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It's why we need copyrights and patents. If there were no protections, anyone that had lots of resources could just cherry-pick new technology and ideas (use t
by paulhauggis 14y ago
It's why we need copyrights and patents.
If there were no protections, anyone that had lots of resources could just cherry-pick new technology and ideas (use the companies as almost free R&D) and beat them to the market before any small company even has a chance to get off the ground.
The result would be a few huge companies.
- beagle3 14y agoIt's a nice idea. And yet, in the 1980s and early 1990s, when there was absolutely no patent protection for software, the software industry flourished. And yet, Google, a small upstart, was able to rise well above all the other search engines, despite being (at the beginning) much less funded, and using an algorithm that -- while patented by them in 95 or so -- had been known for 40 years, and even used in exactly the same way with respect to academic references (who have, for all intents and purposes, "links" in the printed paper world). So, even though everyone who had a lot of resources could do that, it doesn't happen in practice - and in fact, the existing patent regime seems to be useless in this regard. Patents and copyrights are a very nice idea, but the existing implementations are so horrible, that it is not clear to me we're better off than without them.