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Yes, I've often heard this argument. Personally, speaking as a "little guy' who is interested in advancing technology and making a good living doing it, I am f
by tgflynn 16y ago
Yes, I've often heard this argument.
Personally, speaking as a "little guy' who is interested in advancing technology and making a good living doing it, I am far more worried that some corporation will be able to claim patent "protection" over my ideas. This seems far more probable to me than the inverse situation of someone else independently discovering my invention and beating me in the market. Also even if that happened I'd much rather compete in the market than in a court room.
As for the specific case you mention, I think, especially in software, that it's becoming far easier for an individual inventor to take his invention to market rather than needing to sell it to a large corporation. Also this argument seems largely based on the notion, which I think is most often incorrect, that most value lies in a simple idea rather than in the execution of that idea. In other words that you have some idea that can be stated in a few English sentences that has tremendous value and that no one else has thought of. You only need divulge that idea and anyone on the planet will be able to beat you in the market. Such ideas, if they exist at all, are exceedingly rare, maybe once in a generation occurrences. All recent examples of highly successful innovation: Microsoft, Google, Facebook relied far more on the quality of execution - the construction of solutions from many small ideas - than on one overarching genius discovery. And it is exactly this form of value creation which patents impede.
- EGreg 16y agoWell, it's hard to distinguish where to draw the line between a good faith attempt to execute an idea -- failing because a competitor outright copied it in 2 days, and patent trolling. That's why unless we figure out how to distinguish this effectively, either patents get abolished in software or they persist. Personally I did invent something that's relatively easy to copy. How would a big company ever agree to buy what I made when they can just copy it?
- tgflynn 16y agoLet's look at your first example, the attempt doesn't need to fail just because someone copied it in 2 days. Let's say I come up with a great new idea for a smartphone app. It's actually an easy idea to implement, but having the idea in the first place wasn't necessarily obvious. Once I launch my app other developers can copy it quite easily. But that doesn't mean my market share goes to zero. I'll still have a first to market advantage and I can compete on features and quality with my competitors. I should still be able to make a reasonable income from my app, an income that's related to how well I've implemented and marketed it. It's true I won't get much of a wind fall for having had the initial flash of inspiration, but that seems pretty fair to me. Anyone could have had that idea, I was just lucky enough to have had it first, and I probably didn't do a large amount of actual work to come up with it, so why should I have a monopoly on it ? As for your second example, where you're trying to sell your idea to a company, I wonder if you aren't overestimating the amount of protection the patent will give you ? Are you considering the asymmetry in legal resources between yourself and the company ? There are many grounds for finding software patents invalid and if the idea is valuable enough, the corporation may well litigate you all the way to the Supreme Court. Do you have the resources for that ?
- EGreg 16y agoIn the first example, who cares that you are able to get 2-3 thousand users, eventually facebook comes out with it and launches to 500 million users simultaneously, you are unable to advance, and your 2-3k eventually go away.