🚀 go-pugleaf

On 14 Aug 91 15:32:29 GMT, nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) said:

nazgul> In article <48185@netnews.upenn.edu> yee@mipgsun.mipg.upenn.edu
nazgul> (Conway Yee) writes:

yee> In article <1991Aug13.183216.19588@agate.berkeley.edu>
yee> jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes:

jbuck> I think that inventors should be rewarded, but granting them a
jbuck> state-enforced monopoly for a couple of decades is a bit much.

yee> Doing away with patents is next to impossible.  One of the provisions
yee> of the Constitution is a requirement that Congress set up a patent
yee> and a copyright system.  While the duration of the patent/copyright
yee> is not constitutionally determined, its existance certainly is.

nazgul> I'm a little suprised that I've seen noone suggest the obvious
nazgul> compromise of shortening the length of the monopoly.  Thus the
nazgul> person with the idea gets a headstart, but not a lockout of
nazgul> everyone else.

My favourite solution would be, instead of granting the inventor
esclusive *manufacturing* rights, granting him exclusive *royalty*
rights for say 10-20 years on the actual selling price of products
incorporating that invention, i.e. a kind of sales "tax", going to the
inventor.

Everybody would be able to manufacture products incorporating any
invention, as long as they paid the royalty to the inventor.

The royalty would be by default something like 3-5% (which is little for
a new product, where profit margins can be supposed to be something like
30-50%, and a lot for mature products, where they can be supposed to be
around 5-10%), and the inventor could reduce (but not increase) it at
will.

The advantages would be manyfold:

1) Encourage multiple manufacterers to use the same invention. This is
bound to drive manufacturing cost down and drive up sales.

2) Reduce to a miminum legal conflict and administrative costs. Anybody
can license an invention if he pays the inventor. A simple Patent Fee
Center could be setup.

3) Encourage inventors to devise useful inventions, i.e. those that many
manufacturers would want to adopt and for which they would still profit
from paying a royalty of 3-5% of selling price, unless the inventor
wanted to make adoption more profitable by reducing the royalty.

4) Encourage patenting as soon as possible, with as wide a disclosure as
possible, in order to enojoy as long and wide a royalty stream as
possible.

5) Encourage specialization of business into intellectual property
businesses and manufacturing businesses, and lowering barriers to entry
in both branches of activity.

6) Allow for substantial simplification of the patenting process, along
the lines of the copyright process; if a royalty rather than monopoly is
at stake, things are relaxed enoguh that just possibly just a 'Patented
1991' mark like for copyrights could be enough.

7) Correctly modeling the fact that "intellectual property" rights are
not really property rights, because there is no need to exclude others
from enjoying it to enjoy it yourself, but it has an economic value that
may deserve economic incentives.

I would be very happy about copyright law being revised in the same way;
separating the right to reproduce (unrestricted, at a price) from the
right to derive a royalty seems to me a good idea, that probably the FSF
could live with, as they are about free dissemination, not gratis
dissemination, mostly.

--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@aber.ac.uk