Hmmm? Patents stifle innovation?
Method and system patents stifle innovation. When you can make up an idea, not apply it to any actual system, and get a patent for it, even after it’s already out there, the system is broken.
Further, I take great issue with the idea that ‘a limited time’ is virtually for all intents and purposes reinterpreted to mean forever. There is an exchange - in exchange for you getting exclusive government protected use of your creation, you give up rights to that creation after a certain number of years. The trade has been broken through poor congressional action and courts that won’t outright declare the laws unconstitutional for breaking the provisions of limited time.
Yes, most patents are requested in order to keep someone else’s innovation off the market.
A patent can encourage innovation, and it can discourage it too. You are aware of the one thing—that the protection of one’s creative invention allows one to market it, as marketing it generally makes it’s secrets public.
On the other hand, a patent more often is used to quash similar inventions. Often when an invention is made, it is that the time is ripe for it—general social innovation or other discoveries make something obvious or needed in ways that did not previously exits. Many people discover the same innovation, all independently. That is, let me be very clear here, MANY people working in the same field would naturally be expected to come up with the same or similar innovations on their own.
Yup. Lots of paperwork with lots of lawyering and lots of fees makes lots of innovators say "the Hell with it!"
Especially when they consider that the only thing a patent will really do is license them to try to outspend 'Microsoft' on lawyers.
I agree with you. Patents are to protect innovation. The sysyem in the US though does not do a good job of it. Legal cost to defend a patent render many patents useless to the holder