Here is a very similar question on patents.stackexchange.com: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/9994/are-patents-...

Basically, if there's a significant cost to entry, and if the idea were open to anyone, it would discourage anyone from using the patent. With patent licensing there's a barrier to entry that gives a measure of exclusivity that is an additional motivation to anyone taking the idea to market.

I'm not really sure that I agree that governments should own and selectively sell ideas, even if for a short time but I can see the logic in that argument.

I talked to a government researcher recently who expressed this exact opinion. Ultimately, contractors are the one who build things for the government, whether it's a space shuttle or an aircraft carrier. Patents can provide an incentive for contractors to invest in certain areas by ensuring a measure of exclusivity.

That argument (for patents) works just as well as an argument for many other policies that allows a business to exclude competitors from a costly-to-enter market.

For example, in 1993 when it became apparent that the web was going to become important, it would have been beneficial for the government -- at least according to the argument you describe -- to auction off the right to develop and distribute web browsers since that would have motivated the winners of the auction to incur the costs to develop a really good web browser.

The development of a web browser is after all a significant expense: Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft each sink 100s of millions of dollars a year into their web browsers.

There's something perverse in this -- something like, legal impediments to competition are so much the norm that only a loser would want a business without one? If that is the holdup then couldn't we try to reduce this systemic problem instead of adding to it?

(I know, a comment like this is probably from dreamland, but I'd like to keep a vacation house there while I can.)

The systematic problem is that if there's something expensive and anyone can want in, and the profit margins aren't clearly good, it's too risky to blow all your money on something and maybe not get a return. Maybe the market can fund one entrant but if there are two, and the market share is divided, there's not enough money for each player to cover their costs.

A systematic fix would look like one of:

    - Restrict entry to a single player (patents)
    - Provide matching funds for each sale

These fixes apply to this specific situation. We're talking about the space program, so we're talking large up-front capital costs, which means its possible the situation exists. The patent system is clearly cheaper up front, though the more expensive second option ensures at least some competition, making for an overall better product, but at a very high price.

It's probably a defensive patent so someone can't sue NASA for using their own intellectual property.

Having a patent doesn't grant you the right to use it (for example if someone else owns a patent for a similar technology you still have to make sure you aren't infringing that one). Defensive patenting only means that you have your own patents to assert against someone else who might potentially sue you.

I know very little about the topic, but is that a thing? Surely just publishing (without asserting ownership) could establish prior art?

Any sufficiently large organization tends to become host to a population of defensive lawyers, which then produces patents as a side effect of building themselves a nest out of legal documents. Isn't nature beautiful?

In theory, yes. In practice, patent examiners mostly only look at patents when checking for prior art. Once someone else gets a patent for your invention you'll face a costly legal process to invalidate the bogus patent.

While that may be true for generically publishing the work online, there are dedicated disclosure journals that are included in prior art searches by patent examiners. If you want to publish as an alternative to patenting, this is where you do it.

"My reckons" are not generally reliable when it comes to law.

I wrote about this for the Observer a while back: http://observer.com/2015/06/you-too-can-build-a-business-on-...

1) They can encourage innovation in house by letting their own engineers share in licensing fees 2) They give a lot of stuff away 3) They go out of their way to get people to use their inventions in ways that are good for everyone concerned.

I'm a little rusty on the topic since this was a few months ago, but they made a pretty good argument that their measured approach is in the public interest.

I've heard the point of view expressed before that the number of patents filed per research dollar expended is a measure some large organizations like to use to judge the effectiveness of their research departments. Because the government doesn't have a profit/loss things like patents filed can be a way for them to compare their effectiveness to private industry.

That is a truly terrible metric for government entities. It's easy to get arbitrarily many patents if you don't care how worthless they are. The primary difficulty of getting a patent is not inventing something (which all engineers do continuously in the course of their jobs), it's the staggering amount of bureaucracy and paperwork required to propagate it through the patent office.

Which when the patentee is another government agency means the government is paying a whole slew of bureaucrats to do battle with each other time and again in order to generate a meaningless metric that only actually measures how much time they've wasted fabricating that metric.