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No it wouldn't. Talented people would have little incentive to create something new.
by Cyph0n 11y ago
No it wouldn't. Talented people would have little incentive to create something new.
- noir_lord 11y agoTalented people created things for thousands of years before patents.
- Cyph0n 11y agoPeople have lived thousands of years without refrigeration.
- CamperBob2 11y agoRefrigeration is an excellent example of something that could have easily been developed and refined without patent protection. Consumers win when innovators compete with each other. Patents replace market competition with a foot race.
- oldmanjay 11y agoand yet somehow we have more technical innovation now than we ever did outside of a patent system. there is a lot of emotional and assertive speculation around this issue but all of the hard facts that are available very strongly suggest patents work despite occasional (if highly publicized) conflict. how does your theory accommodate that fact?
- CamperBob2 11y agoCounterexample: how did the Internet and WWW ever evolve without a significant reliance on patents? How did the software industry in general ever flourish? The best we can say from empirical observation is that patents don't lead to guaranteed failure. We certainly can't say they're necessary. If everything that could have been patented was patented, we'd all be poorer for it. Except the lawyers, of course.
- ubernostrum 11y agoActually, people have lived thousands of years with refrigeration. Insulated structures using evaporative cooling systems (capable of acting as air conditioners, or of maintaining near-freezing temperatures suitable for refrigeration) are known to date back to the 14th century BC.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoPeople's incentive to create is the same as it always was: creative people just want to. What patents were set up to prevent, IIRC, was trade secrets - they were a way to bribe creators to publish their ideas rather than sit on them. IMO, they were a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Trade secrets would be reinvented. Locking an idea out of the commons for a whole patent term (and longer if they can attach new patents off the side) is a worse outcome.
- venomsnake 11y agoBut on the other hand reproducing the result without reading the patent, should be able to invalidate said patent. If I don't care how you achieved the one click purchase button, I should be able to have my implementation on my page.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoInvalidating patents may not be so hard in the abstract, but the trouble is you have to fight a long and legally technical court case to do it. With no certainty of winning even if you are right.
- rrmm 11y agoThat's too low of a standard imo: just knowing something is possible and what that specific thing is, confers a lot of useful information.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoHowever, that argument also suggests that trade secrets are not much of a barrier to innovation.
- rrmm 11y agoIt definitely depends on the invention in question. Consider the case of nuclear weapons. The first big leap is that the energy of fission can be made to be explosively released. Once you know that this is the case, most people in the field might be able to come up with something along the lines of a gun-type warhead. On the other hand, implosion devices, even if you know they are possible, still require a huge amount of work and design studies to make work reliably. Knowing that they are possible isn't the hard part--making it work is.
- rrmm 11y agoIf there is any issue, I don't think that is it. The issue that might arise is that techniques that are invented might never be openly published (since there wouldn't be protection for it). For stuff that is obvious, it wouldn't matter because it is obvious. The non-obvious stuff--the stuff that actually does deserve a patent--might be lost on occasion. I'm not a big fan of patents in general though given my experience with them (and certainly not patents on genes, etc).