Once Again The Economist Thinks Patents Are Hindering Innovation And Need Reform

from the flip-flop-flip-flop dept

A bunch of folks I know who are focused on the problems of the patent system and who are pushing for patent reform have been eagerly sharing a recent Economist article discussing the problems of the patent system and how they're hindering innovation and doing real harm. No doubt, it's a good article that gets to the heart of many of the problems with the system. Some snippets:

Patents are supposed to spread knowledge, by obliging holders to lay out their innovation for all to see; they often fail, because patent-lawyers are masters of obfuscation. Instead, the system has created a parasitic ecology of trolls and defensive patent-holders, who aim to block innovation, or at least to stand in its way unless they can grab a share of the spoils. An early study found that newcomers to the semiconductor business had to buy licences from incumbents for as much as $200m. Patents should spur bursts of innovation; instead, they are used to lock in incumbents’ advantages.

[....]

One aim should be to rout the trolls and the blockers. Studies have found that 40-90% of patents are never exploited or licensed out by their owners. Patents should come with a blunt “use it or lose it” rule, so that they expire if the invention is not brought to market. Patents should also be easier to challenge without the expense of a full-blown court case. The burden of proof for overturning a patent in court should be lowered.

Patents should reward those who work hard on big, fresh ideas, rather than those who file the paperwork on a tiddler. The requirement for ideas to be “non-obvious” must be strengthened. Apple should not be granted patents on rectangular tablets with rounded corners; Twitter does not deserve a patent on its pull-to-refresh feed.

Patents also last too long. Protection for 20 years might make sense in the pharmaceutical industry, because to test a drug and bring it to market can take more than a decade. But in industries like information technology, the time from brain wave to production line, or line of code, is much shorter. When patents lag behind the pace of innovation, firms end up with monopolies on the building-blocks of an industry. Google, for instance, has a patent from 1998 on ranking websites in search results by the number of other sites linking to them. Here some additional complexity is inevitable: in fast-moving industries, governments should gradually reduce the length of patents. Even pharmaceutical firms could live with shorter patents if the regulatory regime allowed them to bring treatments to market sooner and for less upfront cost.

Good stuff for the most part. Amazingly, the article even tosses out the idea that perhaps patents should be ditched entirely -- and notes that back in the 19th century, the Economist itself argued against any patent system at all. However, it walks itself back from that edge pretty quickly:

One radical answer would be to abolish patents altogether—indeed, in 19th-century Britain, that was this newspaper’s preference. But abolition flies in the face of the intuition that if you create a drug or invent a machine, you have a claim on your work just as you would if you had built a house. Should someone move into your living room uninvited, you would feel justifiably aggrieved. So do those who have their ideas stolen.

That's a weird way to reject its own idea, because patents aren't about "feelings," and the analogy of someone moving into your living room makes no sense, given the difference between rivalrous things (your living room) and non-rivalrous things (your ideas). And, indeed, the article defaults into the worst kind of patent support: the idea that patents are used to stop people from "copying" ideas, when that's almost never the case (it's almost always independent invention).

But the really odd thing about this is that the Economist actually seems to keep changing its position on patents. Back in 2010, it had a similar article arguing that the patent system was holding back innovation and that it needed serious reform to get rid of "frivolous" patents -- including those for business methods and software. But then, oddly, in 2011, the very same Economist... argued we needed more patents and that they should be approved faster. That article bizarrely argued that approving more patents would undoubtedly lead to more jobs... based on absolutely nothing. And then... just months later, the Economist, once again, argued they were hindering prosperity.

So, yes, it's great that the Economist is taking on this issue, but seeing as the magazine (which calls itself a newspaper) has a history of bizarrely flip flopping on the issue, it's still a little difficult to take it seriously.

Filed Under: innovation, patent reform, patents
Companies: the economist

The Internet Never Ends: You Can Deny That Or Embrace It

from the embrace-it dept

Over at NiemanLab, there's a good interview with Tom Standage who runs the Economist's digital efforts, in which he reveals the Economist's general view of how it approaches the internet -- which could be summarized as "deny it exists." Basically, the argument that Standage makes is that people want to feel like they've "completed" something and that they're fully informed, and so the Economist likes to pretend that once you've read it, you're completely informed and you don't have to look elsewhere. This is also why the Economist refuses to link to anyone else, because it would disabuse you of the "illusion" that the Economist provided you everything you needed:

...what we actually sell is what I like to call the feeling of being informed when you get to the very end. So we sell the antidote to information overload — we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content. And we did that initially as a weekly print product. Then it turns out you can take that same content and deliver it through an app.

The “you’ve got to the end and now you’ve got permission to go do something else” is something you never get. You can never finish the Internet, you can never finish Twitter, and you can never really finish The New York Times, to be honest. So at its heart is that we have this very high density of information, and the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time — which is roughly how long people spend reading The Economist each week — then we’ll tell you what matters in the world and what’s going on. And if you only read one thing, we want to be the desert-island magazine. And our readers, that’s what they say.

And as for links:

Another aspect of it is — and I get all the morning briefings, Sentences, the FT one, and Quartz’s, and the rest of them — is that we don’t do links. The reason that we don’t do links, again, if you want to get links you can get them from other people. You can go on Twitter and get as many as you like. But the idea was everything that you need to know is distilled into this thing that you can get to the end of, and you can get to the end of it without worrying that you should’ve clicked on those links in case there was something interesting. So we’ve clicked on the links already and we’ve decided what’s interesting, and we’ve put it in Espresso.

That’s the same that we do in the weekly as well — we’re not big on linking out. And it’s not because we’re luddites, or not because we don’t want to send traffic to other people. It’s that we don’t want to undermine the reassuring impression that if you want to understand Subject X, here’s an Economist article on it — read it and that’s what you need to know. And it’s not covered in links that invite you to go elsewhere.

Mathew Ingram rightly calls this view of things selling an illusion. He notes that such an illusion can be very powerful -- and even very satisfying and appealing. But it's still an illusion.

To me, it's also a version of denial -- a somewhat hubristic denial that actually says (loudly) that the Economist thinks it's much, much smarter than its readers. That seems like a pretty big mistake in the internet age, where (quite frequently) your readers are much smarter. In many ways, we at Techdirt have always taken the opposite approach. We link aggressively outward to source material, knowing that it will help people explore the subject more deeply. We encourage discussion and conversation in our comments, knowing that many of our readers are more knowledgeable on these subjects than we are.

The Economist is obviously super successful, but as we've stated before, the way people consume the news these days is changing. The kind of people who want to just sit down, consume one thing and feel that they're "informed" are going away. That's just not how people consume news these days, and young people especially don't want to consume news that way. They want to explore and dig and share and discuss. The ability to truly interact with the news, research things yourself, share your thoughts and actually be a part of the effort is what's appealing to so many people.

Maybe the Economist's view of things works for people who are scared of the internet and don't like the endless firehose of information that's available, but I'm betting that's a population that will be progressively shrinking, rather than growing.

Filed Under: community, denial, internet, journalism, links, news, the economist, tom standage
Companies: the economist