US Patent System Helps China Catch Up

Although patent law is supported by many different factions as necessary to incentivize innovation, they are actually slowing down the rate of American innovation and damaging our competitiveness with China. It is right for companies to profit from the ideas that they came up with, but the cost of government-created monopoly makes our current patent system the wrong way to go about this. Our patent system is hurting American innovation through three key mechanisms. Patents diminish the use of the most advanced technology when it matters most. By the time a patent runs out, the technology that it protects is often obsolete, and the years that it could have been developed and grown are wasted. Public patents also provide beautiful instruction manuals that allow China and other nations to reproduce our work. The patent system creates a massive legal burden for anyone who seeks to innovate, as they must constantly determine whether their idea is a safe distance from regulatory-arbitrage-seeking patent trolls. The patent system must decrease in size before our

Patents meant to keep specific ideas within the hands of the creators keep those same ideas out of the hands of those who could use them best. There is no guarantee that the person who comes up with a good technological idea will be able to find its highest value use. Although the patent system rewards discovery, it does so at a great cost by limiting the effective use of that discovery. Ideally the one who discovers something would be able to understand it well enough to implement it in a uniquely beneficial way, but there are countless businesses that might be well positioned to find a better use for ideas than the original inventor. By the time the patents run out, the technology they are protecting is often no longer demanded. Any innovation has countless discoveries that could be made on top of it that are actively limited by this government-granted monopoly for inventors. The market will reward inventors without the patent system, and a reduced patent system might even allow inventors to benefit even more dramatically from their creations. Creators would have expertise that the market would often reward richly when their ideas are utilized more widely and effectively.…