Patents are institutional legal protection that was explicitly specified in the United States Constitution with purpose of encouraging scientists, inventors, and artists to pursue their creative endeavors. A patent establishes that a certain person or company has the right to an idea or process because they were the first to come up with it. These legal rights allow the holder to license out their idea and prosecute those who use the idea, typically in a business application, without permission or paying royalties. Ethically and morally, patents seek to prevent the theft of the fruits of one’s hard work, and economically they seek to encourage people to push technology forward by ensuring that profits can be made.
I believe that patents have the right intention but certainly have been abused in business practices and at times, acted counter to their purpose. Despite this, I feel a complete elimination of patents would be overkill. I worry that if patents ceased to exist, many inventors or small business would be slaughtered because larger corporations would have the resources to take their ideas and reproduce them on a massive scale, effectively stealing the advantage from the original inventor. However, something must be done to address the aggressiveness which people guard their patents without really using them. Patent trolls are a perfect example of this, and definitely demonstrate how the current patent system can be abused. This is where we see technology being hindered, such as in the case of the airplane or the steam engine.
I do think there should be patents for software innovations, but I believe there needs to be a higher degree of a scrutiny in determining what is truly a novel software invention. In the This American Life podcast, one search for a general design of software returned around 5,000 results. This is absurd and shows how software patents are being granted far too liberally. I believe this is clearly why we see the issue of patent trolls arise. Almost anyone who has coded before knows that so much of software development involves applying existing principles to a problem at hand. It seems that those who grant patents need to be more aware of this and understand that only breakthroughs in software that are not seen elsewhere should be issued.
timpusaterisite 