How do you tell the reasonable from fascist ones, a priori, every time?
Fascist patents? Eugen -- Governments and people can be fascist, inanimate property rights, not so much. Even if all of them were reasonable, the current MAD approach favors > very big players, and causes stagnation across the board. What's wrong with keeping things secret? Or limiting things to > have an actual product, or at least a working prototype? And please > make them ephemeral. These days things grow stale fast. Your arguments strike more towards patent (or larger IP) reform, rather than abolition. I don't disagree with those folks. Our current system _does_ favor big players, and the 2-5 years (or longer) between application and grant is ridiculous. Supporting and advocating an approach that favors inventions that have been actualized also is eminently reasonable, at least for most fields. I think there's probably a university, physicist or otherwise more theoretical type, that might argue (convincingly) for cases where the limits of physical technology should not act as an encumbrance to the protection of the idea, but I would be willing to wager that those examples would be the exception, and not the rule. Trade secrets, for the most part, can be tricky, especially when you're talking about pharmaceuticals or novel, yet easily reverse-enginerable industries. For one, if you can figure out how to reverse engineer a novel new device, there's no prohibition to doing so. That's great for the secondary market (and arguably consumers), but piss poor for the guy actually doing the inventing. Just because something is easy to reverse engineer, doesn't necessarily mean, after all, that it was easy to come up with in the first place. For two, the legal system (at least in the US) is state-based and a bit of a mess, but at least more uniform than it used to be. Nonetheless, trying to enforce your rights only through an NDA, especially in a global and net-connected economy, can be challenging. In addition to requiring a robust policing system (which, if you're arguing for the little guy, may be even more complicated than a patent), a company may be diligent at protecting their secret and sue the leakers, only for the court to ascertain, after 5 years of litigation and the glasses of hindsight, because the secret has already been leaked out into the wild for the past 5 years, too bad, so sad, the inventor is out of luck. I'm not saying trade secrets protection isn't an available option, and often, its advisable over patents. But I wouldn't abolish the patent system in favor of protecting every new invention through TS. C > -- > Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org > ______________________________________________________________ > ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org > 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE > >
