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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Question on software copyrights v patents | 280 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Question on software copyrights v patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, September 03 2012 @ 10:47 AM EDT
Again, very interesting and thoughtful comments.

I too work as a university professor, albeit at a private university and not a
public one. As an aside, I'm currently a member of a climate task force involved
in trying to get at the root of why many faculty members in the school of
medicine are dissatisfied with their jobs compared with other schools in the
university. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the decreasing focus on the
'core' mission of the university (teaching) and increasing focus and rewards for
bringing grant money into the institution. As you say, this has long-term
corrosive effects on the university.

Putting aside the university setting, I think most people would agree that a
healthy biotechnology industry (i.e. companies) would speed the rate at which
medical innovations make it to the public. For companies (unlike universities)
money is absolutely the bottom line (pun intended) and companies are not going
to research areas that have poor return on investment. Take the example of
vaccine research--arguably the most effective public health intervention of the
20th century. The federal government subsidizes vaccines in the US because there
is not sufficient ROE for the drug companies to make the vaccines on their own.


This goes beyond just the money invested, though. Instead, I was trying to
compare genetics and software as areas in which coming up with the right idea
(be it the association between genes and disease in genetics or the optimal user
interface for a smartphone) is where the vast majority of the effort is spent in
invention. Devising a medical test for this association or writing a computer
program that realizes the user interface seems (to me) in comparison a
relatively trivial task...e.g. Samsung even admitted that it took them only 3
months to modify touchwiz to more closely resemble the iPhone interface. In
contrast, with the light bulb or with drug research, the difficulty is in the
method development. Just because Pfizer has come up with [redacted] doesn't mean
that Eli Lilly doesn't need to put in vast amounts of R&D to make Cialis.
Lilly couldn't just look at what Pfizer had done, make a couple minor
modifications and - voila - have a competitor ready for market.

My point (in a nutshell) is that there are varying amounts of inspiration
(ideas) and perspiration (method development) behind ANY invention or
innovation. I'm curious as to whether you agree with this concept and whether a
system that by definition only protects one aspect of the invention process
undervalues the other.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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