When someone infringes a patent, especially if you’re not commercializing your patent, the patent attorneys tell you, “wow, that looks really tough.”
It’s a big company game at this point, in general, or you’d need something that drives an immense amount of value before the patenting seems worth it, as far as I can tell.
Or just outright sell the patents to a competing big company and let them duke it out. Now at least you end up with some money.
To the contrary, innovation is proceeding full speed, despite patents. The only thing patents are doing is 1. enriching the lawyers on creation, 2. restraining law abiding innovators in country (meaning all other countries will proceed to ignore it anyway), 3. give the advantage to all other countries, and 4. enrich the lawyers again if they can find one of the in-country infringements to pursue (again ignoring all the others).
None of these outcomes is beneficial. The system is broken and antiquated. Ditch it.
Without patent protection, any individual or small business that comes up with something new and (currently) patentable would have no recourse whatsoever. The megacorps could just start producing whatever it is as soon as they find out about it, and outcompete the actual creator with massive economies of scale and the ability to take a loss effectively forever on any given product.
Sure, if you live with an 1800s era mentality about who invents things. This is no longer the era of Thomas Edison and the individual inventor. If our laws don't meaningfully reflect the way our lives are lived now, they won't be useful frameworks. I think your proposal may be about 2 centuries behind the times.
>Without patent protection, any individual or small business that comes up with something new and (currently) patentable would have no recourse whatsoever. The megacorps could just start producing whatever it is as soon as they find out about it, and outcompete the actual creator with massive economies of scale and the ability to take a loss effectively forever on any given product.
It seems like they do this anyway, and patent protections mean high prices for consumers on patent-protected products. Given that in the mid-2020s, the corporation:individual ratio patents is ~18.5:1 (up from 4:1 in the 1970s), I see the benefit gradient being more pro-consumer by getting rid of them.
I get your point, but Edison is the worst possible example to use here.
If it were possible for an individual to profit from their patent today as they would have in the 1970s, it's much more likely that people would seek patents.
If this is actually useful for you, of course, you need a patent lawyer in the specific country you're talking about, which is not cheap, and that's why the other posters said millions of dollars. Patents are not worth it for most people because you still have to pay lawyers to get anything out of them. You also pay for your time in court, acting as witness and testifying and watching court proceedings instead of doing your own business.
So, funny you say that. You know those AI companies that seem to have really good training data...