# When are patents good? When do they hurt? It seems that [[In most industries outside of pharma and chemicals, patents are a net drag on innovation]]. This could be a misperception! I need to go back to [[burkPatentCrisisHow2009]] Some hunches: - Patenting things that are very close to a complete product or system is good. - Patenting things that are components of a broader system that needs tinkering to be better is bad. (There doesn’t seem to be anything on New Things Under the Sun about this yet) ### Related - [[IBMs proxy game is publishing patents]] - [[Patents inherently prevent a piece of IP from being combined with other knowledge]] - [[Arguably patents held back the airplane industry]] - [[Many inventors have spent a lot of their lives in court over patents and sometimes wind up dying in the gutter in spite of that]] - [[Patents have become more BS over time]] - [[merrillBillionsStakeUniversity2016]] - [[Do patents work better when firms are smaller or more uniform size?]] - [[barnettUniversityPatentThickets2020]] ### Related <!-- #questions --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/When+are+patents+good+When+do+they+hurt) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/When+are+patents+good+When+do+they+hurt)