In article ,
Dave wrote:

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 09:39:59 +1100, Peter Wiley
said:

You haven't thought it through, Dave. If there were no patents, people
could reverse-engineer new products freely and without risk of
prosecution. Patents give an exclusive licence/protection in return for
publishing the discovery/process. Companies can & do sit on technology
rather than patent it so as to keep the IP in-house.

They do indeed. But you're going two different directions here. If people
could always reverse-engineer new products, it would be impossible to "sit
on technology." Companies patent some technology and decide not to patent
other technology. One of the factors that influences the decision is whether
it would be possible to reverse engineer the product or process.

Not quite correct - whether it would be economically possible to
reverse-engineer. I run a marine engineering R&D section, in essence. I
have engineers, programmers, a complete electronics lab & heavy
engineering ability. We can build a lot of stuff, but if it's cheaper
to buy, we buy. Now, if all the gear we use was protected by patents
and we couldn't build our own, we wouldn't have that option.

Friend of mine ran an organic chemistry R&D lab for ICI Chemicals. He
said that knowing the composition of the end product wouldn't
necessarily help you much in figuring out how to get there.

The question is whether, if no patent protection were available, companies
would devote the resources to developing new and better products. The theory
behind the patent system is that they would not. I'm inclined to agree.

I'm inclined to disagree. Now, software may be a special case but I
offer the example of open source versus proprietary & protected s/ware.
Companies are hiding behind patents that are trivially obvious and
getting patents on ideas not products. All that and they're still
losing.

As I said, with drugs it gets tricky due to the number of failures to
successes. There does need to be an incentive to innovate. Perhaps a
different reward model is needed. Say for starters, 100X the cost of
all work done to achieve a success plus a percentage royalty on sales,
with open licensing to any manufacturer with the QA needed to produce.
Then manufacturers could compete on their production systems and R&D
firms would make money. Separate the 2 in other words.

A lot of the problem is that patents that are patently ridiculous have
been and still are being issued.

No question about that. One of my former patent partners estimated that 50%
of the patents issued are invalid.

Giving more people a moral justification for ignoring them.

PDW