> Actually, its worse than that; they seem convinced that their patents have actual intrinsic value, which kind of makes sense. They spend a lot of money doing research and development, so of course they want to believe that a legal mechanism for preserving the value of that R&D is legitimate.
Is it not? Should Apple, Google, etc, do the industry's R&D for free? Google's self-driving car is patented. Should Kia be allowed to come along and reverse-engineer the firmware and free-ride on their efforts?
I'm not being confrontational, I'm genuinely interested to hear your viewpoint.
Yeah, I think it'll all be okay for them. Apple does fine, despite the fact that every phone looks like an iPhone, every tablet looks like an iPad, and every laptop looks like a MacBook Air. Companies have been dealing with knock-offs for ages, the club they wield is Brand. Look no further than the fashion industry to see how effective Brand is at combatting knock-offs.
Regarding Google's self driving car: anybody reverse engineering Google's firmware is going to incur enormous R&D costs of their own. The only way they could avoid these is if they could use a copy of the source code, but that's protected by copyright (which, unlike patents, I agree with, since it protects implementations, not ideas).
My issues with patents are these:
1. I just don't think ideas should be ownable. A primary purpose of language, one of the characteristics that defines us as a species, is to transmit ideas from one person to another. In other words, we have evolved to allow one person to have an idea, then make some utterance which takes this idea and makes a copy of it in the mind of another person, instantaneously. To me, this points unavoidably to the fact that sharing of ideas is part of what makes us human. To put restriction on this fundamental human-ness strikes me as deeply wrong. Or, at the very least, good for a few at the expense of the many (AIDS drugs in Africa, etc.).
2. Even if you think ideas should be ownable, patents attempt to reward the first person who comes up with an idea, but being the first to an idea is incredibly arbitrary. As an example, I don't get to invent 1-Click Purchase because I just started developing software 2 years ago. Seems unjust.
Is it not? Should Apple, Google, etc, do the industry's R&D for free? Google's self-driving car is patented. Should Kia be allowed to come along and reverse-engineer the firmware and free-ride on their efforts?
I'm not being confrontational, I'm genuinely interested to hear your viewpoint.