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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Create a system of attribution, where by new products and inventions acknowledge the work they're based on (and they acknowledge the work they're based on etc), and then have a system that takes total sales volumes etc and splits a portion of government money to all the inventors / creators based on how popular their product was. Fund it with a small increase on sales tax for all products, then there's no incentive to not provide attribution since it doesn't effect your take home pay regardless, and have a system for applying for attribution when you think it wasn't fairly given to you.
We spend billions and billions of dollars on our current patent system and the legion of lawyers required to maintain it, there's more than enough resources to build a system that's not based on scarcity.
You pretty much described the current patent system but instead of the market determining license fees some buerocrat does.
No I did not. In the current patent system, once a piece of knowledge is discovered, only a single person or entity is legally allowed to use it for 20 years.
In the system I described, anyone is allowed to use it, modify it, and improve on it, immediately. Discover something great that can improve lives? Great! You'll be rewarded for your efforts, but we're not going to wait for you and you alone to figure out how to setup a global manufacturing and distribution supply chain to get it to everyone, and we're not going to prevent anyone else from daring to improve upon it
In the current patent system the owner can choose to licenses their patent, they can choose how much licensing should cost and manufacturers can decide to pay it.
You're awfully light on the details of how an inventor is rewarded.
Yes, but they do not have to, because it is a system of scarcity. They get to choose whether or not it's scarce and exactly how scarce it is. In many cases companies buy patents just to sit on them and prevent anyone else from using them. In the system I'm describing, all ideas are available for everyone to use in any way they want.
It honestly feels like you're intentionally not understanding that distinction at this point.
I've already explained it very clearly. You want more details on a specific aspect, go ahead and ask a specific question. You want a fully fleshed out system that covers every edge case? Then get politicians and lawyers to start actually designing the system, if we spent the billions and billions and billions of dollars that we have spent creating and enforcing our current system on creating and enforcing a new one, a lot of those details you're looking for would get filled in.
Inventors getting a percent of sales doesn't is a vague description.
How is the royalty rate determined?
How are cheap to manufacture/replicate inventions handled? With a low royalty rate the inventor may not recoup costs for a valuable patent.
How are products with multiple patents handled?
How are patent fees enforced?
Why would a company publish a patent in your system? They can be 1st to the market and be the only ones in the market until their competitors reverse engineer their patent.
How was 20 years decided for patent lifetime? This is an implementation detail to be argued about to find a fair formula.
Again, this is a matter of determining a fair mathematical formula that rewards inventors appropriately depending on the amount of sales.
Also, for comparison how does our current patent system ensure that inventors recoup costs on valuable patents? How does our current patent system reward downstream inventions and ideas? You seem to have lofty goals for a new system that our current system doesn't address.
Again, implementation detail, but if multiple ideas contribute to the same product then the inventors of both would get rewarded.
What patent fees? We're talking about taxing products / services / corporate profits and then using that money to reward inventors.
Because 6 months later when it's reverse engineered any competitor will be able to recreate it. If your idea is so unique and complex that you don't think it can be reverse engineered then fine, keep it as a trade secret, that's already how our current system works.
I thought your plan was simplifying things and getting lawyers out of it, guess not.
How is a fair mathematical formula determined? Who decides what is appropiate? Are sales the only metric for the formula?
The inventor licenses the patent for for an agreed upon value. Value is determined by the market.
See above.
How are those not addressed?
Money that goes to patent holders is a patent fee no matter how the money is collected. If a company uses a patented invention but doesn't list it how is that infringement enforced? More lawyers and lawsuits?
Details are the important part, how is the value of one patent determined over another, ie how do they split the revenue.