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I think the best inventors are internally motivated and financial reward is a secondary consideration. Also, patents tend to limit second hand users of failed ideas. As Edison said, "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do in the first place doesn't mean it's useless." In today's world, Edison would be bankrupted 1000 times over for taking others failed (but bought by trolls) patents and making them useful.
A large number, possibly most of Edisons inventions, were not his at all. He simply patented them. He employed other people actually create the inventions.
It's the Westinghouses of today who are going bankrupt. Just like in Edison's time.
The Edisons of today are doing quite well. There's more money in being the middle man.
"On the other hand, estimates for the cost of a new drug brought to market range from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions. How on earth would this work without patent protection?"
If you are willing to roll back those figures to adjust for the effects of inflation, I can think of a couple of ways it HAS worked in the past. As a part of the mandate for university research (which is admittedly a fast dying part of society) . . .
I don't think that university research is going to be the answer. For one thing, the money simply isn't there. Moreover, universities are now among the most aggressive seekers of patents on their work -- Bayh-Dole, and a share of the royalties to the inventor and the university, unlike anywhere else in the United States.
If you do simple extrapolation of insurance costs, you will realize that without a major revamp of the system, insurance - private or publicly funded both - will quickly be unsustainable.... it WILL change or it WILL self-destruct.
Yes, when I saw that insurance companies and the medical establishment were thoroughly on board with ACA, I knew it would be an expensive and wasteful POS. You can't reduce costs unless you cut the act of the institutions causing the greatest expense.
More to the point, the amount of our economy that the drug companies suck up is way out of proportion to the benefit they provide. I'd even say that overall they do more harm than good. So it certainly wouldn't bother me if there were no patents for drugs.
A large number, possibly most of Edisons inventions, were not his at all. He simply patented them. He employed other people actually create the inventions.
If Edison had done this, he would have been guilty of fraud, subject to criminal penalty, and the patents would have been held invalid. Were other contributors to the inventions not listed as co-inventors?
Usually, the problem here is that techies often misunderstand the concept of inventorship as opposed to directed work. In principle, inventorship cannot be decided until the patent examiner sorts things out, so that it can be determined who contributed what to the allowed claims. It's potentially far more dangerous to willfully omit a legitimate inventor than to include an extra inventor whose contribution might be questionable.
As far as who profits, most organizations require employees to assign the economic rights to their inventions over to the company. The assignee is not necessarily the inventor, and in fact is almost never the inventor. Rather, the assignee is the organization or person who funds the work. For example, look at an IBM patent: inventor Joe Jones, assigned to IBM of Armonk, New York.
Last edited by Hamish Forbes; 05-28-2015 at 11:41 AM..
I don't think that university research is going to be the answer. For one thing, the money simply isn't there. Moreover, universities are now among the most aggressive seekers of patents on their work -- Bayh-Dole, and a share of the royalties to the inventor and the university, unlike anywhere else in the United States.
. . .
the linux kernel was created as part of linus's senior design semester.
also at+t donated a hindered single-user version of their multix operating system that they re-named unix to universities like mit and ucalifornia-berkley. now unix and bsd (including mac) surpassed the functionality of multics.
Why is there a presumption that this is about big companies? There are probably many more independent creators--novelists, non-fiction writers, photographers, and songwriters--who depend on copyright protection against big businesses than there are big businesses.
If Edison had done this, he would have been guilty of fraud, subject to criminal penalty, and the patents would have been held invalid. Were other contributors to the inventions not listed as co-inventors?
Usually, the problem here is that techies often misunderstand the concept of inventorship as opposed to directed work. In principle, inventorship cannot be decided until the patent examiner sorts things out, so that it can be determined who contributed what to the allowed claims. It's potentially far more dangerous to willfully omit a legitimate inventor than to include an extra inventor whose contribution might be questionable.
As far as who profits, most organizations require employees to assign the economic rights to their inventions over to the company. The assignee is not necessarily the inventor, and in fact is almost never the inventor. Rather, the assignee is the organization or person who funds the work. For example, look at an IBM patent: inventor Joe Jones, assigned to IBM of Armonk, New York.
Uh-oh. Hamish, you would do well to read beyond the versions of history taught in school and given out in little pamphlets by big business. Alexander Graham Bell was working as a patent clerk when he stole the idea for the telephone from an Italian applicant. Edison engaged in patent wars with Frieze-Green and other independent inventors of the cinema, and Ford did not "invent" the assembly line, but merely used the meat packing industry DIS-assembly line as a guide to a line process. Oh yeah, and Bill Gates "bought" a version of the freely available CP-M under HIGHLY questionable circumstances and tweaked it into MS-DOS.
Uh-oh. Hamish, you would do well to read beyond the versions of history taught in school and given out in little pamphlets by big business. Alexander Graham Bell was working as a patent clerk when he stole the idea for the telephone from an Italian applicant. Edison engaged in patent wars with Frieze-Green and other independent inventors of the cinema, and Ford did not "invent" the assembly line, but merely used the meat packing industry DIS-assembly line as a guide to a line process. Oh yeah, and Bill Gates "bought" a version of the freely available CP-M under HIGHLY questionable circumstances and tweaked it into MS-DOS.
If you have it handy, please provide a link that shows Bell worked as a patent clerk. I think that perhaps you are confusing your "Italian" with Elisha Gray, who filed a patent application for the telephone the same day that Bell filed. (Or maybe you're thinking about Marconi, who was involved in radio transmission; half Italian IIRC.) Such coincidences are not all that unusual. It has to do with invention being a product of technological gestalt in addition to individual cleverness. In other words, think of the telephone as the next inevitable step after the telegraph. Had Bell not invented the telephone, someone else surely would have at about the same time. This is unlike musical composition. If Beethoven had never lived, it is highly unlikely that anyone else would have written his ninth symphony, ever.
Whether or not Edison engaged in "patent wars" has nothing to do with whether or not he fraudulently attributed inventorship (again, if he had, the patents would have been held invalid if challenged in court; lying about inventorship is totally foolish). Gates? Ford? This has nothing at all to do with patent protection . . .
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