<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>freejazz</author><text>The Constitution requires that Congress setup laws for both copyright and patent, for the good of the nation. Patents were always intended for the overall wellbeing of the nation. That&amp;#x27;s not to say that is what has always been achieved by the patent system, but it&amp;#x27;s not some sort of conspiracy. If anything, in history, they were always OSTENSIBLY for good, but perhaps ACTUALLY bad. So I find your statement to be A) historically and factually inaccurate B) literally incorrect given your usage of ostensibly.</text><parent_chain><item><author>pslam</author><text>&amp;gt; The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate.&lt;p&gt;The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.&lt;p&gt;I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; in their history been ostensibly for good.</text></item><item><author>brenden2</author><text>The whole US patent system needs to either be scrapped or rebuilt. The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate. Getting a software patent is mostly a matter of sneaking past the people at the USPTO, and making sure you&amp;#x27;re the first to file. These patent factories could just write code to generate patents all day (maybe start using PyTorch?).</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties</title><url>https://seekingalpha.com/news/3550760-ibm-sues-airbnb-for-patent-infringement</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tasty_freeze</author><text>You can of course have any opinion you want, but at least present the actual rational for why patents exist. Let me attempt to state it, whether you agree with it or not.&lt;p&gt;A company may invent a mechanism or process which is better for its intended use than what came before. Sometimes it takes a lot of money and time and it doesn&amp;#x27;t always work. In the case of a mechanism, once it is sold, competitors could take it apart and reap the benefits without having expended the money and effort to create something new.  If patents were killed off, it would discourage people and companies from making those investments. It has varied over the centuries, but currently a patent gives a 20 year time limited &amp;quot;monopoly&amp;quot; on the thing invented.&lt;p&gt;In the case of a process (vs a mechanism), without patents, a company is highly motivated to keep the process a trade secret. Even with patents a company may prefer to take that route. What do patents offer here? In exchange for disclosing the process, the company is granted that monopoly. In theory disclosing the process will spur the next round of improvements and help the system.&lt;p&gt;The problem isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily patents, but the process. Patent examiners are not paid all that well and literally have minutes to research and approve or deny a patent. They need to crank through multiple patent applications a day. And companies abuse the system. Secondly, the practice in patent law is to write the patents in such a way as to disclose as little as possible and claim as much as possible using obtuse language. If you read really old patents an ordinary person could understand most of them. Today I can read a patent in a domain I&amp;#x27;m expert in and it is very hard to follow.&lt;p&gt;There should be some penalty for filing obvious patents, and part of the penalty would be to pay for for more patent examiners, and to pay the legal costs of the challenging party.</text><parent_chain><item><author>pslam</author><text>&amp;gt; The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate.&lt;p&gt;The very first patent was to duplicate an existing process (the loom) and have a monopoly to produce it.&lt;p&gt;I keep hearing this argument from patent proponents, but patents have &lt;i&gt;never&lt;/i&gt; in their history been ostensibly for good.</text></item><item><author>brenden2</author><text>The whole US patent system needs to either be scrapped or rebuilt. The purpose it was originally intended to be used for doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense in a world where most new technology is just software, and software is incredibly easy to copy and duplicate. Getting a software patent is mostly a matter of sneaking past the people at the USPTO, and making sure you&amp;#x27;re the first to file. These patent factories could just write code to generate patents all day (maybe start using PyTorch?).</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>IBM sues Airbnb for patent royalties</title><url>https://seekingalpha.com/news/3550760-ibm-sues-airbnb-for-patent-infringement</url></story>