3 ms·

can anyone tell me what are repercussions of simply disallowing selling of patents? I mean if they just allow only inventors themselves to license their patent

• jessriedel 15y ago
  This would prevent the economic separation of inventor from producer. That separation is key for specialization and therefore economic efficiency. There's no reason that a scientist/inventor in a laboratory is going to be any good at running a business selling his invention, just like there's no reason a farmer is (or should be) any good at running a grocery store. It's much more efficient for the farmer to simply sell his produce wholesale to the distributors so he can concentrate on farming. Don't take offense at this, but I think this idea (that the problem with the patent system is the separation of inventor and producer) is especially prevalent within the start-up community. Such entrepreneurs are used to thinking of the entire process as occurring in their figurative basement: identification of the problem, invention, patenting, production, and sales. When this is possible, it's awesome...but it's not usually possible. In many industries/disciplies, each one of these steps is done by a different person (who are very good at it because they are specialized) so it is crucial that they are able to capture their value-added at each step.