| Michael Wojcik 2006-01-10, 9:55 pm |
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In article <lzxwf.80029$6K2.49736@edtnps90>, "Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com> writes:
>
> I believe that the original intent of patents was to promote innovation.
The original intent of patents - from "letters patent", ie letters
published to the general public - in this sense (as opposed to
land-grant patents, letters patent conveying a title, and so forth)
was to reward people for service to the crown by giving them an
artificial monopoly. No innovation was required. It wasn't long
before governments started issuing letters patent granting monopolies
in order to make risky enterprises, notably overseas trade, economi-
cally viable, and so created the Dutch East India Company and the
like. Again, the people receiving those patents weren't being
rewarded for being clever - ruthless is more like it.
> That is, previously, people didn't bother to think up ideas, because it
> wasn't profitable.
This was a joke, right?
> People could just take the ideas and build their own
> products based on the idea.
Not when artificial-monopoly patents were introduced they couldn't.
This was feudal Europe at the beginning of the Early Modern period;
mercantilism and the entrepreneurial class were just starting to
appear. Sure, there were coffeeshops (a harbinger of the rise of the
middle class in Europe; see Stallybrass and White's _The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression_) starting to appear in the most cosmopoli-
tan cities, but the idea of commercial competition was still mostly
just a gleam in a clerk's eye.
Very few people were in any position to take an idea and profit from
it, at least by providing goods or services.
> So patents were created so that the person who
> came up with the idea was allowed a monopoly on the idea for a few years,
> giving him/her a chance to make some profit off of the idea.
Intellectual-property patents apparently first came on the scene (in
Europe at least) in Venice, but letters patent granting monopolies had
already been around for some time. In English law, the intellectual-
property patent wasn't the dominant type until James I, and there was
plenty of innovation before then.
> Nowadays, patents are stiffling innovation.
That's a popular opinion, and like most popular opinions, it's a
gross generalization. There is no clear evidence or compelling
argument to show that innovation would be significantly greater were
patents suddenly overturned or significantly restricted. While it's
difficult to argue that patent-granting authorities such as the USPTO
don't grant numerous foolish patents (and they're certainly over-
whelmed by volume, political pressure, and lobbying), it's not
immediately clear how to fix that without making the patent-granting
process even more difficult and expensive - which raises the barrier
to entry even higher for individuals and small businesses.
Intellectual property law is a mess. But it's always been a mess
(when it's existed at all, and only the very naive think things would
be better in a state of nature). It has of late undergone significant
and useful change, and it remains in flux, so at least there's hope
for progress. Which is more than you can say of many problems.
--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@microfocus.com
It wasn't fair; my life was now like everyone else's. -- Eric Severance
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