[Patents] Patent system run for consumers or producers?

[Morten S. Nielsen msn@ipt.dtu.dk]

Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com> [001008 18:43]:
> 
> But as I have argued for the last seven years, their is no really
> convincing a-priori argument why software should not be patentable
> while hardware should be patentable.  So let's clean up the patent
> examination systems first, get rid of much of the crappy patents
> that issue, and then argue philosophy.
> 

You might be right on this. But why indeed should hardware be patentable?

It is well known that free trade is what benefits society the most a opposed 
to
a situation where the market is monopolized or ruled by a trust. So why this 
exclusion from free trade that a patent really is?  When firms pursue 
development 
of new technology they may disclose their results to get the advantage of a 
temporary monopoly. The disclosed knowledge may be used by other firms and 
society in general to develop new technology. So it's the disclosure of the 
knowledge in the patents that motivates society to grant the temporary 
monopoly.

But if the loss society gets from granting a monopoly on a method is larger 
than the value of the disclosed knowledge, the deal is bad for society. This 
is
the reason for the "not obvious" clause in the good patent. But if one looks 
at 
a small society the probability of someone inventing two similar methods is 
much
smaller than in a large society. Furthermore in a large society what is lost 
by 
granting a monopoly is much larger than in a small society because of the 
bigger
market.

It might sometimes be that society in general benefits form disclosed 
knowledge
in the case where hardware is concerned, but I don't think it ever would be 
the case when talking about software. No encryption scheme or font renderer 
or 
web-gizmo is ever worth the value of the disclosed knowledge. Especially since
interoperability requires the disclosure of the knowledge anyway. So what I 
think is needed to tell software companies is:"Go out and compete! If you have
routines which are brilliant, hide them if you can!". Society wouldn't loose 
much 
on that account anyway but would gain a lot on more free trade. This might be 
a 
bit cynical but free trade and survival of the fittest is a cynical philosphy 
but has some very good merits when it comes to optimizing a system.

Taken to the extreme :) : In a world of an infinite population the loss of 
granting a monopoly would be infinite (the market is infinite thus the 
revenue), 
while the value of the disclosed knowledge would be going towards zero, since 
the probability of someone else inventing the same thing outside a firm would 
be going towards 1.

Morten S. Nielsen

-- 
- The Penguin's  1. We are better together than alone
-     Postulate  2. If you push something hard enough it will fall over
- Morten S. Nielsen           Department of Manufacturing Engineering
- mailto:msn@ipt.dtu.dk       Building 425, 2. floor, DK-2800 Lyngby