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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 11:28 AM EDT |
Someone can explain how a proposed coin sorter or proposed mouse trap works and
we can know that it will work from the provided information though the devices
have never been built.
Men went to the Moon in devices that had never been fully tested. Sure, there
was a chance that the devices included defects, but baring defects, they knew
Eagle would get them to the Sea of Tranquility and back.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Doghouse on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 11:54 AM EDT |
"Hasn't been shown to work" does not equal "won't work", nor
does it mean the idea is flawed (let alone useless). Making a valid idea work is
engineering, and dependant on being able to afford the investment of time,
money, materials etc. required. I'm simply pointing out that, framed without
care, a simplistic "use it or lose it" approach could simply deprive
anyone with limited resources of any meaningful rights to their inventions,
directly contrary to the way in which patents are supposed to work. Yes, it
would stop patent trolling - but it would potentially throw the baby out with
the bathwater. There have to be additional tests.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Except. - Authored by: Wol on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 04:26 PM EDT
- Except. - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 05:33 PM EDT
- Except. - Authored by: Wol on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 06:10 AM EDT
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Authored by: tknarr on Thursday, April 25 2013 @ 08:55 PM EDT |
The idea behind patents is to reward people who have actually produced a
useful invention with a legal monopoly on that invention. So why
should we grant that monopoly to someone who just has an idea but can't
actually produce the invention they'd like to have produced? The reduction to
practice doesn't have to be a market-ready product, it can be just a
proof-of-concept prototype, but IMO if the inventor hasn't done the work needed
to make his invention actually work then he should be told to come back once he
has.
I recall a comment by an author along those lines. It went something
like "So you have this great idea for a story, and you want to outline it to me
and I just need to write it up and we'll split the profits 50/50? Such a deal. I
come up with a dozen new story ideas a day. Those are easy. Writing the book,
that's months of 8-hour days at the keyboard, editing, proofreading, rewriting,
more proofreading... it can take me half a year of hard full-time work to turn a
story idea into a publishable manuscript. And you seriously want me to do
that much of the work and then give you half the profits?". When people talk
about wanting a patent on something they haven't reduced to practice, that
author's comment springs to mind. It's asking for the reward for all that hard
work, without actually having done the hard work. And I think the proper answer
should be that author's answer to all those fans who come to her with that kind
of deal: "No.".
On commercialization, there are issues there. IMO most of
them can be solved by simply saying that "attempt to commercialize" does
not require actually selling the product in the market. It requires
merely having an invention reduced to practice and reasonable attempts by the
inventor to market it in some rational way. It can be shopping the prototype
around to companies who might be interested in buying the rights and turning it
into a marketable product. The inventor would get paid for his invention, so
that attempt alone would qualify. Nobody has to actually buy, it's not fair to
the inventor to make the outcome dependent on what someone else does. But at the
same time it's not fair to reward an "inventor" for chucking his idea on the
shelf and waiting ten years to see what happens, and then swooping in to grab a
share of the market someone else created without his involvement.
And
yes, that means that sometimes someone's going to lose out because they came up
with a brilliant idea that's so far ahead of it's time that it's going to
require multiple advances in the state of the art before it could possibly be
reduced to practice. That's fine. If the invention's really worth it then even
after those advances it's not going to be trivial to produce it and the guy who
had the original idea has a head start on everybody else. And if it is
trivial to implement once the needed advances are in place, he shouldn't be
getting the reward when other people did all the hard work to make it
happen. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Useful - Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 03:04 AM EDT
- Useful - Authored by: tknarr on Friday, April 26 2013 @ 02:30 PM EDT
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