>encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period o

>encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time I always imagined it was more along the lines of encouraging inventors to open-source their technologies, by giving them greater legal defenses for doing so. To avoid the "apple does research, and archives it secretly, lost forever if it doesn't reach market" scenario; instead we now see Apple publishing anything and everything it thinks it can lay claim on, to tune of absurd claims today, but in (80) years, the research is still available to all