Reply to post: Re: Irrelevant in this day and age

Re: Irrelevant in this day and age

Patents served a purpose during the industrial revolution, but in this day and age they stifle innovation and, case in point, too often get used for extortion (patent trolling).

Patents have never served a useful purpose besides creating monopolies and making money for a privileged few.

If you follow the history of patents, patent enforcement and so on, you will usually see that patents follow froma period of innovation, not lead to such. Typical pattern is as follows:

1) there are no patents, no patent laws, no patent enforcement;

2) there is a period of high technological/industrial/manufacturing progress, basically much new stuff is invented;

3) a lot of 'stealing' of ideas, spread of knowledge, cross-pollinization of ideas, improvememts on others ideas and processes, even more stuff is invented and produced;

4) individuals or organisations want monopolies on the stuff they've invented, as they are too lazy to keep inventing, they want to rest back and live off what they've already invented, and push for patents and so on;

5) patents are introduced;

6) rate of inventiveness goes down, as you no longer have to keep inventing new stuff to keep ahead of the competition, you have your monopolies, you just need to keep that stuff ticking over and keep extending the patents (witness how the pharmaceutical industry keeps being able to - in effect if not literally - get patents extended by combining them with other existing patents, e.g. drug 1 patent, drug 2 patent, both about to run out, hey lets combine drug 1 and drug 2 into a new single dose pill for both those things, and get a patent on that that effectively denies others the use of drug 1 and drug 2 since those drugs while out of patent on them, have effectively got an extension by being in this new patent that combines them);

7) inventiveness moves to new countries who don't have patent laws, or weak patent laws (e.g. UK -> US -> Japan -> Taiwan -> S.Korea -> China);

8) rinse, repeat in the new country.

The same pattern can be seen with regards to copyright as well. E.g. Hollywood a the turn of the 20th century was built on other peoples copyrights, ignoring them. It wasn't until after Hollywood became a significant player that they started whining about their copyrights.