From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Mon Mar 10 2003 - 17:37:53 MST
> (Hal Finney <hal@finney.org>):
>
> I foresee a day when every patent will have a link you can click on to
> license it. As the internet works to drive down transaction costs in
> all other areas, it will facilitate patent licensing as well. This might
> even be a huge economic opportunity for the first company to facilitate
> this process. Maybe they can even get a business patent on the idea...
>
> Once patents are no longer a brick wall, but rather a limited tax,
> they will be much less of a problem and opposition to them will decrease.
That's similar to a scheme already in use that eases some of the
burden of copyright: mandatory licensing. If a radio station wants
to play a tune, they don't need to negotiate with the owner, they
just a pay a fixed fee set by law, and the owner collects it, but
doesn't have the option to say no. These mandatory licensing
schemes are very limited though, and fees are generally still
higher than what would be economically efficient.
If we must have patents to encourage long-term investment in R&D,
then one way to ease the burden and reduce the licensing costs is
to include a statutory licensing scheme. If you sell a widget based
on patented ideas, you can apportion a percentage of your profits
among the patentholders according to a formula fixed in law, and
not have to negotiate anything or risk that a patentholder will
refuse entirely. That at least takes away the one most serious
flaw of the system--the owner who can just say no, using the patent
for the exact opposite of its intended purpose to "promote progress".
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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