> If you invent something fantastic, say a way for a self driving car to perfectly sense its surroundings

That sounds like a highly constructed example, and even if we take it for bare value, makes a lot of assumptions, for example that whatever you invent is patentable.

The way you phrase it also makes it sound like patents are all about individual contributions, when in reality the era of lone genius inventors is long over (if they ever existed). In the US, it's practice for your funding institution to keep all the rights to your inventions, so if you invented the perfect sense for self driving, it's highly likely that a company like Ford already has the patent, because they quite literally own your intellectual output.

Imo, I feel the same way like OP, there needs to be a use it or loose it doctrine, just like there is with trademarks. Overall the legislation around intellectual property and copyright feels to be in favor of big corps at the moment and should be heavily castrated.

Doesnt sounds constructed to me.

The "you" in that case could very easily be a startup

The number of patents owned by startups is greatly dwarfed by the number owned by large companies. Furthermore, the competition opportunity for small businesses to offer similar products at lower prices greatly outweighs the value of patent invention.

Some people would say large businesses can make things cheap in a way that small businesses can't compete with. However, that turned out to not happen in practice as big companies chase huge profit margins, supported only by the government.

China doesn't have this problem the US does because they have weaker patent laws. Patents need to be eradicated ASAP or we will not be globally competitive. We are also harming humanity as a whole as the inventive utility of patents simply doesn't scale in proportion to the harms, with the large populations we have now, they are clearly harmful on balance.

The fundamental problem with patents is that the benefit has lower asymptotic complexity with respect to population size than than the harm does. When you exceed some population size, patents become harmful.

The utility of copying is N^2 since you have O(N) copiers and O(N) inventions to copy from.

The harm of patents is therefore O(N^2) since this is the copying that patents prevent.

What we find is that the benefits of patents seem to scale at most around some O(N /log N) ish metric. Doubling the population size increases the number of inventors, but the chance an invention was already invented by someone else increases as population size increases. Hence the benefits of patents scale worse than O(N). Applying that to the harm and we still get O(N(N/logN)) for harm and O(N/logN) for benefits. Clearly patents do not scale.

* Here I am using Log N as a substituite for the difficulty increase of finding an invention not already invented. This exact measure is difficult to estimate.

Not having a patent doesn’t _prevent_ you from bringing your invention to market, it just accelerates _someone_ bringing it to market, and that’s a net good for society if the invention is useful, no?

Patents are vital to bringing things to market. It lessens the risk associated with investors getting returns, which allows funding for development.

I get that people don't like patents because they sometimes get abused, but on the whole I think we wouldn't have a lot of the things we take for granted if they didn't exist.

Let me add a personal anecdote: my uncle has developed a better sprinkler head. Think of bearded inventor tinkering in his garage for a decade. This was late 80s /early 90s so not much CAD was involved.

This is where the patent system shines. Because he got a patent he could shop around, sell it to a company which made a tidy profit on it. He didn't need to raise capital to establish a factory and all that to bring it to market and the company buying it seriously got ahead without spending an inordinate amount of money and time inventing the thing.

I agree that patents serve a purpose, but taxing intellectual property similarly to other property doesn't seem like it would end patents.

A slightly different approach would be for patent owners to declare an estimated value and pay property taxes on that value to enforce their monopoly. (They may also wish to update the estimated value periodically as circumstances change, perhaps every few months or years.)

To keep owners honest, anyone is allowed to pay the owner a multiple (1.5x? 2x? 10x?) of the patent's current estimated value to invalidate it.

If the patent owner wishes to hang onto the patent but cannot afford the taxes then perhaps banks would be willing to offer a patent equity line of credit, like using any other income-generating property as collateral.

To use your example, if you estimate that your self-driving patent is a ten million dollar asset and Ford pays you twenty million dollars to invalidate it that seems like you come out ahead because you have more than the patent was worth and can still build your product.

I don't think that the patent should be allowed to be ended early; the fee is paid to keep the patent protection in place.