Michael wrote: > If there are no patents, then what incentive does anyone have to do > anything? If you spend your time/energy/money developing a > product/idea/etc, and someone else can legally steal it the instant it > hits the market, what exactly was the point?
It doesn't have to be all or nothing, no world is an island, and just and peaceful settings are not the best adventure background. To be specific: * The water world is a colony. Special interests on the homeworld could make it difficult for colony-based organizations to file for patent protection. Yes, that is legalized robbery, and yes, homeworld is happy with it. If colonists disagree, the Space Marines will teach them the error of their ways. * On the other hand, the patent office on the homeworld has lots of patent-expired technologies on file. A colony could select a consistent, fairly complete and royalty-free package and adopt it as 'industrial standard'. Failure to comply with appropriate standards means a product is legally 'defective' - if a music player can't plug into standard music databases, it breaks the implied (?) warranty that it is a workable music player and customers can ask for a refund. * Patent law could be biased towards technical process, but not designs, business procedures, biological discoveries, or mere standards. A new way to make high-temperature superconductors could be patented, but not the placement of a button on a web site, an enzyme from an alien biology, or a file format. * Patent law could explicitly exclude patents which prevent interoperability. That kills business models like selling cheap ink-jet printers and making money with the ink, or selling cheap game consoles and making money with the games, but that could be a feature rather than a bug. * In addition to patents, there are trademarks and copyrights. All work differently, for different reasons, but IMHO recent real-world developments are to patent what should really be trademarked or copyrighted. That could go the other way, too. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
