But you see, if you get rid of patents then you get rid of what makes companies and products unique. Even though it may seem nice in concept to allow anyone to do anything, can you imagine the world if there was no real sense of identity. The companies that innovate would be put out of business by the companies that feed off their R&D;and produce cheap knock offs. In the end this will mean that nobody will invent and innovate. What is the point when all you are going to be doing is spending money that others will benefit from.

It may be nice to think that patents stifle innovation and invention but in all honesty, without them there would be next to none, because to do spend money trying to innovate would be commercial suicide

Right, many people spend lots and lots of money to develop a new product, and patenting that product is an excellent way to recoup those expenses.  Imagine if your friend who made the colored bubbles was not able to patent his innovation.  He would take one of two paths:  he would release his product for the world to scrutinize, duplicate, and reproduce en masse, and he would be out of a job; or he would keep the secret to himself, and nobody would benefit from it.  Either way, he would be $500,000 in the hole with nothing to show for it.

The world of business is not quite as clear-cut as you’d like it to be, and it’s not friendly at all.  Companies have one true goal: to make as much money as possible.  Competition is fierce, and if you invent something and can’t control its production and distribution, you immediately lose.  As much as we’d all like people to do it “for the good of mankind,” it’s never going to happen (or, very rarely — and you get stuff like open source software).  People release the inventions that get them as much money as possible.  If the thing you’re best at is creating new inventions, and you can’t work a 9-5 job to save your bacon, you’ll be S.O.L. without patent laws.

In an ideal world, there would be no such thing as lawsuits, patents, copyright, etc.  Everything would be free, and people would only take as much as they need and share with the less fortunate.  But we do not live in such a world, and copyright, patent, and related laws exist to protect the creative instincts of those who can make something wonderful from those who can’t, and would simply profit off someone else’s work.

For those interested:  colored bubbles!  

I agree.  Let’s also abolish alarm systems, trademarks, and anti theft laws.  What’s mine (very little) is yours . . . and what’s yours is mine (a lot).

BTW, now I’ve got a bunch of new ideas to persue.

First, I’m going to start a web site call ‘Deep Thought’. Then create my own line of ‘Dell Computers’ (starting price $99).  And finally, my own version of the Apple iPod.

THANKS everyone for the free Research and Developement . . . and also the free advertisment as well

Great idea having no patents. But this idea has been tried before. And it failed.

The former communist states, such as the USSR, also did away with domestic patents from the get go. Russian inventors got a pat on the back, but no money. And like everything else in communists theology, it was all for the sake of making everything wonderful for the average worker. Well, we all know how well that economic model worked!

Of course, that economic model might work on a small commune level, but certainly not on a larger scale. There will always be people who want to go for a free ride letting others carry their load. Companies are the same and most would be happy to let other companies carry the innovation load and just copy anything and everything. But soon you have no company carrying the innovation load, since innovation costs money, and if the company down the street can just copy your technology for free you can never recoup your investment (or pay your engineer’s salaries to make inventions). So, you soon have a system where everyone copies but no on can afford to (or has the motivation to) innovate.

Well, the patent, trademark and copyright systems make it profitable to innovate. And you do need those profits so that you can pay those engineers and other talented people working in a company.

If you want to do away with the patent, trademark and/or copyright systems you need to have a viable alternative. Some nirvana where everyone does the “right thing” is just muddled thinking, not deep thought.

But without the patent system inventors can’t profit. In order to cover the costs of having to actually develop the product they have to charge the customer more. But someone who just takes their idea and makes a version can make it much more cheaply and therefore undercut the original inventor, and therefore reaping the rewards of someone else’s work

In response to Pilky, Patents are not what makes a company unique. Trademarks and branding are a much bigger part of that.

If there are no patents, you experience the free-rider problem when those who invest in innovation see their investments dissipate when immitators began copying.

While this is a strong argument, it’s not without counterarguments. In a patentless system, if you’re company A with product Z, and Z is a the newest and coolest thing, you’re gonna have great sales just as you would under the current system. Immitators will without doubt jump on the ka-ching band-wagon, offering products similar to Z (but not identical because this hypothetical doesn’t abolish the trademark system so there will still be brand differences). A’s market quickly becomes cannibalized. Assuming A’s going to survive, what’s A to do? Innovate again. A would be forced to keep R&D;pumping to stay ahead of the immitators. This would create a cut-throat survival-of-the-fittest sistuation where only those with strong R&D;could stay at the front of the pack, with the drone immitators picking up the rest of the market. Rather than stymie innovation, the abolishment of patents might encourage innovation to increase at a blistering speed. At the same time, copiers would undoubtedly have to compete solely on cost. So there is the possibility that both development would become faster and prices would go down. Without doubt that would be a net plus for consumers, even while inventors would be in a breakneck struggle to stay on top of tech trends.

However, this would only work in markets where the cost for R&D;could be borne by the increased profits an innovating company would get before their market is cannibalized. A company like Apple developing and improving incrementally on the iPod could most likely stay ahead of the pack and create such a situation. However, the inventor of the colored bubbles would have difficulty in such a system. Once the bubbles are colored, there’s not much farther to take the invention. So it seems there may still be some use for patents yet.

It seems the better solution is to work with the system we have but refine it. One of the biggest problems from my unlearned eye is the patenting of things that are overly obvious and not really all that innovative at all. In my opinion, the bar something must cross to get a patent should be raised. It may also be useful to shorten patent time limits, and perhaps customize such limits per industry. Patents related to industries with a rapid rate of change in technology, say, software, may be suitable for shorter patent protection periods than, say, agriculture. It would take a lot of smart people to get together and see what the best time periods would be.

I think the patent system is necessary, but it is too restrictive and can be applied too broadly at the moment.

I think a patent should be enforceable only if the inventor is actively selling the product or idea covered by the patent, and all patents should be subject to some sort of compulsory license provision whereby the patent holder is required to license the tech covered by its patent for a small royalty rate.

The incentive to innovate is preserved, but patents can no longer be wielded as a weapon to stifle competition.

Well, no matter what you do, rafe, people will get pissed and ugly situations will abound. Sure, the patent concept has its pitfalls, but ditching patents will not be a panacea. It’s a nice idea in concept, but I have my doubts whether or not taking patents out of the equation will make things any better. No matter how noble the idea, human nature always somehow gets in the way.

Rafe, I would venture a guess that for every invention that two people come up with relatively obscurely from each other, there are probably at least a hundred others who labor away for years and come up with something that is different enough from what anyone else has done, and nobody else has done the same thing (yet?), that they can patent their innovation without being hassled from companies with nastygrams.  If everyone was inventing and reinventing the same stuff over and over, and trying to patent them all and getting into a huge fuss over everything, then yeah, I’d say the current patent laws are obsolete and need to be taken out with yesterday’s garbage.  But as it is, the majority of patents get granted without a fuss, without someone sending you a cease-and-desist letter.

And furthermore, how many people do you think try to invent a new way of doing something without researching whether or not it has been done already?  It seems to me that it would be foolish, and just asking for a cease-and-desist or a nastygram or whatever, if you don’t do some research to determine whether you have any claim to the idea or not.  I wouldn’t set out to reinvent the folding chair without finding as much information as I can on the subject, and determining whether someone has put the technique I want to use into practice or not.  It just doesn’t make good business (or common) sense.

Your last post assumes that every inventor will come up with something that someone else has done, which is sometimes the case, but it’s not always the case.  The patent system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than having no patents at all, in which everyone freeloads off the ideas of others, and nobody brings their ideas to market because they don’t want them stolen out from under their noses.