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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 30 2012 @ 04:10 PM EDT |
And I disagree with your assertion as to the original purpose of patents.
Patents are supposed to be an exchange:
Knowledge of the invention
disseminated to the public for a very limited sanctioned Monopoly!
In my
humble opinion to claim some kind of extra protection to the small inventor is
actually quite misleading. It protects the big inventor just as much as the
small inventor... when it's actually used as a shield and not as a
sword.
Additionally, you'll notice the word limited. It wasn't
meant to be granted on any invention. It was supposed to balance the value of
the invention with the harm to Society and only be a grant on the more worthy
inventions.
So that'll be another of those things that went
wrong:
Grants on everything no matter how obvious or even if the balance
removes knowledge from the public instead of disseminating knowledge to the
public.
But that's not the only thing that went wrong... there's lots
more.
In case you doubt my understanding of the exchange patents are
supposed to provide - or the limitations that are supposed to exist so "not
everything is patented" - perhaps a little reading on Thomas Jefferson and his views on Patents will
help.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 30 2012 @ 05:26 PM EDT |
Please, please, please, stop using emotive terms like "steal".
You cannot steal an idea, you can only copy it.
More than one person can come up with the same idea without recourse to each
other.
Most ideas are a furthering of what has gone on before. That is, ideas are very
rarely (if ever) created in a vacuum. Though they may require looking at the
previous stuff from a different perspective.
Enough said from this tired old indigenous white fellow (me).[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: jjs on Wednesday, October 31 2012 @ 09:52 PM EDT |
Actually, in the US, the language of the Constitution makes
clear the purpose - to get people to publish their trade
secrets (and thus prevent loss of knowledge) by offering
limited time protection to production rights. That small
businesses benefited would almost be a given - there were
almost no large businesses back then (corporations required
an act of a state legislature, so most businesses were small
sole proprietorships or partnerships).
---
(Note IANAL, I don't play one on TV, etc, consult a practicing attorney, etc,
etc)
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Authored by: Tyro on Wednesday, October 31 2012 @ 10:52 PM EDT |
Limited patents have a limited use in protecting innovation where massive up
front investment is required to produce something, but where copying is
relatively cheap. Drugs are a reasonable case. (I'm not claiming that current
patent law makes sense even in such cases, merely that there is a case for a
good patent law.)
I will agree, however, that given the current laws and precedents, the best
action would be to totally revoke all existing patent laws. And independent
should be allowed as a defense against a patent. Further, if 3 or more have
independently invented the invention, it should be deemed too obvious to be
patentable. (This is slightly unfair to the original inventor, but I can't
think of anything that would work better.) Note that reverse engineering does
not count as independent invention. That requires a clean-room implementation
with nobody passing in the specs, even in a sanitized form. (Statements of the
problem, however, are another matter. That's fair communication.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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