Anti-Patents
Patents throttle adoption of inventions in order to skim profit.
The Patent system has shortcomings that work against it’s stated purpose of fostering innovation – the cost of most innovation has been climbing for decades because intellectual inputs themselves are often patented – this compounds over time in a nested chain of legacy costs.
Obtaining patents is expensive and requires legal expertise. Many inventors are untrained in patent law do not have the finances to retain a lawyer, and so their innovations often go unpublished for lack of funding. This is a loss not only to the inventor, but the society at large. The widening wealth gap is worsening this problem and starving humanity of innovation.
Anti-Patent is a term that I coined in 2024 that means any enabling publication of an invention which is published into the public domain/creative commons or equivalent, specifically with the intention of preventing any entity from patenting the same idea. Authors of Anti-Patents explicitly eschew any patent rights or copyrights in the enabling disclosure itself. The content of an Anti-Patent is a public invention.
The author of an Anti-Patent does not seek to generate ownership or rights, only authorship.
A person on a talk-show offhandedly reciting an enabling description of a novel, useful and unobvious idea (i.e. a patentable invention) is a fine example: the idea was published without intention to capture it as intellectual property, yet it was widely seen, so now no one can ever patent it. The author of an Anti-Patent intends to establish authorship and to preclude others from patenting the invention while explicitly eschewing control over the intellectual property themselves.
An anti-patent is a publication that grants the inventor a provable moral ownership of the invention (they get ‘moral credit’ for being the first to publish the idea) and precludes everyone (including the inventor) from ever patenting the invention. An anti-patent is a forfeiture of the inventor’s right to patent the idea for themselves, but it also makes the idea un-patentable for everyone else. An anti-patent immediately injects the invention into the public consciousness for anyone to elaborate upon, improve upon or even sell, without legal or monetary hurdles related to making or using the invention itself.
Anyone is free to make, use, develop and even sell embodiments of an public invention (even to incorporate them into a for-profit business), without any licensing fees. Attribution may be requested by the inventor, but it’s not required (indeed, there is no legal mechanism to require it). I would like to see an ethos of ‘public inventors’ develop, who are rewarded with cultural cache or even direct payments (such as donations) to encourage further output.
The inventions that I believe are best-suited to this kind of publication are pro-social ideas that require low capital expenditures to realize. These traits makes adoption broadest and most impactful.
Some inventions are not well-suited for this kind of publication. Pharmaceuticals, for instance, require such large capital expenditures (clinical trials, etc.), that patents do meaningfully de-risk R&D efforts. Publishing a promising new drug as an Anti-Patent could actually preclude its deployment to patients because no company will want to pay the expense of clinical trials if they can’t enjoy a 20-year monopoly on the drug. For pharmaceuticals, anti-patents may be counterproductive, but the pharmaceutical industry is atypical in this respect.
Most inventions do not require large expenditures before they can be brought to market, the way that pharmaceutical do. Many inventions are simply new ways of doing things in industries that are lightly regulated or entirely unregulated. So for these kinds of ideas, the design and manufacture of the product is straightforward and cheap, and by unleashing the entire world into the new niche market (instead of enjoying a 20-year monopoly as the only actor in that niche market), the invention can be brought to market and honed by market forces immediately. This quickly unlocks the economic potential of the new niche market to all players, not just the highest-bidder that gains the patent license. Moreover, this speeds consumers’ access to the invention itself because there is no patent proceeding, no licensing negotiation and (most importantly) no monopoly!
The easier to bring the product to market, the more suited the invention is to Anti-Patenting. The limit of this situation is in software, which has a marginal cost of zero and can be replicated infinitely at zero cost. The social effect of a pro-social App that could be patented, but which is instead Anti-Patented, can be greater than the social effect of the same App which is patented and launched as a monopoly. In a scenario where the App is patented and licensed to one or more companies, the licensing fees paid by the companies to the patent owner directly increase the price of the product, directly slowing the roll-out of the invention into the world. For pro-social inventions on a caroming planet experiencing a technological ‘singularity’ moment, speed to market is paramount for social impact.
Anti-Patents unleash inventions into the market as “real boys”, not puppets.
An example could be a new kind of book attachment that improves children’s ability to read via a low-tech, hardware-based system. The specifics of the system are not important (but can be seen here, this is a real Anti-Patent that I’ve published). This could be a profitable product if patented, but the social benefit of the invention may be quite great, and the barrier for new companies to start making the invention is low (because it is a simple, low-tech device). Therefore, by Anti-Patenting this invention, small companies can sell into this space immediately, without the need for patent proceedings, licensing negotiations, and without the licensing fees that are always sought by patent owners.
So by Anti-Patenting the invention instead of Patenting it, an entire tiny industry can burst forth with lots of actors that may compete against each other (anti-monopolistic), and each of the actors will have no overhead re: licensing fees of the patent (allowing smaller companies, that otherwise could not pay licensing fees, to make and sell the device). Furthermore, the emerging niche product/market may partially or fully displace other niche products/markets that are heavily reliant on patented inputs. The only party “losing out” is the inventor themselves, and the decision to Anti-Patent is entirely their own. In my case, personally, I value the ability to gain a recognized moral ownership over my unpublished inventions higher than the potential monetary value in patenting them. It also provides me sense of permanence and sometimes closure for my ideas. I also value the ability to publish ideas without fees, without exhaustive prior art searches, without legal filtering, and without delay.
One of my forthcoming projects is to build and facilitate a website for myself and others to pool anti-patents into a database that is positioned to return in searches made by patent examiners worldwide. I have purchased publicinventions.org for this purpose. I (we?) want to build a network of ideas that meaningfully block patent actions in appropriate emerging markets so that innovation can better flourish in those markets. I want to build a community of inventors that encourage each other to use their creativity to solve problems and improve life on Earth instead of to simply make the inventor money. I want to build a community of inventors and non-inventors that encourage these efforts socially and economically. I want build a brain trust that works against the forces of capitalism and gives individuals and small businesses an opportunity to compete in brand new markets without any IP restrictions that would otherwise price them out.
“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life