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Sure, that's what it would lead to eventually, but I'm quite sure that right now the 'big' companies are using patents the way they use (armies of) lawyers, sim
by timwiseman 17y ago
Sure, that's what it would lead to eventually, but I'm quite sure that right now the 'big' companies are using patents the way they use (armies of) lawyers, simply to raise the bar to competition.
That is what they were intended to be for.
The original idea (as I understand it, obligatory IANAL) was that in order to reward inventors, the government would temporarily raise the bar on competition to the point no one else could directly use that particular technology to compete at all. Anyone who wanted to compete would either have to license the technology from the inventor, or go to the point of developing a new parallel technology that achieved the same function. This was their reward for adding to human technology and it was meant to encourage inventors to do this.
One key point though is that like copyright, patents are for a limited time.
- jcl 17y agoOne key point though is that like copyright, patents are for a limited time. Moreso for patents than copyrights. Number of patents that expired last week: thousands. Number of copyrights that expired in the last decade: zero.
- timwiseman 17y agoI think that is a bit of an overstatement, but it is a point well made. Copyrights have been extended to great lengths and retroactive extensions have been passed, so they expire at a very slow rate which is not at all fixed.
- jcl 17y agoI'm not sure if you are saying that copyrights have been expiring, or if you mean that copyrights aren't expiring now but will eventually. If the former, you have my curiosity... Could you describe a case in which a copyright's term could have expired in the past decade? As I understand it, the Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended all copyright terms by twenty years, and that was eleven years ago.