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Patents exist specifically to avoid a fully free market. The trade-off is that in return for a time-limited legal monopoly on certain ideas and obvious derivati
by AlotOfReading 3y ago
Patents exist specifically to avoid a fully free market. The trade-off is that in return for a time-limited legal monopoly on certain ideas and obvious derivatives, you have to publicly disclose what it is that you own. This also serves the practical purpose of allowing you to determine if you're potentially infringing anyone else because you can look at the patents. The free market approach would be no patents at all.
- randomdata 3y agoPatents exist to compel inventors to divulge their secrets, to allow future humanity to be able to replicate the processes when those with the secrets move on, by offering a time-limited monopoly in return as payment. It is being suggested that if a secret is worth exposing, the people can simply make a direct offer for the things they want to know and let things they don’t care about, like how to buy an item online with one click, remain ‘secrets’. Patents wouldn't go away, but would by priced by their recognized value. What would be no doubt lost are the things people don’t know that they want to know — ideas that aren’t commercially viable at the time of conception, for example. On the other hand, with the patent record now impossibly large, does anyone truly scour patents to seek out inventions they didn’t know they needed and derive a real benefit from them upon discovery?