How many cases do you know of that people were unable to advance the arts because of a patent?
For one concrete example, anyone who worked on data compression outside of purely academic areas has been harmed, and by extension their customers have been harmed, by early software patents in that area. The LZW patent (infamously associated with the .GIF file format) and IBM's patents on arithmetic coding both rendered entire fields of computer science radioactive for years.
It's perhaps even more enlightening to spend some thinking about what life would be like if everything that could be patented under the incredibly loose standards of the USPTO was patented. It's safe to say you wouldn't be able to afford the computer or tablet you're typing on, nor the Internet service necessary to convey your thoughts. But this argument is also moot because neither of those technologies would be available in their present form, at any price.
Your impression is likely based on what you hear in a) tech media, which is largely supported by ads and hence welcome rage-views, and b) tech forums like this where open source is the dominant religion.
My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.
I'll give you some numbers less than 1% of patents are ever asserted
How many land mines ever explode? Does that make land mines a good thing? Patents are intellectual land mines, nothing more, nothing less.
I'm looking at actual data. You are speaking from hearsay and anecdotes. Here's a paper to get started with. It is a review of dozens of papers most of which have empirical results:
Your example is not concrete. What you think of as "radioactive" could simply be researchers concluding that specific area was not worth exploring anymore. Here's how you can give a concrete example: Those patents have expired. Can you point to any new fundamentally significant compression technology that has since emerged that could have been thought of as being previously held back by those patents?
Now I can give a concrete example of how those very same patents caused innovation: When they sued people over lzw in gifs, that prompted people to develop alternate methods like PNG. Sounds like progress to me. Was it forced innovation? Sure! But that's always been one of the rationalizations of patents. People often don't innovate unless forced to.
>My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.
So let's get even more anecdotal: how often have you been unable to "advance the arts" due to a patent?
> How many land mines ever explode?
How many good ideas get ripped off with their creator getting nothing in return? If we want to be hyperbolic, I could just say "anti-patent people are just intellectual thieves, nothing more, nothing less"?
For one concrete example, anyone who worked on data compression outside of purely academic areas has been harmed, and by extension their customers have been harmed, by early software patents in that area. The LZW patent (infamously associated with the .GIF file format) and IBM's patents on arithmetic coding both rendered entire fields of computer science radioactive for years.
It's perhaps even more enlightening to spend some thinking about what life would be like if everything that could be patented under the incredibly loose standards of the USPTO was patented. It's safe to say you wouldn't be able to afford the computer or tablet you're typing on, nor the Internet service necessary to convey your thoughts. But this argument is also moot because neither of those technologies would be available in their present form, at any price.
Your impression is likely based on what you hear in a) tech media, which is largely supported by ads and hence welcome rage-views, and b) tech forums like this where open source is the dominant religion.
My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.
I'll give you some numbers less than 1% of patents are ever asserted
How many land mines ever explode? Does that make land mines a good thing? Patents are intellectual land mines, nothing more, nothing less.