patent law, will grant them patent protection for upto 20 times the investment.
Unfortunately, there is no reasonable way to do this, simply because there are too many factors to consider. For example, if the area is difficult, and I have to try out 10000 ideas before getting one that works, granting a patent for 20 times the cost of the idea that works would not be enough.
On the other hand, granting a patent based on the total
cost of the 10000 ideas that you had to study would favor stupidity: if
a more clever inventor (better intuition, better methods) only needs to study 100 ideas, his invention would be cheaper to produce, thus he would get a "smaller" patent (a patent for a shorter duration) based on the cost of trying out only 100 ideas, not 10000.
Generally, it is a bad idea to base the price paid for anything on the cost for a specific producer. Any such system favors expensive (i.e., inefficient) producers.
This was done under communism: I heard of automobile engineers in communist Poland being ordered to increase cost in order to increase profit. How it works ?
There is no competition, so the market does not limit sales when price climbs
Price is fixed by the government to be cost plus a 20 % markup
Viewscan is low-cost closed source scanning software (not exactly shareware, but almost). It runs on Linux, among others. You should ask the author how many sales he makes under Linux (I just know of one copy sold, the one I bought).
This looks like good business because with many scanners, Open Source software (SANE) does not work, and scanner manufacturers provide no Linux support. Either you don't scan or you don't use Linux or you use this closed-source program.
Richard Stallman once told me he may be interested in getting patents in the interest of free software. You should contact him, to see what he thinks of your potential patents: how to use them best in the interest of free software, and whether somone else than you might pay for them (the FSF ?). It is rather expensive to file a patent application.
Slashdot Mirror
patent law, will grant them patent protection for upto 20 times the investment.
Unfortunately, there is no reasonable way to do this, simply because there are too many factors to consider. For example, if the area is difficult, and I have to try out 10000 ideas before getting one that works, granting a patent for 20 times the cost of the idea that works would not be enough.
On the other hand, granting a patent based on the total cost of the 10000 ideas that you had to study would favor stupidity: if a more clever inventor (better intuition, better methods) only needs to study 100 ideas, his invention would be cheaper to produce, thus he would get a "smaller" patent (a patent for a shorter duration) based on the cost of trying out only 100 ideas, not 10000.
Generally, it is a bad idea to base the price paid for anything on the cost for a specific producer. Any such system favors expensive (i.e., inefficient) producers.
This was done under communism: I heard of automobile engineers in communist Poland being ordered to increase cost in order to increase profit. How it works ?
The slashdot way:
In Soviet Russia, your higher cost benefits YOU !
This looks like good business because with many scanners, Open Source software (SANE) does not work, and scanner manufacturers provide no Linux support. Either you don't scan or you don't use Linux or you use this closed-source program.
Richard Stallman once told me he may be interested in getting patents in the interest of free software. You should contact him, to see what he thinks of your potential patents: how to use them best in the interest of free software, and whether somone else than you might pay for them (the FSF ?). It is rather expensive to file a patent application.