Re: Intellectual Property Rights ;-)

Tim Bates (tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au)
Wed, 23 Dec 1998 12:57:12 +1100

Samael said
samael said:

>Do you really want to live in a world where everyone spends their time
>waiting for someone else to do some research?

No, i just want to live in a world where if i do the research I am not put in jail becuase someone else did it before me.

The clearest justification for patents has been R&D recovery where trade secrets would not work. So, let's simply do that. Let's explicitly tie patents to R&D costs and restrict them in time to 5 years or the time taken to recover R&D costs, which ever is the lesser. Either that or have no patents and require alternative producers in the R&D recovery period to contribute pro-rata to the R&D debit.

Economically, patents of 20 years encourage people to make poor R&D decisions.

how's that sound?

tim