I have to strongly disagree. First of all, all his statements about how the patent system does not promote innovation are merely conclusory and do not show any evidence or reasoning behind them. (Other than a couple of cherry picked individual cases).
This is an interesting question, but it is unfortunately really hard to show scientific proof either way. Economics is just too uncertain of a science to prove something as complex as this. One thing that is known is that most countries whose economies rely on IP creation usually end up with a relatively strong IP protection system.
Now, as I have said here before, I agree that some patents may hinder innovation. Patenting things that are not new or obvious or issuing patents that are too broad can just create a lot of harmful rent seeking which only hurts innovation. But this is something that should be fixed by modifying the patent system not scrapping it.
This is too big of a discussion to have here, but I should point that a big mistake people make when considering the cost of the patent system is to assume that if patents did not exist things would be just the way they are now, but without the patents. This is simply not true.
I really doubt those Africans would have any AIDS drugs if the patent system did not exist, because nobody would commit the resources of developing and testing an AIDS drug without patent protection.
Furthermore, if there is no patent system, the only way to protect your inventions would be by keeping them secret and companies that do innovate would go through very costly measures of making sure their inventions are secret. These measures probably cost much more to society than the patent system. Also, keeping inventions secret often resulted in the inventions being lost forever. Thus, if there is no patent system one may argue that the ideas would still be kept under lock, in fact they would be more severely locked down than before.
If you study the history of innovations, you can see a lot of interesting inventions being completely lost merely because their practitioners wanted to keep them secret. Also, you will find out about entire secret societies being formed just to keep knowledge secret (e.g., the Masons).
For example considering the kind of buildings the masons built in medieval times, they must have had some pretty good knowledge of rudimentary physics and mathematics. But all this knowledge was carefully kept secret to ensure their monopoly. Thus, nothing was published and nothing could be used by the scientists of the era to develop overall scientific theories.
edit : full disclosure, I am a patent lawyer.
Further edited for spelling and grammar.
If the windfall profits granted by state-capitalism were vacuumed back into non-existence, perhaps it would be possible for governments, non-profits, and academia to collaboratively conduct pharmaceutical development out in the open.
I've never seen anyone but patent lawyers make a spirited defense of patents for their own sake.
My father is a professor and doctor of medicine at one of the most esteemed medical schools in the country. He is 100% sure that without patents we simply wouldn't have most of the drugs we have today. They are far too expensive to develop and then have your competitors copy. The government funding for these projects is pitifully small and slow (I can say that from an academic non-medicine perspective as well). Non-profits are pretty much useless as well since they have nowhere near the funds.
Drug development seems to be the case where the patent system actually works and I wonder if that is due to having one patent per product? Elsewhere you get patent thickets and invention choked off by multiple ownership. Perhaps a useful reform would be to insure that no product is encumbered by more than one patent. This could be done by letting the most inventive patent covering a particular product be the trump patent. Minor patents would lose their nusiance value. Research incentives would be turned upside-down. Instead of doing cheap research to get a trivial patent and a seat at the bargining table to leech off real inventors, expensive research, aimed at major breakthroughs would be the only way to win.
This is an interesting question, but it is unfortunately really hard to show scientific proof either way. Economics is just too uncertain of a science to prove something as complex as this. One thing that is known is that most countries whose economies rely on IP creation usually end up with a relatively strong IP protection system.
Now, as I have said here before, I agree that some patents may hinder innovation. Patenting things that are not new or obvious or issuing patents that are too broad can just create a lot of harmful rent seeking which only hurts innovation. But this is something that should be fixed by modifying the patent system not scrapping it.
This is too big of a discussion to have here, but I should point that a big mistake people make when considering the cost of the patent system is to assume that if patents did not exist things would be just the way they are now, but without the patents. This is simply not true.
I really doubt those Africans would have any AIDS drugs if the patent system did not exist, because nobody would commit the resources of developing and testing an AIDS drug without patent protection.
Furthermore, if there is no patent system, the only way to protect your inventions would be by keeping them secret and companies that do innovate would go through very costly measures of making sure their inventions are secret. These measures probably cost much more to society than the patent system. Also, keeping inventions secret often resulted in the inventions being lost forever. Thus, if there is no patent system one may argue that the ideas would still be kept under lock, in fact they would be more severely locked down than before.
If you study the history of innovations, you can see a lot of interesting inventions being completely lost merely because their practitioners wanted to keep them secret. Also, you will find out about entire secret societies being formed just to keep knowledge secret (e.g., the Masons).
For example considering the kind of buildings the masons built in medieval times, they must have had some pretty good knowledge of rudimentary physics and mathematics. But all this knowledge was carefully kept secret to ensure their monopoly. Thus, nothing was published and nothing could be used by the scientists of the era to develop overall scientific theories.
edit : full disclosure, I am a patent lawyer. Further edited for spelling and grammar.