On Thursday 31 May 2007 07:05:44 am YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote: > The point of patents is to reward the person to *first* invent something.
This is not quite true. The original point of patents was to induce the inventor to disclose the invention. (That's what the word "patent" means (as in "patently obvious")). Before patents, inventors protected their inventions by keeping them secret. The Constitution institutes patents "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" -- but it is only an interpretation (favored by inventors) that a significant part of this is to induce inventors to invent. The significant social benefit lies in making all inventions public record so that subsequent inventors can use the innovations rather than having to re-invent them. A good test for whether the patent system is doing its job is whether inventors and developers of technology go to the patent records as a major source of technical information. In practice this is simply not done in software (and I hold a software patent, BTW), indicating that the system is having an almost completely negative effect. Lawyers are keen to push the idea that patents are a form of property (it isn't now, but it could be with a little more legislation). However, those of us who are working on building artificial people out of ideas would do well to remember that we fought a little war (1861-1865) over the extension of the notion of property to people. Let's hope we don't have to fight another one... Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
