A litigated court case? I'll have to think about that for a while. But the question you ask, are patents good for humankind in general, is yes. Transnational comparisons make it easy to see over the course of history that people invent more in countries that have secure rights for inventors. Patents can be overbroad (that's often what we talk about here on Hacker News) and patents can be for "prior art" already known to other workers (and that's what often gets litigated), but in general patents are a helpful public policy, along with copyrights (I think current United States copyright terms are much too long) and trademarks. Protection of legal rights in intellectual property encourages creative people to produce more intellectual property.
AFTER EDIT TO REPLY TO A QUESTION:
I was asked for a written account of transnational comparisons of intellectual property law and its effect on innovation. Here is one.
I have to go to a conference today for work, but perhaps other participants will join in with other comments on the international legal comparison issue. I have lived in two countries (the United States and Taiwan), and I lived in Taiwan before and after it developed intellectual property law enforcement, and it is plain to me that intellectual property rights encourage innovation (as contrasted with mere copying).
Do you have some evidence that inventions are a direct result of patents as opposed to socio-economic factors? I can see inventors appreciating recognition, but our system offers no other means of appreciation than patents. Patents are an example of degenerate capitalism, taking away your freedom.
As with all things, it's a mixed bag. See work by Mossoff, Zorina Khan, Petra Moser, etc for historical analysis of how patents influenced invention. It's not all good, but it's not all bad either. Will try to find some refernces when I'm not on a mobile device.
Having a free market, which allows the inventor to be first to market, is an inherent means of appreciating innovation. Compare and contrast with ideal communism. Patents are really just a way to strengthen and extend this inherent benefit.
1. We don't need to appreciate innovation by granting a monopoly. Math is thriving, even though none of that is eligible for patents.
2. You can be first to market by developing it secretly, perhaps collaborating with a larger company in exchange for royalties. That may not earn you as much money as a patent-monopoly, but that's fine.
In any case, if I independently invent something I should have full rights to pursue it however I want. That someone else 'thought of it first' is unrelated to my inventing it. That's the free world I wanna live in.
These inventions are built on our shared knowledge. Nobody deserves a patent for it. Inventors will invent anyway.
I'm mostly with you, I just wanted to point out what looked like a missed connection in the earlier statement.
That said, I'm not completely sold on whether patents are entirely useless. Certain types of invention seem to fit the model better than others.
Then again, I've heard of instances where patents, or something similar, could help innovation. One example is the business poaching I've heard of here, where someone starts exploring an idea as a service, only to shortly thereafter have a separate services company run with the idea, and put out a better executed version quicker than the originator because of more capital. At first glance that seems unfair to the originator but better for society, but if enough people think it's not worth entering the market because they'll be scooped, we all lose out on those ideas.
I don't have a solution, and I don't think the answer is simple.
One data point is not much but my uncle actually invented a new kind of sprinkler and patented it -- without patenting he couldn't seek a buyer cos anyone who got the plans could just go and manufacture it but this way he could enter into discussions without fear. So yes, patent law as it was originally intended is very useful.
There is a "little" difference, however, between these patent trolls and the guy tinkering sprinklers in his basement.
I'd like to read more in depth about these transnational comparisons on the effects of patent systems. Can you please point me towards a source which serves as a good starting point for further reading?
It's important to remember that this is not a question of patents or nothing; if you can't protect your inventions with patents, that require a thorough disclosure of how it works, then you might use other methods, such as trade secret law, which lasts quasi-forever and by definition has no disclosure.
Obviously you can't trade secret law in a variety of contexts, but if you're making something physical and can hide the secret details inside a factory....
(Of course, I'm not talking about software patents, which are entirely bogus ... although many encryption patents seem to have a lot stronger basis for validity. In particular think of RSA, which seems so obvious in retrospect ... but Diffie, Hellman and Merkle didn't think of it, and used a system they knew was weak so that they could demonstrate a proof of concept.)
The car safety belt was invented by Volvo, but either they didn't patent it, or patented it but allowed other car makers to use it at little or no cost. I don't have a source, but I've read something along those lines online.
While Volvo didn't invent the first car safety belt, they invented the 3 point safety belt that everybody uses today. Lap belts would help keep you in the car, but the addition of a sash belt kept your face off the 50's era steel dash, and made seatbelts worth using.
Volvo patented it in the 50's and made it freely available for use.
Patents were not allowed to exist for the good of humankind. They were supposed to be ways to expose smart ideas and then we may use them all much later. More importantly if patents were to help mankind, they should be public domain.
That's like saying "does anyone know a case where trespassing laws were used for the good of humankind"; lawsuits are necessarily the bad outcome, we can't be sure how many times the law caused a good thing. There are certainly valuable things for the good of humankind that were patented, and that were produced by corporate (or even university) labs where obtaining patents was certainly a factor in the company's decision to fund that lab (taking computer industry examples I think of the nokia 3G tech, or RSA or LZW).
There are things we don't know, sure. But if we just look at court cases we're going to see a very biased picture, because the bad effects of patents are much more likely to cause court cases than the good effects.
Because it forces the inventor to publish, they are a lot better for society than the previous protectionist default, which was relying on keeping trade secrets.
Part of what is interesting to me about open source is that it provides a system of development that is pretty competitive with the established protectionist models, so I am watching the open source hardware scene very closely.
To me the question isn't whether patents are good or bad in some absolute term, it is more whether they are becoming obsolete for many situations.
