Open-source ID project awaits Microsoft's blessing

Here's a couple of things by Stephen Kinsella, who argues that patents and copyrights are not required for innovation at all.

"No such thing as a Free Patent" http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1763

Patent Trolls and Empirical Thinking http://blog.mises.org/archives/005215.asp

Against Intellectual Property http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf

And bunches of other stuff for interested individuals. After one or two, I kind of got the idea.

http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

Quoting:Holding up progress all because of stupid patents. What a waste!

AFAIR patents were designed for just that: stop the progress and give a time-limited monopoly to the "inventor". The theory was that is was supposed to be an incentive for inventors to invent new things. FOSS proved this assumption to be totally false.

BTW: The key word here is "time-limited", but the US Congress heard that time is relative and took it very seriously, at least in case of copyrights ;)

>AFAIR patents were designed for just that: stop the progress and give a time-limited monopoly to the "inventor".

No. The monopoly to the inventor is an exchange for making the invention public. In the bad old days, many inventions were kept as trade secrets. Patents release inventions into the public domain.

One place you can see both the good and bad side of patents is in the pharmaceutical industry. The patent monopoly allows drug companies to recover the incredible costs of bringing a new drug to market. When the patent expires, the patented drug becomes available as a cheap generic.

It can be very bad when there is only one effective treatment for a serious ailment -- the drug companies, in the absence of competition, can charge what the market will bear and seriously ill people will bear a lot.

quote:: the drug companies, in the absence of competition, can charge what the market will bear and seriously ill people will bear a lot. ::quote

Or die, when they can't afford to bear a lot.

> FOSS proved this assumption to be totally false.

FOSS proved this assumption false in one particular area. That is not the same thing as proving it totally false. Taken as a whole, I think that the patent system has been a good thing. It's the extension of patents to software and business processes that have been a problem. That's what we need to overturn. A more reasonable time period on software copyright would also be a good thing.

>Or die, when they can't afford to bear a lot.

Yes.

A problem with patents is that there is that the choice to give out a monopoly is arbitrary. There is no reason that two, three or ten firms cannot have the right to use a patent. Limiting competition without handing out a monopoly would still provide an incentive to innovate (in cases where the patent system does that).

>There is no reason that two, three or ten firms cannot have the right to use a patent

And, in fact, it typically works that way today, with multiple firms licensing patented technology from the patent holder.