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from the article: "In countries without patent laws, inventors depend entirely on secrecy, lead time, and other alternatives to patents in protecting their

from the article: "In countries without patent laws, inventors depend entirely on secrecy, lead time, and other alternatives to patents in protecting their intellectual property." This has been shown time and again, remove patents and you remove the incentive to disclose.

glesica 14y ago
Who cares? With so many patents issued in the US there is basically no disclosure anyway, at least as far as a small company or individual is concerned. In addition, many modern inventions are so complex that it is almost impossible to identify every patent they might violate. Even large companies get hit by this sort of thing, just look at video codecs.
- M8R-fhlcjm 14y ago
  That's a cop-out given the abundance of search tools, regexp, CTRL-F, etc...
  - glesica 14y ago
    That's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen posted in this forum. I can't tell if you're genuinely ignorant or just trolling. You're saying that the reason patents covering a given product are so difficult to identify is that nobody knows about regular expressions? That has absolutely nothing to do with anything. The difficulty isn't in finding patents based on keywords or patterns (Google patent search can do that all day long), the difficulty is in identifying patents that might cover a given device or product. If you've created a cell phone you can't just search the patent database for "cell phone". A patent could cover some piece of the device and never even reference cell phones, or a patent could cover a method of doing something that you didn't even realize was novel enough to warrant patent protection. This requires careful study of a given patent, by lawyers but also by engineers. It is an expensive process with potentially tens of thousands of patents to sift through for a reasonably complicated product.
    - M8R-fhlcjm 14y ago
      Given your example of cell phones, there's a lot more costs to bringing a new type of cell phone to market than the ~$50k on patent searches. Since we're talking about driving innovation, someone who genuinely advances the technology is able to gain some protection on their investment in R&D by applying for (and hopefully obtaining) a patent(s). If all you're doing is bringing another same-old cell phone to market then the question is what benefits are you bringing - or rather, does society benefit more from your same-cellphone than the someone who is innovating and introducing something new and novel.
      - glesica 14y ago
        But even an innovative cell phone is covered by thousands of existing patents, many of them unknown until someone sues. That's the problem. There is no such thing as "pure" innovation. All new technology somehow involves older technology, and in many cases it isn't clear which existing patents cover a particular device or product so the only thing to do is wait to be sued or not release your new (an innovative) product at all.

glesica 14y ago

Who cares? With so many patents issued in the US there is basically no disclosure anyway, at least as far as a small company or individual is concerned. In addition, many modern inventions are so complex that it is almost impossible to identify every patent they might violate. Even large companies get hit by this sort of thing, just look at video codecs.

M8R-fhlcjm 14y ago
That's a cop-out given the abundance of search tools, regexp, CTRL-F, etc...
- glesica 14y ago
  That's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen posted in this forum. I can't tell if you're genuinely ignorant or just trolling. You're saying that the reason patents covering a given product are so difficult to identify is that nobody knows about regular expressions? That has absolutely nothing to do with anything. The difficulty isn't in finding patents based on keywords or patterns (Google patent search can do that all day long), the difficulty is in identifying patents that might cover a given device or product. If you've created a cell phone you can't just search the patent database for "cell phone". A patent could cover some piece of the device and never even reference cell phones, or a patent could cover a method of doing something that you didn't even realize was novel enough to warrant patent protection. This requires careful study of a given patent, by lawyers but also by engineers. It is an expensive process with potentially tens of thousands of patents to sift through for a reasonably complicated product.
  - M8R-fhlcjm 14y ago
    Given your example of cell phones, there's a lot more costs to bringing a new type of cell phone to market than the ~$50k on patent searches. Since we're talking about driving innovation, someone who genuinely advances the technology is able to gain some protection on their investment in R&D by applying for (and hopefully obtaining) a patent(s). If all you're doing is bringing another same-old cell phone to market then the question is what benefits are you bringing - or rather, does society benefit more from your same-cellphone than the someone who is innovating and introducing something new and novel.
    - glesica 14y ago
      But even an innovative cell phone is covered by thousands of existing patents, many of them unknown until someone sues. That's the problem. There is no such thing as "pure" innovation. All new technology somehow involves older technology, and in many cases it isn't clear which existing patents cover a particular device or product so the only thing to do is wait to be sued or not release your new (an innovative) product at all.