On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 12:11:10PM +0000, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI <renaud@???> wrote:
>
> > No, they were introduced to guarantee the inventor the exclusivity of his invention for a certain time, so he alone could profit from it during that time.
> >
> > Introduced to make research economically viable.
>
> And the flip side is that to get a patent, you have to document your invention in public.
>
> Thus the choice of go for a patent and get exclusivity at the expense of telling everyone the details of your new invention. Or keep the details secret - thus leaving others to try, if they can, to reverse engineer it or simply to put their own effort into re-inventing stuff.
>
> Hence the argument that, if people go for a patent, their knowledge then becomes public - and effort that could have been expended on re-inventing that knowledge can be spent on something else. When the patent expires, that knowledge is then out in public for everyone else to use.


All very good points, indeed, which unfortunately become automatically
nonsense in the case of software. 17 or 25 years are the blink of an
eye for hardcore 19th centrury industrial innovation, when the patent
system was invesned, but correspond to several geological eras in the
case of software or modern technologies. And this does not help
innovation, rather hinders it.

Do you still remember what was your computing like 25 years ago,
i.e. in 1991? I was the lucky owner of an Amstrad CPC464 at that time,
64KB of RAM, Locomotive BASIC 1.0, which I received as a christmas
gift in 1988. Most of my classmates didn't have any computer at all,
and I felt so lucky to possess one that I found it shameful to even
dare dreaming about an i386. Now every teenager in the western world
has a quad core computer in her hand, and can manage to dump it every
two years for a shiny new one, which is in turn 100 times more
powerful than the previous one.

Let's face it: most of the categories invented before the digital
revolution exploded make no sense at all now that we are entering the
post-digital era.

No
Sense
At
All

HND

KatolaZ

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