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Re: Bezos on 1-click ordering
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> I think that the whole idea of a patent is absurd. You're saying that you
> own a discovery.
Not quite. It's not really like you own the discovery. It's more
like you own an exclusive license from the goverment to make use of
the discovery. That's not absurd; people license stuff all the time.
Congress' power to award patents derives from the Constitution, where
it says:
The Congress shall have the power ... To promote the progress
of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to
authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective
writings and discoveries ...
That's what patents are supposed to be about: Promotion of the
progress of science and the useful arts. The inventor gets an
exclusive license to his or her invention for a certain period, in
return for making public the details of how it works. The idea is
that the patent is a trade. The public will come out ahead in the
long run because inventors will be encouraged to disclosed their ideas
by the promise of the patent.
> The methods to do these things already exist. You're just
> discovering them.
That's a pretty fine philosophical hair to split, isn't it? Anyway,
whether you call it inventing or discovering, it seems to be equally
hard to do.
> The idea of intellectual property has always seemed a bit,
> artificial for me).
It's artificial for lawyers too. In law there's a distinction between
natural and statutory rights. You have natural rights to life and
liberty because it's unethical to deny them. But your copyrights are
much more pragmatic. You have copyrights not because you're ethically
entitled to them, but only because Congress passed laws that said that
you have those rights, presumably because it appears to be in the
public interest to give you those rights. Again, the idea is that by
granting copyrights, Congress is encouraging people to write books,
and by granting patents, Congress is encouraging inventors to disclose
their inventions, and that the public welfare will be improved as a
result. But the rights only exist for the ultimate benefit of the
public, not the author or inventor, and they're specifically different
from natural rights such as the right to own property.
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