Nicolai Rosen on Sat, 4 Mar 2000 11:01:16 -0500 (EST) |
On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Mark-Jason Dominus wrote: > > > > 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. But that's my point. It's a license fromt he government. It's artificial & contrary to the rights of everybody to use science for their own benefit. > 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. That's not the way patents work though. If anything, they restrict innovation. Were we to do away w/ them, you wouldn't get fat corporations making money by preventing others from innovating. Examples of this include Intel's efforts to keep that japanese company from producing a bus for AMD (or something like that. My memory's shot), the patent on fixing Y2K bugs by windowing, etc.. > > 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. So then as the person who had access to this information first, you have a head start. You shouldn't need patents, especially at the current rate of technological progress. > > 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. That may be the intention, but that's not how things work in the real world. Also, I think that if we're granting a right that isn't a natural right, then we need to take a serious look at why that right is being granted and whether or not it's justified. Nicolai Rosen nick@netaxs.com Earthstation/Netaxs **Majordomo list services provided by PANIX <URL:http://www.panix.com>** **To Unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe phl" to majordomo@lists.pm.org**
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