3 ms·

Could someone please tell me why intellectual property protection should even be a thing?

• hga 12y ago
  So people can make money with their minds, instead of just their hands? Patents, in fields where they make sense (not software, at least not without 1000x better patent offices) are also useful because they require disclosure up front, allowing immediate cross-fertilization, so to speak ^_^ (very important in Silicon Valley's meteoric development of ICs), and a limited life time. Without them, entities resort to trade secrets, which makes everyone indefinitely impoverished, ADDED: including the trade secret holder, because of that lack of cross-fertilization. Note the people once asked this question about land. For farms, in fact....
• skosuri 12y ago
  Why would any commercial entity invest in things like drug development, crop development, etc; if the moment they actually bring something to market it's trivially copied and sold at cost?
  • bovermyer 12y ago
    I'm not sure why I'm getting downvoted; it's an honest quesiton. Why does a business have to base its profits around a particular implementation of a thing?
    • dionidium 12y ago
      > Why does a business have to base its profits around a particular implementation of a thing? That has nothing to do with it. It's a question of incentives. Patent supporters believe that a limited monopoly encourages innovation. That's it.
    • hga 12y ago
      Errr, "a particular implementation of a thing" cannot be patented. It might be copyrightable (in the US, things with no creative content like a telephone book cannot be protected by copyright). GMOs are much more like inventions protectable by patents than creative works, like, say, an artificial form of life based on silicon. Not entirely different in principle than building a machine out of different mostly pre-fab parts, the combination of which is an invention.