🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Aug26.065945@eklektix.com> rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn) writes:
>simplifying advantages which offset the short duration:  I suggest that the
>monopoly extend from discovery until someone else figures it out--i.e.,
>effectively zero duration.  Consider:
...
>	- There's still copyright and trade-secret protection.
>	- Although the legal duration of protection is zero, the effective
>	  duration is decidedly NONzero.  If you "invent" something and use
>	  it in a product, you have it exclusively until someone clones it.
This takes very little time with a patent, since the patent is in fact a
description of how to do it.  All you are giving the inventor is the
"time-to-market" factor, and not even that if you consider that the inventor
will want to submit the patent as soon as they think of it, not after they
have started selling it.  So in essence you are encouraging me to make it
a trade secret rather than publicizing how I did something.  I'm not sure
that's an improvement.

>	  it to your advantage.  Bogus "inventions" (like the xor cursor)
>	  have zero duration and get exactly the protection they deserve:
>	  none whatsoever.
I think there is a better way to get rid of bogus inventions.  Namely it
shouldn't be patentable if any person in the field, when faced with the
component parts, would be likely to reinvent it.  That's not an easy
metric to apply - but no reasonable metric will be.
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I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.