On 09/04/10 08:13, Scott Melton wrote:
Would you agree that patents and property rights greatly accelerate
the rate of innovations, accelerating the growth of a free market
economy?
Not at all -- I claim the opposite and the jury is still out. Even
proponents of patent law seem to occasionally admit that the innovation
benefit has not been proven.
The cost of patents is manyfold. Read the two excellent articles posted
previously in this thread:
http://mises.org/daily/3702
http://mises.org/daily/4018
Why would I would I work nights and weekends to come up with a
solution to a real world problem if I knew that as soon as I did I
received nothing for it? The answer is I would not. I would do
something where I would get rewarded instead. Camp, fish, raise kids,
work a few extra hours for that new toy money, you get the picture.
I can think of at least two reasons:
(1) you just want to do it. Believe it or not: there is such thing as
intrinsic motivation and it can be the core driver for some people.
Being one of them I'd like to believe they are the truly innovative bunch.
(2) you need to do it for some business reason. Whoever invented the
doubly linked list most likely did so because they had some other
problem to solve (or it fell into category (1)). Or you might improve on
some existing system to get a competitive advantage.
What patents do is to artificially extent that advantage. Is that
ethical? Depends on your value system. Is that useful? Who knows -- it
is something hard to study, I can't see scientific experiments done on this.
Peter
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java
Posse" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
