> At 10:51 5/4/98 -0700, you wrote:
> >In a world without patents, 99% of new products would be small
> >incremental improvements to existing products, with next to zero
> >research costs involved. Those projects that /do/ require long
> >research (if any--nature shows us that incremental improvement
> >is sufficient to create extremely complex and powerful things)
> >will probably be undertaken by industry consortia who contract
> >with each other to share the risk and benefit of it.
>
> Now you have given the world over to the industry consortiums who end up as
> virtual monopolies.
Really? How come there is no evidence of these virtual monopolies?
> An individual has no hope of being able to bring a
> revolutionary idea to life unless he sells his soul to the company store...
Who did Martin Luther King Jr sell out to?
Why was Robert Heinlein able to dictate to a publisher that they
would sign a certain contract, and then immediately renegotiate it?
> I am not willing to wait for 'evolution' to generate the products I will
> need to survive in the next millennium. I want people to be able to make
> leaps and bounds in creation, and benefit from their own efforts. I thought
> we were supposed to improve on nature, not slavishly follow it..
This is why a patent system is necessary: so that people CAN make
leaps and bounds in creation.
Without a patent system, there is very little benefit to the inventor
in even the most obvious evolutionary improvement, let alone in
anything that takes any work. And such little benefit as there is,
derives from PERSONAL use, not from making that improvement public
knowledge -- so you will probably never learn of it.
You cannot expect to leap beyond state of the art, if you don't even
know what the state of the art is.
The patent/copyright system is the reason that the state of the art
is publicized.
>
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