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Also the purpose is important too, to know how to move forward when the tech landscape shifts. Patents are there to incentivize making it public how inventions work. Inventors would tend to keep their inventions as trade secrets, in fear that someone else will reap all the profits. This would slow the compounding effect of later inventions building upon previous ones. Therefore, patents give exclusivity to the inventor for a set period. In exchange, during this period competitors and others become aware of how the new tech works and hence they can prepare for the time when the patent expires, and then a host of derivative tech can appear. It has been perverted to an absurd parody where the vast majority of patents are not intented for actual use, never get licensed and simply provide cannon fodder and deterrent stockpiles in the lawyer wars between companies. The patents are so broad and vague that legally speaking tech companies are constantly tramping on each other's ground, resulting in a kind of stalemate truce where they agree not to sue, because the other would countersue. Copyright is there to incentivize creative authorship and its dissemination to the public. By giving exclusive rights, the author can pull a revenue stream, making cultural/artisitic/intellectual creation more viable and hence spurring intellectual and cultural activity in society. The goal is to make authors incentivized to create. Not to drive up the stock prices of mega-publishers and music labels. Trademarks are there to avoid confusion for buyers as to the identity of a seller or by falsely implying endorsement. What's common to these is that they are overwhelmingly there to help broader social interests, a common good, in accordance with the enlightenment, somewhat romantic ideals of the optimist zeitgeist of the time when the concepts were defined. They involve restricting individual rights, such as free speech (you can't recite this or that poem in public). That restriction was done reluctantly, to serve higher purposes, like a thriving intellectual exchange and technological progress on a societal scale. It was not about trying to make things as cushy and profitable for huge conglomerates as possible. |