In article ,
Dave wrote:

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 11:15:44 +1100, Peter Wiley
said:

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.

Maybe yes, maybe no. What you mean is that you couldn't build your own if
you weren't willing to pay the inventor your share of what he thinks is the
value of the work he did in inventing the product.

No, I couldn't build my own if the patent owner wouldn't license me to
do so. Alternatively if the company was selling items for $100K and
wanted a one-off fee of $200K then in effect they've prevented me from
building my own by rendering it economically foolish to do so. I tmight
only cost me ssay $20K in time/materials to build the item myself.

Been there done that except with unpatented equipment. Got a quote for
$250K and the manufacturer wouldn't release the source code even on a
non-disclosure basis. Wanted us to buy a pig in a poke in essence. We
built our own, including 2000m depth rated pressure vessels &
electronics, wrote our own software. If I get really bored one day I'll
write it all up for a marine research engineering journal and release
the specs & code into the public domain.

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.

Bad idea. Administered prices are inherently inefficient in the longer run.
This would be just another case of administered prices.

Huh? What administered pricing system? You're dragging in a red
herring. I said nothing about price controls of any kind.

I note that you have nothing to say WRT innovation happening regardless
of patents or protection of IP in software. I take that as an
acknowledgement that I am correct and that you are incorrect.

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.

Not the way it works in the real world. Most businesses don't honor or
ignore patents on the basis that doing so is moral or immoral. In fact
patents is one of those areas of the law where morality has very little
place. It isn't immoral to infringe a patent or trademark. But it may be
costly.

Quite true. However, while companies have no sense of morality, most
people do. Also technology drives business practices. Once again I
refer to software where the cost of duplication is so small as to be
insignificant. Ditto music and soon movies as bandwidth increases.
Already organisations like Encyclopaedia Britannica have either changed
business models or gone out of business.

It may well be that patent law and copyright law become unenforceable
in practice, for whole classes of product.

PDW