On Sep 13, 2010, at 7:01 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > If I own a company, or even shares of a company, that pays salaries & > benefits to a team of engineers and pays for all their tools, and all my > engineers have agreed to intellectual property agreements with the company, > then I want to know that my investment is protected. As soon as my > engineers invent the wheel, I want to know that my company's competitors > can't just copy it. > > It's unfair for my competitors to reap the benefits of the work that I paid > for, or personally contributed to as an engineer on a team. Unless there is > some agreement between my company and the competitor, for them to pay > royalties to my company.
There's also a public good argument. When you patent something, yes, you get a temporary monopoly -- but the tradeoff is you have to publicly reveal it. In the absence of patents, more technological advances would be treated as trade secrets and kept out of the public eye. I do think there are a lot of abuses of the patent system, most of them related to insufficient vetting of new patents and the expense of litigating them later. I think something like the patent system is necessary, though. -- David Brodbeck System Administrator, Linguistics University of Washington _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
