From: Ken Clements (Ken@Innovation-On-Demand.com)
Date: Wed Dec 22 1999 - 12:10:50 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> Why is it obvious that we should "encourage" anything? Isn't the
> whole point of capitalism and free markets and all that that we just
> let the system work naturally without encouraging anything? Why not
> let the inventors' edge be just the fact that they are creative and
> talented individuals who will be in demand by producers? And as I've
> said before, R&D costs are a red herring--they're only high because
> the patent system encourages long, expensive R&D cycles, not because
> there's anything inherently good about such speculative spending.
Some convents in society are more successful in promoting the general
benefit
than others, so they go without notice. For example, we could have
more
freedom, but it would not do much good to allow each person to print his
own
money without limitation. The basic idea behind the patent is that it
is a
covenant between the society and an inventor, in which the inventor
agrees to
publish the invention, and the society agrees to grant the inventor the
legal
power to stop others from making or using the invention for a set period
of
time. The U. S. Congress established the covenant because it was
believed that
the country would make faster advances in industrial development if
inventions
were published, instead of kept as trade secrets, as had been the
practice.
Such a vehicle of infrastructure having been established, it was normal
human
nature for the individuals on the side of receiving the monopolistic
protection
to do whatever they could to make the pile on there side bigger than the
pile
on the public's side. Thus, we have had a fair amount of abuse. A
famous
quote from Edison goes, "A patent is a license for a lawsuit." However,
I can
state from personal experience that attempts to raise funding for the
advance
of technology in the private sector will be without result if there is
no
expectation of the generation of intellectual property beyond trade
secrets.
One of the things I find annoying happens when I do not patent something
and
then, years later, someone thinks of the same thing and prevents me from
using
it. For many years IBM has protected itself against this kind of thing
by
publishing a journal of things that they decided *not* to patent. (see:
http://www.patents.ibm.com/tdb) I am working on a similar idea for my
web
site, where I would provide a forum for the publishing of ideas into the
public
domain. I call this my "Open Ideas" public service project, and would
like to
receive comments from those on this list, pro and con.
-Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:10 MST