Obviously would it be positive for a single entity to gain government-controlled monopoly on anything it can sell, that's pretty certain. It is also very certain that this has negative consequence on the society as a whole.<div>
<br></div><div>Certain types of organizations and products probably wouldn't sell as well in a society without patent laws, but you would most likely have other products and organizations which would serve other purposes and markets. Nothing beats the free market, and it's not a positive trend we're seeing around the global with big governments protecting failing corporations, some companies and products are just prone to fail sooner or later.</div>
<div><br></div><div>It's a philosophical discussion whether "intellectual property" deserves to exist in the manner it does today, but that's a whole another discussion.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>
<div>With this said, I would just like to add an example to your question:</div><div><br></div><div>Company X and Y are in the business of developing CRM software. Company X is first on the market and patent-protects some of it's innovations. This means Company Y is under the constant treat of being in violation of Company Y's patents as patents are generally very broad in their descriptions. Hence, X is stifling Y's ability to innovate and bring competing products to the market. Then again, you could argue that Y should pay royalty fee to X since they where there first, but remember that two inventions can happen at the same time independently but only the first guy to patent it wins. Patent laws makes it possible for any holder to actually crush a competitor completely and make it impossible for them to actually sell competing products.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So then we have X and Y, who are both putting a lot of money into R&D to develop CRM products. They both spend one billion dollars, a total of two billion. To cover these costs, they would need to price their products in the market to earn money back on their investments in R&D. So the market has to pay a minimum of two billion dollars for CRM software.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If no protection was possible and Y could "copy-cat" some of the ideas and innovations from X, then we potentially could cut the R&D costs in half, one billion dollars (for the point of the argument let's make it half, though would probably be higher). This means the two companies have used only one billion dollars to create two competing CRM software products, which the market only have to pay in total one billion dollars for. This means the market spend less money on CRM licenses and the two companies probably would earn more money since software generally are cheap anyway so they wouldn't lower their prices 50%.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Would company X do the initial investments in R&D if they couldn't protect their innovations? My argument is yes, they would. Wherever there is money to be made, there will be investments. Would the product be different? Yes, probably. Would the product be developed in more incremental manner? Yes, probably. Is this good for the consumers? Yes, very likely.</div>
<div><br></div><div>-- </div><div><br></div><div>Regarding one of the links mentioned on this thread, I seriously doubt patents is the reason for SAP's problematic issues. I have worked at big organizations with large SAP-implementations, it's in no way related to patents that they are having problems now. SAP consultants have generally been very expensive and very lucrative, with innovations in the open source space and availability of cheaper resources from countries such as India and China, few companies are willing to pay the premium and costly investments that SAP represents. SAPs recent change in view on patents is in my persona opinion, just a way to gain money where they no longer are able to stay up-to-date and be a choice for customers: <a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20060118/0256239_F.shtml">http://techdirt.com/articles/20060118/0256239_F.shtml</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>PS: We don't have software patents (which are really process patents) in Norway, and we've had some pretty big innovations that was very costly. Opera Software (browser), Funcom (games), Qt (open source framework) and FAST (search engine). Qt was bought by Nokia and FAST was bought by Microsoft.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>- Sondre</div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2010/5/26 samantha <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sjatkins@mac.com">sjatkins@mac.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"><div class="im">
Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Sondre Bjellås <a href="mailto:sondre-list@bjellas.com" target="_blank"><sondre-list@bjellas.com></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>You are exactly right regarding searching for any topic on the web ;-)
Which is why I'm asking "who and what" is the reason for your statement:
"Clearly, yes, patenting stimulates innovation"
The content I read on patents does not clearly say that patent stimulates,
on the contrary, I must be reading the wrong material.
Check for instance "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan
Kinsella: <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/7511095/Against-Intellectual-Property-by-Stephan-Kinsella" target="_blank">http://www.scribd.com/doc/7511095/Against-Intellectual-Property-by-Stephan-Kinsella</a>-
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre>### OK, let's start at the beginning:
<a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/4132712" target="_blank">http://www.jstor.org/pss/4132712</a>
Countries without strong patent protection did not produce innovations
except in the industrial branches where profits from innovation could
be realized without patent protection.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
One can ask, how would the profits be realized if everyone was
immediately able to legally copy the industrial inventions that would
have been patent protected before? Wouldn't the R&D cost be a
disadvantage to the creating company as all other competitors gut the
successful results of that R&D for free or only for the cost of
implementing the known working design? <br>
<br>
- samantha<br>
<br>
</div>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br> Sondre Bjellås | Senior Solutions Architect | Steria<br><a href="http://www.sondreb.com/">http://www.sondreb.com/</a><br>
</div>