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You are correct, for R&D that takes years, patents are stimulating innovation. For ideas that take a week to "invent", patents are probably stifling innovation
by koonsolo 10y ago
You are correct, for R&D that takes years, patents are stimulating innovation.
For ideas that take a week to "invent", patents are probably stifling innovation instead of promoting it.
Most software patents (if not all) fall into the 2nd category. That's why in Europe we don't have software patents, and rightly so.
So it indeed depends on whether you are able to recover your R&D costs after going to market.
- ryandrake 10y agoMaybe tie the patent duration to some measure of how long the invention took to develop? An algorithm that took a day from napkin to filing for the patent? You get a day of protection. A drug that took 10 years to develop? You get 10 years. The difficulty there preventing companies from exaggerating about the time it took to develop. I suppose it's not too much to ask companies to show written evidence of the date that a specific invention process commenced.