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Very different. The cost of coming up with chemical compounds is often quite large. With software most new work is done by very few people.
by sseveran 14y ago
Very different. The cost of coming up with chemical compounds is often quite large. With software most new work is done by very few people.
- rayiner 14y agoAt the same time, a successful chemical compound might mean tens of billions in sales. A modest software innovation might have a very niche application with much smaller sales. Is a small research team less entitled to protect their novel work than a big corporation?
- jessriedel 14y agoIf you use the word "entitled", you're thinking about this wrong. Patents are not designed to protect fundamental rights (e.g. to a "reasonable" profit), they are designed to maximize societal good by balancing a monopoly incentive with the benefits of open use.
- jhdevos 14y agoThat will be solved in part if patents get assigned a value (on which 'damages' etc. are based) that are proportional to the work that went in. For a software product that contains thousands of good ideas, the value of each of those will be only a fraction of the value of the total product. Then, of, course, the idea of blocking sales of a product because of infringement should also be completely abolished -- some money should be the most you can get.