Nobel Prize Winners Continue To Explain How IP Hurts Innovation

from the time-for-a-change dept

We've discussed multiple times in the past about how economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz believes that patents hurt innovation. Michael Geist points us to Stiglitz's latest speech, where he teamed up with John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, to point out how the patent system is stifling innovation. It's great to see Stiglitz continue to point out the problems caused by the patent system (and great to see other Nobel winners noticing as well). While Stiglitz has normally focused on pharmaceutical patents, in this speech he also touched on software patents. While Stiglitz hasn't yet come around to believing that patents should be abandoned, he is quite convinced that they're doing plenty of harm in many cases, often locking up innovation and costing society a lot more than they benefit it.

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Studies

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Oct 18th 2007 6:23pm

Another Nobel Laureate Points Out How The Patent System Holds Back Innovation

from the the-economics-are-clear... dept

It always amuses us when supporters of the patent system attack our views on patents as being somehow uninformed. Over the years, we've pointed to plenty of rather detailed research on how the patent system tends to hold back innovation -- and how there's no correlation between stronger patent systems and innovation. Usually, when we point this out, the response is to insult us, rather than respond to the research. Fortunately, though, those doing this kind of research keep getting plenty of validation for their work. We've already pointed out that at least one Nobel Laureate in Economics, Joe Stiglitz, has been speaking out on how patents harm innovation. Now comes the news that one of the latest economics Nobel winners has also done research in the space. Evan R.S. writes in to point out that the NY Times article on the winners notes that Nobel winner Eric S. Maskin recent research is on how patents can hold back innovation. The good folks over at Against Monopoly (who include some economists who have been leading the charge in studying this topic) point us to Maskin's paper on this topic. The paper argues that patents tend to harm innovation in high tech fields, mainly because so much innovation is sequential and complementary -- at which point handing out monopolies is guaranteed to slow down the innovation process, because the innovation gets more expensive (need to license any time you do anything), more limiting (because you have to get approval before innovating) and much more time consuming (especially if you have to keep going to court). This isn't a new idea or even new research -- but it's yet another reminder that the economic research continually shows how patents will often hold back innovation, rather than help it.

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