[Patents] monopoly/publicity contradiction?

[Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es]

I have read too fast the message of Steve. As a result, some parts
were not properly answered. (Steve, please forgive if you are reading
this message twice. Probably I sent the answer to you although I
wanted to send it to the mailing list).

On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 04:04:54PM +0000, Steve Probert wrote:

> Setting arbitrary thresholds based on research
> costs would effectively discriminate against individuals and smaller
> companies in favour of the bigger companies who will always spend more
> on research.

I find essentially unfair that the first individual who needs to solve
a problem is the only one authorized to solve it. (Although patents
cover methods, often a problem has only one solution, or a small set
of solutions. And patents often cover whole problems by using the
appropriate language). By contrast, a patent on the result of a hard
research work looks fair to me: he who has worked hard should get a
compensation for that work. And these patents are necessary, because
no company would invest in research. If the results of that research
could be used by competitors, they could offer cheaper products as
they do not have to recover the investment in research.

Small companies can choose to keep inventions secret if they wish to
do so. This is specially easy for software. Software is usually
distributed as binary code; in that form one cannot learn the internal
methods of the software. Decompilation and reverse engineering are
forbidden by most license agreements.

It should not be a problem for small companies that they cannot
use expensive inventions because without patents that inventions
would not exist.

> And who would decide how much money needed to be spent to
> make a particular invention?  (I presume you would not be content to
> determine the fate of a patent application on the basis of how much was
> actually spent.)

But at least the law could say that the Patent Office should try
to determinate the difficulty of the invention. For example,
the applicant could give a report of the research work and the
Patent Office would accept or reject the application based on
a qualitative valuation of the difficulty of that research.

Anyway, the mechanism used is not relevant for this discussion. My
point is that the protection for a invention that required five years
of research should not be the same as the solution to a problem found
after several hours.

Ramon