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."

Comments

Look who's talking.

[dinotrac]

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.

Re:It is Scary

[dillon_rinker]

...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 problem is duration, not quantity

[Sloppy]

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.