Re:Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
by antihero on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @10:36AM
(#27894258)
> we'd be better off without intellectual property at all
So there's absolutely nothing at all to prevent a situation where you put time and money into developing something, and as soon as it gets legs, a megacorp instead of buying you out or licensing it from you, just copies it and pushes you out of the market?
Re:Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
by hansvm on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @12:22PM
(#27895768)
Is that worse than the current situation where you accidentally infringe on a dozen patents from the megacorp's warchest and get sued to oblivion if you don't quietly agree to their favorite terms? Is that worse than all the innovation being stifled by agreements requiring work on your own time and dime to belong to your employer? Are first-mover advantages and other sources of natural monopolies not really that important in building your moat? Is intellectual property the right mechanism for limiting megacorp power?
I'm open to the idea of some intellectual property rights remaining (like the "natural rights" you see in a lot of the world, or retaining current trade secret laws), but I still think we'd be in a better place than we are now if the current system were completely abolished.
Re:Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
by kiba on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @10:44AM
(#27894361)
There's also nothing preventing a megacorporation from preemptively inventing and patenting everything under the sun. They also have infinite money to fight patent lawsuits.
Moreover, these patent lawsuits mean that said inventors spend more time talking to their lawyers instead of getting these inventions to market.
If independent invention were a valid defense and the terms were a bit shorter then the only patents which would actually affect your business would be those which you legitimately couldn't come up with on your own (which seems like the point of the whole system -- you get a monopoly and we get blueprints in return). Shorter terms of 5-10 yrs would allow for faster iteration on important ideas.
Alternatively, compulsory license agreements like you have for some aspects of music could substantially reduce the chilling effect on new inventions. You don't have to worry about somebody suing for multiples of revenue; you just always have the ability to pay a reasonable royalty -- the patent owner still gets handsomely compensated, but important new inventions can start rolling out immediately.
Or else if the bar to get patents were a little higher then the system would work a lot more smoothly. The fact that cloudflare was able to invalidate the vast majority of patents when a troll sued them strongly indicates they shouldn't have been awarded in the first place even under current guidelines.