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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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the problem with that... | 209 comments | Create New Account
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... patents that it would never license
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 20 2012 @ 12:46 PM EST
Look up the history of the Steam Engine sometime, or Heavier-than-air flight.

Both are rife with people getting patents that they never lisenced.


I'm still looking for someone to provide an example of the patent system working
as advertised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

... patents that it would never license
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 20 2012 @ 02:31 PM EST
Not at all. The idea is that by requiring the particulars of the invention
being made public, the invention won't be kept *secret*, thus benefiting the
public.

There's absolutely no presumption of any form in patent law that a patent *must*
be licensed to others. Just that it must be *disclosed* in order to receive the
associated legal protections.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

the problem with that...
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 20 2012 @ 08:27 PM EST
..is that we grant lots of patents on ideas (or even actual _inventions_) which
are just obvious combinations of other recently-developed things.


So the system was supposed to give people an incentive not to keep their
invention secret, but in many cases (I would even say MOST cases) nothing would
be lost if the patented invention were not disclosed, because someone else
independently invents it three months or three years later anyway.

And we've given the first guy (who got the patent) an exclusive monopoly over
that idea (or _actual invention_, if the patent office were actually doing its
job). That guy (or more likely, his large corporate employer) then refuses to
license the patent, and uses it to sue smaller competitors out of business, or
raise their barrier to entry.

The patent system is pretty obviously broken, and no one in power wants to fix
it because they benefit in various ways from the current broken system. The
ones who don't benefit are the real inventors and small businesses who get
patent-trolled.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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