely high burden. I did some patents on financial market plumbing, implementing that requires licensing and infrastructure far beyond any coding or building problem

Thinking of it 10 years before investment banks get around to it I think should still be incentivized someway

But the current system is cooked