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Too Many Patents as Bad as Too Few
NonSoftAntiCurve writes "Forbes.com has an interesting article about how too many patents are as bad as too few when it comes to incentives for innovation. 'The tension between the patent as a way to stimulate invention and the patent as a weapon against legitimate competition is inherent in the system.' There is a scary example of how this plays out in practice."
If you do not have enough laws, you would end up with chaos. If you have too many, then you are oppressing the people.
All in moderation, as one smart person said.. but I'm too dumb to remember who said it.
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If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
Nothing in this article is news except for the source.
This isn't RMS, it's a patent attorney writing in Forbes.
I think I'll stay in tonight. Surely, there are pigs flying about.
...paying people's sons and daughters for a few years of creativity on behalf of a father/mother/uncle/aunt or whatever
Sons and daughters? Copyrights last for, what, life + 70 years? Barring advancements in logevity treatment, my children (~20 years younger than I) and my hypothetical grandchildren (~40 years younger than I) will all be dead 70 years after my death. My great-grandchildren will be either dead or retired. At some point, the recipients of my creativity will be my great-grandchildren and my great-great-grandchildren.
Patents, no matter what else is wrong with them, have the good grace to expire 20 years after being issued. Let's all hope that no one ever comes up with a Sonny Bono Patent Act.
The first part of the answer is: most companies with programmers on the payroll don't make any money selling the software or enforcing patents. Most software is developed for in house use or to solve a particular problem for a specific customer. So only the minority of companies need to worry about this at all.
If you're releasing under the GPL, your competitors will be unlikely to take your source. If they do, they either have to release their source back to you so you can take their improvements, or they're infringing copyright and you can sue them.
As for "stealing ideas," an even smaller number of companies develop any ideas worth patenting. Most software which is sold uses well understood, non-patentable techniques.
As for stealing your ideas, so what? Companies like Cygnus and Red Hat managed to do alot of business selling a product that wasn't patented. Only recently did Red Hat start getting defensive patents. There are other things to sell beyond a monopoly on an idea. Most notably, if you had the idea first and developed it to fruition first. Who is going to be able to have the first to market advantage? You. Who is going to be in the best position to push the idea to its limits and maintain the cutting edge? You.
Will the elimination of software patents reduce the profitability of some software companies? Certainly. But it will be a very small number of companies. Those companies will still have some advantages in the market. And if the market grows and competition increases as a result, maybe it's a good idea.
IMHO, the biggest (perhaps the only?) problem with patents, is that the duration is not a function of the development cost. If a company really does spent a gazillion dollars developing something, then maybe a 20 year monopoly makes sense. Or maybe 40 years. Or maybe one year. But that's not how the system works.
And that's reason software guys, in particular, bitch about patents so much. (And it's not just Free Software guys. Commercial developers of less-than-megacorp size are going to tend to hate patents as well.) We happen to work in a realm where development is so ridiculously cheap, that the arbitrary hard-coded duration is completely inappropriate and senseless.
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