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by OtterCoder 3040 days ago
Maybe we should have a law that allows patent infringement in the case of someone being able but unwilling to bring a product to market?

There are probably too many potential loopholes in that law though. There have been cases in publishing where a malicious publisher buys the rights to publish a book, promising a minimum run of the book, and then setting the price of the book prohibitively high, effectively censoring the title.

1 comments

At that point, even the song and dance of 'it helps the little guys protect their ideas from the big corporations' is totally gone. Big corporations can just make it so that small inventors almost never get the capital to develop the invention, so that the corporation can say 'see, he never even attempted to bring the product to market' and develop it on their own with out compensation.

IMO, the whole patent system should just be tore down.

I don't think the wild west will be any friendlier to small inventors than the current techno-dystopia. At least at the moment companies are required to toss a coin at prior art occasionally.