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A secondary market for patents is fantastic. There are secondary markets for everything. The banking/venture system is designed to allocate scarce resources as
by jsmeaton 12y ago
A secondary market for patents is fantastic. There are secondary markets for everything. The banking/venture system is designed to allocate scarce resources as efficiently as possible - why wouldn't the same thing exist for inventions?
The real problem IMO is that patents are being issued for frivolous ideas. If patents really represented inventions of value, then the secondary market should be correctly allocating those patents to the right people. Unfortunately, patents do not represent inventions of value, because what we see is the secondary market identifying "infringements" everywhere, so it's more profitable to extort.
If there are so many infringements, how is the patent possibly novel?
- lukifer 12y agoI agree that the practical problem with the current patent system is in implementation: the granting and enforcement of broad, poorly-defined patents, and the costs of litigation. Whether it's possible for a good implementation to exist, particularly in a long-lived form that copes well with radically new technologies, is debatable. My moral objection to patents can be concisely summed up by John Carmack: "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." Anything that is so specific that it could not be reproduced by an independent human in a clean room (ie, the full text of Harry Potter) is well protected by copyright. Anything which can be reproduced through simple problem-solving can not be said to be "owned" by its creator. Patents outlaw thinking itself.