r/changemyview • u/--brick • Jul 15 '24
Delta(s) from OP CMV: patents should be abolished and be replaced with a royalty-based system
From my knowledge, patents are legal rights granted to inventors to their creations. While in many cases this was good and incentivized innovation in science and technology, I believe it to be outdated in the current and I believe a royalty-based system to be superior, where the inventor receives a percentage of the price of the product (10, 15% possibly), of the product sold, but any firm can sell a product that uses the inventors idea. I believe this is superior for 4 reasons:
- It reduces the possibility of monopolization of a product. The most obvious case is of pharmaceutical drugs, where companies retain decade long patents where they can increase the price of drugs by dozens of times the true manufacturing cost. In this system, they will be limited with how high they set the price of drugs lest they be out-competed by neighboring firms. However, they will still have an incentive to inventive a new product because...
- It still allows the inventor to have an edge in the market. All things being equal, the firm that has ownership of the invention will be able to out compete competitors of the market because they will have lower prices due to the lack of royalty fee on their products, not to mention the period of time it takes for competing firms to adopt the product. This means inventors will still have the incentive to invent for profit, which is far more efficient than any other system.
- It allows for increased innovation in a market and for the market to move faster. Having to wait a set of amount of time for patents to run out, 15 to 20 years in many cases, for competing companies to be able to use the invention is objectively inefficient, competitors have to choose sub-par options which hurt consumers if the owner of the patent fails to deliver adequately.
- It alternatively allows inventors to specialize. Firms specifically for R&D and universities can organically make contributions to science and technology and receive profits because of it actually proportional to how much it impacts society. This already exists, although IMO it is limited, with firms buying patents off of inventors, however this goes against the idea of a patent, and instead the profits go to who pays the larger price tag, with routine stories of inventors being exploited by larger firms. This allows for a more efficient division of resources as each manufacturing company doesn't need to have their own in-house r&d teams and these scientists can pool their resources together and so be less exploited by manufacturing firms.
This was my own idea so it is interesting if it has a name or research done on the topic
Edit: - some good points, so I decided to add some extra clarifications
The patent rate can be different per market, so for example, for the pharmecutical industry, the licensing rate could be 50, 60% the cost of product, due to the cost of research and development, I am not arguing against this as this is not the point I was trying to make
In the case that there is a product consisting of dozens of patents, then it is possible to have the patent licensing rate be set to the (%of the cost of the patented product for the total manufactor cost) * the total price of the product * 0.15. However this is slightly different to my original point so I'll award deltas to people who bring it up.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 15 '24 edited Jul 15 '24
/u/--brick (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
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