This is a good discussion we all need to have. The disgusting state of socialist patent laws. Yes, its highly socialist, but it doesn't benefit all people, it disproportionately shifts wealth to the wealthy. Patents are a commie scam, this is true.
Yes, it's true that patent trolls are a problem, but the problem with IP laws is far deeper than the trolls. They're just one part of a broken system. The entire system itself is based on the WRONG idea that thoughts and ideas should be privatized. This goes against the fundamental principle of free speech, against the 1A. Do you agree or disagree with this point? Allowing corporations to own and restrict the use of ideas, we're stifling the 1A and suppressing innovation. Not to mention creating massive wealth inequality.
LOL at your comparison of my argument to the "You didn't create that" line. I'm not saying people don't make cool new stuff. Everything we create is built on a ton of ideas and knowledge from before, from generations and generations past. So why does one guy get to cash in on that, just because he was the last one to blow his load?
Theres tons of examples of patent abuse, for ex chevron bought the GM hybrid vehicle patent in the 70s to prevent others from building on it. How much pollution could have been saved from that if the patent scam didn't exist? Let that sink in. This is the regulation that you as a libertarian supports. Pretty disgusting if you ask me.
You seem to think that without patents, nobody would bother inventing stuff. But yeah, the internet was open sourced, so was the greatest invention made to date, which is artificial general intelligence systems. Most of our space technology was also open sourced. Innovation can't be stifled, it goes forward even with the scam IP system in place.
And about the drug development thing: a lot of that research is paid for by us, the taxpayers. But then a private company gets to sell the drug and make a ton of money. How's that for socialism lol.
You keep saying "stealing" ideas LOL. Ideas aren't property, how can it be stealing? This is free speech, plain and simple. I believe in giving people credit for their work, but not to the point where they can shut everyone else down.
IP laws are very socialist / communist, not based on free market capitalism. Let this sink in for a minute...these artificial regulations are giving government control over the distribution of ideas. In other words, they decide who gets to use an idea and who doesn't. Sounds pretty communist if you ask me. If it walks talks and quacks like a duck, then its a duck. Its not too far from soviet russia and other commie countries where the government controls and distributes resources.
What these IP laws do is that they create artificial scarcity, where one person or company controls an idea and gets to decide who can and cannot use it. This whole shtick is like socialism for the big corporations. They get to rake in the profits off of ideas that should be free for everyone. You call it protection. I call it an exclusive right that mainly benefits the wealthy and powerful. To see how fukd the system is, all you need to realize is that we have "trillion dollar" corporations, and they sure as heck wouldn't have gotten anywhere close to that without the communist patent system in place.
IP laws goes against free market and goes against free speech. They're not even capitalism, not unless you squint with one eye and are mostly drunk would you think it is. What next, they start charging you for the air you breath? Is that also capitalism? This is the fact, ideas aren't property and the sooner you admit this, the sooner you can move on with your life, my so called "libertarian" friend.
I appreciate that we both clearly believe in liberty, think socialism is bad, and capitalism good. On those points, seems like we're in solid agreement. Where we appear to diverge is purely on whether or not someone can own an invention.
To your question, no I absolutely don't agree that there's any merit at all that the First Amendment has anything to do with IP. The First Amendment protects my right to say what I want, especially in the realm of political speech. It does not enshrine my right to take your inventions. There is no rational interpretation of a right to speak, assemble, have a free press, or practice religion that says I have a right to steal your inventions (or your copyrighted work if you're an author or artist).
There are indeed examples you can cite where patents have been abused, as there are examples of abuse with nearly every positive feature of our country.
Also, I do agree that there are inventions that would have been conceived absent patent protection. The Internet is a partial example (though critical pieces of its foundation were absolutely protected by patents, including the initial routers and associated devices that enabled the Internet to transition from a military and academic tool to the mass market, and again for Wi-Fi).
Regarding drug development, no, you are mistaken. Most drug development R&D is paid by pharma companies out of profits they earn selling other patented drugs, and that would dry up almost completely without patent protection. I speak from very first-hand experience on this point. It is true that the NIH funds a huge amount of research. But a few points on that:
1. The NIH mostly funds early stage research, not specific products. Raw research is not the purview of patents. Patents ONLY cover commercial products, not raw knowledge. So, for example, the NIH funds research an how polymerase can both replicate and help catch DNA replication problems, but it does not fund efficacy or safety studies on a possible drug to treat a specific disease.
2. To the extent the NIH does fund some work that leads directly to patents (that does happen), the government generally has free right to use any patents that emerge from work it has funded. That's in the grant contracts.
3. Even the NIH and other government agencies (including DARPA who funded much of the work on the Internet) recognize the importance of patents in developing new products, as they frequently engage in private-public joint funding opportunities, where they will only match funding in a grant with existing private funding. This reduces risk to the investors who fund the private side (gov't funding lowers the effective private cost to the work) and the government knows this hugely increases the likelihood of a commercial product emerging. But the private funding would not exist absent a patent to ensure the invention can't be used by someone else who didn't pay for it.
You are absolutely correct that much software development is done with no patent protection, and there is a lot of legitimately innovative open source work done in that space. That all does serve as good examples to support your point. Interestingly, there's not much of a choice there, because it's tough to get a patent relating to software. The PTO does not consider software or algorithms patentable in most cases. There are some, like the MPEG patents (mostly expired now), and I've been in court cases relating to others, but they're particularly rare and hard to enforce in software,
In general, patents apply only to physical devices, and that's how all the software patents exist at all -- they all tie to how they control something physical, like bits being to store an image or sound on a disk and then reproduce it on a screen in the case of the MPEG patents. As soon as you get outside the significant but still relatively small world of software, you'll see that innovation is almost entirely patent driven.
Another reason this is very different outside of software is cost: while it takes some time to create software, the cost of production of test runs is effectively zero (just a trivial cost for the electricity to run it). On the other hand, the cost to produce test builds for physical devices is generally quite large, multiplied by the typical multiple iterations needed to get it right. Absent patents to protect that, they don't happen.
Say you're an entrepreneur and you have an idea to do X. Unless your family is wealthy and gives you the money, the only way you can afford to pursue it is to convince someone (an angel investor or a VC) to invest in you or the company you founded to commercialize your idea. If you have a patent, the investor sees that there's a path to make money on the invention and funds you, enabling you to proceed. If you don't have a patent, the investor knows that even if you begin to succeed, someone else will just come along with deeper pockets and steal the market from you, and therefore won't invest.
In other words, patents don't protect the big companies (much). Primarily, they protect the entrepreneur and enable him or her to compete with the big guys, or get acquired by them for access to the invention.
Patents = innovation. That's not to say that there can't be any innovation without patents, but there would be much less of it. If you think otherwise, it's only because you lack experience in that world and an understanding of how commercial R&D is funded and how new physical products come to market.