Re:Show HN: Pinterest + iTunes + Youtube Mashup
by hughesdan on Saturday May 05, 2012 @09:10AM
(#3932042)
Good point. The whole reason we have patent law in the first place is to promote the progress of science. Patents still have a role in some industries where inventing is expensive and cloning is cheap (e.g. pharmaceuticals). But on the web we don't need them. They do more harm than good. I've thought for a while that patent examiners should take into account the investment made by the inventor, giving greater weight to inventions that take a lot of time & money and less weight to inventions that were trivially easy to hack together.
I really do believe the web is better off without patents and letting companies copy each other, and I think the same would be true for software companies, too, and maybe many other industries as well. Copying leads to competition, leads to further improvements and new ideas through combing old ones. Besides, wholesale rip-offs will always be criticized by customers anyway if they go too far, who wants to take their business to a "clone" anyway, when they could go with the original.