Eric Maskin, một trong ba người đoạt giải Nobel Kinh Tế năm nay, đồng ý với Richard Stallman rằng software patents cản trở sáng tạo (dù họ có các lý do khác nhau). Trích một bài báo hồi 99 của Bessen và Maskin:
The standard economic rationale for patents is to protect potential innovators from imitation and thereby give them the incentive to incur the cost of innovation. Conventional wisdom holds that, unless would-be competitors are constrained from imitating an invention, the inventor may not reap enough profit to cover that cost. Thus, even if the social benefit of invention exceeds the cost, the potential innovator without patent protection may decide against innovating altogether.
Yet, interestingly, some of the most innovative industries today—software, computers, and semiconductors—have historically had weak patent protection and have experienced rapid imitation of their products. Defenders of patents may counter that, had stronger intellectual property protection been available, these industries would have been even more dynamic. But we will argue that the evidence suggests otherwise.
In fact, the software industry in the United States was subjected to a revealing natural experiment in the 1980’s. Through a sequence of court decisions, patent protection for computer programs was significantly strengthened. We will show that, far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity, these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most. We maintain, furthermore, that there was nothing paradoxical about this outcome. For industries like software or computers, there is actually good reason to believe that imitation promotes innovation and that strong patents (long patents of broad scope) inhibit it. Society might be well served if such industries had only limited intellectual property protection. Moreover, many firms might genuinely welcome competition and the prospect of being imitated.
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Còn đây là thông tin khá thú vị với ý trích từ quyển “Against intellectual monopoly” của Michele Borodin và David Levine hiện đang dạy tại Washington Uni về pool patents:
* Patent pool
Some companies corporate with each other to share one or more patents. Companies within these pools could use the product without paying any fee. In some cases, patents pool has a form of cross-licensing agreements in which firms agree to automatically cross-license all the patents pertaining the same categories.
Patent pool is very popular in USA. Patent pools are generally mandatory for new participants in standard setting organizations. Large corporations like IBM, Intel, Xerox engages enormously in patent pool. Patent pool helps company cutting down the cost of patenting, protecting themselves from other competitors without compromising their benefits and most importantly helping them to remain their monopoly.
Many people things that patents is a good things for small companies. Well, it is not really the case. The fact of the matter is that a new product, esp software products, often uses a lot of tools that have been patented before and the cost of paying for theses tools may exceed the profits gained from products. The producer is, therefore, forced to cooperate with some companies who own the tools to share the profit or just join some patent tools.
Here is the interesting statement from Roger Smith of IBM that I should do nothing with it but to quote it directly:
“The IBM patent portfolio gains us the freedom to do what we need to do through cross-licensing—it gives us access to the inventions of others that are key to rapid innovation. Access is far more valuable to IBM than the fees it receives from its 9,000 active patents. There’s no direct calculation of this value, but it’s many times larger than the fee income, perhaps an order of magnitude larger.”
Bình luận:
“Well, that’s the way business is. And also it’s the way big fish catch and swallow small fish.”
Talking about Design Pattern is similar to talking about the science. The science can create the unclear, chemical, biological bomb or support a lot of facilities in the human life. But the science itself is neutral, it just provide us more information about the world. The problem is how we use the science (or design pattern) in our living.