Patentes
A continuación pongo un comentario muy interesante aparecido en OSNews:| Problem solving and innovation... By Saem (IP: ---.vc.shawcable.net) - Posted on 2005-06-22 21:55:16 |
I think if one understands problem solving, then they understand that a lot of it involves not only being creative but utilizing what you have. ie. there is an underlying acceptance of inheritance. Take Newton's attribution of credit in his works, he clearly stated that he would not have made it without others. Patents, are the sign of a strong leading to individualism, sort of. They are there to restrict information flow, but if information was restricted we wouldn't get anywhere. Thanks to Newton's formalization, this led to a huge explosion in our ability to build and do things. These are true innovations, in fact, Newton's work was disruptive technology. Something that will likely not be matched with anything short of String theory being proven right. The point is he required access to information. This information was used to create tools to then address further problems. Mind you, innovation is a far greater thing than mere invention, invention is merely implementation, we're talking paradigm shifts. It is nothing short of stupid to compartmentalize innovation, one cannot, save entirely arbitrarily, differentiate, in any formal manner, innovation. Why do we extend this to invention then? One has quaint ideas of patents helping the little guy, keep inventing. Yes, one could hark back to the Bell and Franklin, but that would not prove anything. In those days device complexity was low, education was scarce, social funding for research minimal and thus on needed to allow innovation to fund itself. But that doesn't scale well, that solution is limited. Assessing our current situations. We have the ability to manufacturer products and distribute products and services, efficiently and on a large scale. A simple invention can pay for itself, millions of times over. So why is it that we haven't scaled back the number of years that a patent is granted for? Not to mention a lot of research is carried out mostly by large companies, not the proverbial, "little guy" that's trying to make a buck. Then there is the fact that patents block public non-profit work and often research into the work can have public funds mixed in. Especially, when you count the amount of money universities get from public coffers and then make a killing from it from various means. Yes, it helps the market, but the market is not the same as the public that helped to fund it. Also, the idea was that with patents one would go forward and find new ways of doing the same thing when one way was already discovered, borrowed from the, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Well that's a nice notion, but it doesn't work as soon as you get closer and closer to constrained systems, like computers, often there is only one efficient way of doing things, then doesn't that imply that all those one efficient way cases are basically obvious, mind you, obvious doesn't equate to easy. That would nullify patents on them, would it not? |