El problema del Derecho de patentes y la innovación: James Bessen & Michael J. Meurer: Patent Failure

 

Al parecer el Tribunal Supremo norteamericano va a decidir sobre si las patentes de software y de ideas de negocios son válidas o no aqui. A través de ese post, hemos dado con el capítulo introductorio del libro de esta entrada aquí

Interesante, aunque los problemas del Derecho estadounidense de Patentes son más graves que los del Derecho europeo. Algo que pone los pelos de punta es la responsabilidad – al parecer – del Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, el tribunal de apelación especializado en patentes, creado en 1982 y a cuyo sesgo a favor de los titulares de patentes atribuyen los autores que hemos leído buena parte de la culpa del elevadísimo coste del sistema de patentes para la Economía.

Cuando se compara la propiedad sobre bienes materiales con la propiedad sobre bienes inmateriales, se comienza con la afirmación de la rivalidad en el consumo de los primeros (“si yo uso la bicicleta tú no puedes usarla”) frente a la no rivalidad del consumo de los segundos (“millones pueden leer la misma novela al mismo tiempo o usar el mismo procedimiento para grabar DVD’s”). En términos de definición – jurídica – del derecho de propiedad, el derecho a usar en exclusiva la cosa de la que uno es propietario es una obviedad (porque sólo uno puede usarla) mientras que no lo es en el caso de la propiedad industrial o intelectual

“Establishing notice is often inherently easier for tangible property because, as opposed to patents, tangible property is a rival good. This means that active possession of tangible property is often sufficient to inform the world about what is owned and who owns it—).

De ahí que para estas....

, lo central en la definición sea el derecho a impedir que otros la usen. Para poder concretar este derecho a excluir, lo central es delimitar los contornos del derecho patentado. Pues bien, la falta de definición de los derechos patentados unido a la ampliación de lo que puede ser objeto de patente genera una enorme litigación cuyos costes superan los beneficios sociales de todo el sistema de patentes fuera del sector farmacéutico.

“can determine, with reasonable accuracy, whether or not patents provide net positive incentives for a given group of inventors”…countries without patents were just as innovative during this period as those that had patents…Although general measures of property rights exhibit robust correlations with economic growth, measures of patent rights do not… economic experiments that extended or strengthened patent rights do not seem to show clear evidence of increased innovation, except, perhaps, to a limited degree among the wealthiest nations… Case studies present a convincing argument that patents are critical for investment in R&D in the pharmaceutical industry…By almost any interpretation, the United States patent system could not be providing overall positive incentives for these United States public firms by the end of the 1990s. The risk of patent litigation that firms faced in their capacity as technology adopters simply outstripped the profits that they made by virtue of owning patents. A firm looking to invest in an innovative technology during the late 1990s, taking this risk into account, would expect the net impact of patents to reduce the profits from innovation rather than to increase them. Moreover, preliminary data for more recent years suggest that this problem has gotten worse since 1999. Note that patents do provide profits for their owners, so it makes sense for firms to get them. But taking the effect of other owners’ patents into account, including the risk of litigation, the average public firm outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries would be better off if patents did not exist…the distinctive pattern of litigation over time and across technologies does provide support for an explanation (del incremento de los costes sociales del sistema de patentes) based on the deterioration of patent notice (o sea, en lo amplias y poco precisas que son las reivindicaciones)… Economists have long recognized that patents on chemicals work particularly well because these patents have very well-defined boundaries.