[vikramkr]

Held back might be the tradeoff we have to pay for letting them exist in the first place. Developing new technologies is not cheap or trivial- especially hardware innovations. I'd rather have a delayed 20 year start to fast e ink innovation than have e ink never get the r&d funding needed to get past the valley of death and make it to market in the first place.

[TeMPOraL]

These companies didn't make money on patent licenses, they made money on selling the stuff. More money than they should, because they used patents to limit competition.

Patents can be useful as an incentive, but their length need to correspond with the pace of progress in a given field. Otherwise, they end up slowing down everyone.

[syshum]

Other than the false equivalency of your argument, you would also have to prove the technology would not have been completed with out the patent, I think that is a hard conclusion to draw given the amount of other progress we have made with out such consideration (i.e see FOSS )

Once you have proven the need for an exclusivity grant, You also need to prove that 5, 10, 15 years of exclusivity via a patent would be unable provide enough incentive, that it had to be 20 years to strike the proper balance

In today's fast moving society, I think 5 years would provide more than enough incentive even for expensive technology that requires lots of capital investment though I would favor a shorter exclusivity grant, and then may be longer required licensing grant. like 2-3 years of exclusive use, and then 10 years of licensing but the patent holder is required to treat all uses of the patent in the same manner with fair and non-discriminatory pricing.