Business will maximize patents at the expense of innovation
Derek Khanna, 2015 - associate fellow of the R Street Institute. He previously was acting policy director for Lincoln Labs, a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, JD from Georgetown University Law Center. “USING PRIZES TO SPUR INNOVATION AND GOVERNMENT SAVINGS” R Street Policy Study No. 44, https://web.archive.org/web/20160304015157/https://www.rstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/RSTREET44.pdf //DH
If businesses are rational economic actors, we should assume they will maximize their opportunities to file for and obtain patents. When patents of dubious quality are granted, this distortion can become more pronounced and more harmful to the goal of innovation. Maximizing patents can mean investing in lawyers, rather than engineers, and filing applications for inventions and processes which the firm has no intent ever to bring to market. In such cases, innovation and competition suffer, for no discernable benefit.