Quote:
Originally Posted by MovieBird
if we increased the length of a patent, it would cripple our scientific, and economic, progress. Witness the state of the software industry....
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Yeah, not really seeing it.
There's a lot of proprietary stuff in software that actually works very well, and in some cases better than an open format. E.g. iOS is proprietary and locked into hardware; Android is open and can be modified at will. In some respects, Android has its advantages; e.g. Amazon and B&N can use it, without licensing fees, for their ebook devices. Also anyone can write software for Android, without needing approval from the Cupertino Control Freaks. But in many respects, Android is a mess. A developer has to write for dozens of different screen sizes and hardware variations, whereas iOS devs have to deal with... two. The user experience on iOS is smooth, whereas Android is all over the place.
Some things, like an open standard that all vendors agree to use, are very helpful. But we've had a lot of proprietary software for decades, and it doesn't seem to have strangled innovation.
Short patent spans also creates issues. For example, drug manufacturers have a limited period of time when they have an exclusive right to sell a drug; after that, other companies can make a generic. The result is that branded drugs are very expensive for many years, as the pharmaceuticals try to recoup their R&D and earn profits as quickly as possible. I.e. shorter patent terms may in fact discourage drug development, and drive up prices before the generic is available.
In addition, drug manufacturers find ways to work around the shorter patent period. They engineer minor formula changes to make a "new" drug (which is no more effective than the old one), or combine two existing and tested drugs to make a "new" drug with a new patent.
I'd also say that the relative unimportance of content is exactly what makes it feasible to have longer copyright durations than patents. If you have a disease, and only one company has the right to make the drug to cure it for 75 years, even if the company goes bust, that's going to present a serious problem. If you wrote a cheap paperback mystery novel in the 1950s, no one is likely to die because it's out of print.