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I'm not at all convinced of the idea that without patent protection, nobody would invest substantially in R&D. The semi-conductor industry has had very comprehensive cross-licensing agreements for decades to circumvent those exact patent law hurdles, yet it has been the most fast-paced innovative industry in those same decades. IBM literally produced i386 processor and AMD literally produced i486 processor clone under those licenses. That did not stop Intel or AMD from continued innovation. In fact, an argument can be made that the pace of innovation slowed down after Intel narrowed the scope of further cross-licensing after the Pentium processor. See, it takes time to even put together the production facilities for making clones. The pressure of clones coming in 24-36 months provided strong incentive to bring leading edge products to market quickly as well as coming up with the next generation leading edge products 36-48 months after the release of the current generation. 17 years is an eternity in the modern world, and the time value of a patent is really quite industry-dependent. Any apriori number of years picked by the patent office is guaranteed to be unfit for most specific industries.
Shakespeare actually borrowed/"stole" many plot ideas from his contemporary playwrights with whom he shared drinks at the pub. In today's world, there would be endless lawsuits; the playwright would be spending all their time in court instead of writing . . . either that or we wouldn't see many of Shakespeare's master pieces because the main plot was first thought up by someone else in the pub.
posted by 96.233.42...
, Thu, 6 Jan 2011 23:03:23
, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 15:31:58, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 16:23:21, Sun, 9 Jan 2011 03:24:46
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