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Old 02-12-2010, 12:05 PM   #14
zerospinboson
"Assume a can opener..."
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon View Post
I forgot to mention above that I'm not sure that I'd argue that IPR always leads to increased incentive to innovate. But it often seems to lead to increased incentive to disclose successful innovations.

Whether that effect is greater or less than the negative aspects is an argument for another day.

Xenophon
But consider the other side. In new industries you often see a willingness on behalf of the first entrants to share ideas, in the hope that this will increase the rate of innovation for all. This surely is as worthwhile an incentive to disclose as patenting is, at least it is for those firms that did so (or to mutually NDA, but whatever. And in the software industry, eternity is not all that different from 17-20 year patents.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boldrin&Levine
That innovations do not, like Athena, spring out fully armored from the head of the innovator but are the products of painfully long processes of cumulative discovery to which hundreds, often thousands, of independent individuals contribute is well understood by actual innovators and repeated by an endless list of writers. The most recent discussion of this point we came across, in the business-related literature, is Berkun (2007),which contains plentiful, interesting examples and abundant reference to the many who argued this point before him, and us.
I imagine that one of the primary reasons you had to write that patent quickly was not because it was especially worthwhile, but because you otherwise ran the risk that another would patent it, and use it to stifle your competition.. This is not a worry in a patentless world, though.
Also, lots of companies choose not to patent their innovations specifically because they don't want to disclose, and just use NDAs. So in that case nothing is gained by offering a patent option that allows them sole ownership of the idea and all 'similar' implementations for 17-20 years down the road.
And the more successful an innovation, the more reason to try to reverse-engineer it. (Which would be allowed and doable, even if the actual implementation wasn't disclosed.)

In any case, I'm not really sure I care enough about a dye from the 12th century, and an innovation that apparently wasn't notable enough to be copied/reverse-engineered/whatevered yet to lock down the whole world over it by forcing every country to adopt the us's IP legislation.
The problem with your second assumption, however, is that this second line of argument is always 'put off for another day' by everyone, even though the answer to it is incredibly important if you're worried about the possibility for future companies to comfortably try out new ideas without worrying about whether someone else has patented it already.

What you have now is a whole slew of industries in which basically only those who can contribute significantly to the "shared patent pool" are allowed to compete. All others are denied the right. This is really a cartel by another name, and bad.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire View Post
I can reverse engineer a great deal out of my competitors' components (I'm an R&D manager in the field of passive components) if I choose to. That saves an enormous amount of R&D, even with the inevitable fine tuning (material choices, process control) and new equipment purchases.
Sure you can, but you're already part of the field. Do you really think that you would have been able to do so right out of high school? Without investing time and money in doing comparable R&D yourself, you wouldn't have had this experience. And in a patentless world, that other company would have been just as able to copy your thought-up innovations as you would be in copying theirs.


Edited. You can get the Against Intellectual Monopoly book here (free). The first chapter contains an interesting discussion of the history of the invention of the Steam Engine by Watt, and is par for the course.

Last edited by zerospinboson; 02-12-2010 at 02:29 PM.
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