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Freeing patents | |||||||||||||||||
Patent laws and copyrights were originally designed to encourage originators and developers of ideas to advance knowledge and put it to good use. As time progressed these laws have been perverted to prevent good ideas from being developed and used to produce products to advance knowledge and benefit the public in general. Although creators of ideas should certainly be entitled to rewards for their efforts it should be legally possible for other creative people to utilize these ideas in new and useful ways to benefit the community that would not detract from any profits the original creator might have in his first application. No inventor should be able to sit on an idea and prevent other creative people from developing it. It should be possible for a creative person to legally require proof that an innovative use of a patented idea would damage the first creator so that it would enable a new use of an old idea to use that idea for the benefit of the community without penalty.
sand, Jan 04 2009
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Generally patents do work, to protect the property one has created.
With the patent system, nothing prevents a product designer or manufacturer from licensing patents from other companies, except the unwillingness of companies to license their patents.
That said, I believe there should be some limits on patent holding companies, and/or patents/IP not actively exercised.
The item was inspired by the experience of a student at MIT that had to pay the institute 75000 to develop his own idea. See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/03/2327255
Perhaps when a new patent is created or sold the creator or potential buyer has to create a plan for its use, like a business plan. And also that the company buying must have reasonable reasons or expertise/interests in the success of the prodoct/idea. If progress is made and the idea is used within a perscribed amount of time then the idea can keep the patent, but if it sits, then it becomes public domain. This would probably be an administrative nightmare to track, but it would avoid things like GM selling the electric car patent to an oil company so that it could be killed.
I agree that patent ownership is a crock and difficult.
generally as an engineer nowadays, you have to sign a boilerplate-type document that agrees that any ideas you come up with while in the employ of said employer are hear-to-fore owned by said employer. Upon hire, you have to give them a list of all of the ideas that you already have (disclosure) so they'll not be able to say that you thought of if while working for them.
It's sort of a catch-22 to give away your ideas to prove you'll own them. When technically, you probably thought them up under a similar contract with a previous employer.
If I wanted to develop any of the ideas that I've presented in whynot, I'd probably be legally required to buy them back from my employer of the time I thought them up.
But conversely, I did have a company once that thought enough to patent one of my ideas and they picked up the tab. Unfortunatly, I'm listed as 'coinventor' with my boss...