[Patents] natural forces

[Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es]

Gregory Aharonian writes:
 > 
 > Look, society offers multiple ways of disclosing informational activites.
 > If you want complete control, you use a patent, a complete control which
 > should be as available to software as it is to hardware, mechanical, etc.
 > 
 > If you want less than complete control, you use copyright, a right which
 > has been gradually weakened from an author's control system to a user's
 > rights system.
 > 
 > If you want no control, you dedicate it to the public domain.
 > 
 > Where's the problem, unless you are against complete control of new
 > software ideas (and therefore I argue, against complete control of any
 > new idea, mechanical/electrical/informational).

Patents don't give you complete control over an idea (or at least they
were not conceived that way). Patents are just devices used by the
society to improve the spread of information about new
technologies. They gave you some control about the manufacturing and
comercialization of devices build using a given novel technique in
exchange for disclosing the technique in detail. This seemed to work
in the past centuries for some kinds of techniques. It may not work
for others. An dspecially for cases where building a device and
spreading information about the technique is basically the same.

The very idea that the society has the obligation to give you control
and monopoly over any generic idea just because you were one of the
people writing down the idea is at least difficult to explain to the
members of any given society. Justification for patents is usually
that the "inventor" in exchange for the monopoly gives back to the
society the completely detailed description of the invention, so that
any other professional can rebuild it. In several industries, it is
argued that this helps to improve the rate of new developments. As far
as I know, this is something still to be proven in the case of the
software industry. On the contrary, the software industry has
demonstrated a very high rate of development of new technologies,
basically in the absence of software patents (which until recently have had
a really low impact on the industry as a whole)

Saludos,

     Jesus.

-- 
Jesus M. Gonzalez Barahona                | Grupo de Sistemas y Comunicaciones
jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es / jgb@computer.org | ESCET, Universidad Rey Juan 
Carlos 
tel: +34 91 664 74 67                     | c/ Tulipan s/n
fax: +34 91 664 74 90                     | 28933 Mostoles, Spain