The idea that I can be presented with a problem, hire a dozen experts and spend millions of dollars coming up with a solution to the problem, and have someone come along and just copy the solution and use it in their own product to compete with me is horrifying.
Bounce scrolling, emoticon keyboard input, unified search across multiple apps, "placing internet information on a tv screen", etc. These are totally obvious ideas, not the type of thing that you spend millions of dollars on researching for years.
The idea that someone can come up with a solution:
- prevent anyone else henceforth from using it without paying them,
- enforce that by force and using taxpayer money,
- stretching over political boundaries,
- not even giving the remotest fair chance to the unborn to ever come up with that solution,
- charge a price fixed by whatever whims tickle that person's fancy and deny others of a possibly cheaper solution
- just to protect a possibly overvalued idea
.. is extremely horrifying to me.
Please refer this earlier post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4591253
Genuinely asking, a real world situation would be cool. It seems like this would happen most when ex-employees try to compete with the large company.
At the opposite end of the spectrum think of a company like Intel investing into WiMAX. Developing that standard was not cheap, but almost by definition it was something that required disclosure of the end result. Intel can try to recoup the initial investment by selling chips implementing the standard, but competitors can always undercut them on price because they didn't have to spend any money coming up with the initial design.
There is a lot of technology that's much easier to reverse engineer than it is to develop. Especially with software, where it's often very easy to dig out a copy of the firmware from a competing product and decompile it.
You might think this kind of stuff doesn't actually happen, but in the 1990's American companies hated working with the Chinese precisely for this reason. They'd take an American product and copy it right down to the silk screening on the PCB's, and sell the result for cut-rate prices.
And the world is arguably a better place now that the Chinese can make super-cheap parts and clones of American designs and sell them to people who couldn't afford them otherwise.
We may have lost some of Shakespeare's plays because he had to be so secretive with his work, since he had no other legal protection from people just copying the stuff and putting on their own plays.
[1] Last chapter of the recent book "Imagine" by Jonah Lehrer
What would be more horrifying is a dearth of innovation for fear of other people copying it. Is that realistic? Is first-mover advantage enough? What about prize funds (e.g. Netflix prize, X prize, etc.)? Would the inefficiency costs of those mechanisms be larger than the coordination, government regulation, litigation etc. costs that patents cause?
Are there any kinds of innovation that definitely would not happen under alternate schemes, that we absolutely need patents for?
I thought the argument is actually that they exist in the way they do, not in them existing at all.. ?
"what would be appalling about patents not existing" is a good counter-argument.
Then someone make that argument; the post I replied to didn't IMHO, and here is why: If patents didn't exist, you wouldn't do the same R&D in the same way as you would do in a world with patents. So that's just apples and oranges. "If this chair didn't exist, the person would fall on their butt!" No, actually in that case the person wouldn't even have gotten into a situation where they need a chair to not fall.
Which is of course something that is often claimed, that we need patents to "encourage innovation". But consider all the inventions that are made at more or less the same time by people who never heard of each other. To me it's obvious that (large chunks of) invention are more inherent in the laws of physics and human society than in individual inventors. "I made this" actually means "everything up to and including me made this"... sounds less grand, is so much more true. But I guess taking credit for pre-existing things and squeezing money and power out of them is something we actually got used to. Doesn't make it true though.
To me it's all bogus anyway, I don't even buy the claim that a bunch of molecules and the memories others have of them constitute an entity called "John Carmack", as if that was a real thing. But with that outlook it's very hard to influence the political process, or even to just make sense to the average person.
But if the solution is reproducible by an average or good programmer leading by logical steps, then it shouldn't be patentable at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...
The fact that the decision was unanimous has a lot of us hopeful that the new patent cases that the supreme court is taking on will see more of the federal circuit's nonsense cut back. It won't be patent reform, but it will be progress.
Therefore anything more complicated than fizzbuzz passes the nonobviousness test and is patentable.