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The effectiveness of patents, even in the past, is not clear. If you look at what happened to the steam engine, it wasn't until the patents expired that it rea
by dantheman 8y ago
The effectiveness of patents, even in the past, is not clear. If you look at what happened to the steam engine, it wasn't until the patents expired that it really took off.
Patents aren't about morally owning property -- they're about their effectiveness. The case of patents needs to be made for their continuation.
Intellectual property is a misnomer, it's not property -- it's restrictions on what others can do with their own property.
- rayiner 8y agoThe steam engine example isn't a good one. The whole point of patents is to create a temporary period of monopoly that enables investment to be recovered, to enable a subsequent period of wide adoption. If the prospect of the temporary monopoly convinced investors to invest in the steam engine in the first place, and the inventor did recover his investment, then the subsequent commoditization of the invention when the patents expired is exactly how the system is supposed to work. The history of technology repeatedly shows that (temporary) monopolies are good things. The transistor was invented by the AT&T monopoly. GUIs, email, and networking were bankrolled by Xerox's patent monopoly on copiers. (PARC declined almost immediately after a DOJ suit forced Xerox to license its patents to Japanese competitors.) Google's panoply of innovations is bankrolled by its near-monopoly on search. By contrast, commoditization tends to kill innovation in an industry. PCs have languished for two decades now thanks to a highly competitive environment where companies like Lenovo struggle to eke out a few percent in profit margins.