[_delirium]

I mostly agree, but patents were partly intended to protect small-fry scientists/inventors who came up with good ideas that they couldn't necessarily commercialize themselves, by providing a legal mechanism to keep manufacturers from just ripping off the idea as they shopped it around. It makes more sense when it's not a portfolio company holding hundreds of patents, though, and when the inventions are genuine breakthroughs: e.g. if a biotech researcher comes up with something that really would improve pharmaceutical research greatly, it seems okay to me if there's a legal mechanism to make pharmaceutical firms pay him licensing fees if they want to use the invention, even if he himself never ramps up into pharmaceutical research. This becomes much more of a minefield if the bar to novelty/nonobviousness is low, though, because then you just get people preemptively "inventing" a bunch of things that other people would've found anyway, and then demanding licensing fees.

[narrator]

Patents are good for protecting inventions that require a large amount of capital investment to bring to production.

Fashion and food were traditionally not protected by patents because to make a cake or a dress, one only needed an oven or a sowing machine. On the other hand, complicated manufactured goods needed patent protection because the factories needed to produce them would cost millions to build, and a small inventor could never raise the money without patent protection.

In the age of computing, the cost of the equipment to create software is negligible, so it's far more optimal to not grant patent protection.

[sandipagr]

"Fashion and food were traditionally not protected by patents because to make a cake or a dress, one only needed an oven or a sowing machine. "

Is that really true? I don't know I am just asking. I personally don't think capital investment should have anything to do with the patent. It's like giving no value to the innovative technologies made by people in garage. Just doesn't make sense to me.

On a side note, do you consider time as capital investment?

[metamemetics]

>Is that really true?

Yes. Or more precisely because clothes and food are too "utilitarian".

"Lessons from fashion's free culture"

http://ca.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion...

"Copyright law's grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry ... and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley."

[nickpinkston]

So then music, software, books, etc. - all requiring low capital, should be in the same realm of fashion - right? If you don't believe that's true: please compare capital of an industrial bakery to a software company of the same revenue/profit.

[astrodust]

The important distinction between fashion and software is that clothing is useless unless properly manufactured. The materials and manufacturing process are an integral part of the final product. To duplicate a garment is to reverse engineer it, source the materials, and then remarket it as a knock-off, or as some imitation item under another brand.

Fashion doesn't need strict copyright enforcement because by the time you've reverse engineered something and put it into production, it's already wildly out of date.

You can see how Apple applies this principle to their main products, aggressively innovating so that by the time their products are copied, which is inevitable, they have already obsoleted them.

Software can be duplicated at effectively zero cost to produce an identical copy. It also has a much longer lifespan for mature packages (Office, XP, etc.), where people will use the same software, plus or minus patches, for five years or more.

There needs to be some kind of reasonable limitation on what people are able to do with software that they purchase, so at the very least a form of copyright is required, not unlike protections offered to books.

The real thorn is that software patents are mostly preposterous, with very few requiring actual innovation to produce. It's like trying to patent a plot twist or a character quirk and then suing all authors that use it.

[metamemetics]

Copywright != patent

copyright protects the expression of an idea, while a patent protects the idea itself

[sandipagr]

thanks for the link. That was very interesting. It's really amazing how the entire fashion industry even without any sort of protection is running well.

[mhd]

While the fashions themselves aren't protected, the names of the labels etc. are trademarked. That's why you're seeing the Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana names on everything. And the Luis Vuitton luggage pattern contains their logo. A lot of stuff produced is basically nothing but a vehicle for the logo itself, without much fashion/innovation around it.

[metamemetics]

True. However analogously software companies also have trade-secret protection from employees divulging source code independent of the software patent process.

[nooneelse]

I agree that a straight "use it or loose it" is too harsh... how about a mechanism for forced licensing with the fee based with upon some reasonable criteria, including but not limited to attempts to use the patient well? Oh wait... I forgot this is the USA, can't assume a competent ability to set up good bureaucracy with fair rules.