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In article <GUEST.91Mar9231308@geech.ai.mit.edu> guest@geech.ai.mit.edu (Guest Account) writes:
>  I don't see how giving a 17 year monpoly to a company
>benefits society.
...
>I think competition benefits society much more than monopolies do.

Monopolies aren't the goal of patents, the goal is encouraging inventors to
publish descriptions of their inventions.  Granting monopolies is the
*means* of encouraging this.  At the end of the 17 year period competition
is possible; without patents, the inventor would probably keep it a secret,
and would have an implicit monopoly (unless someone else manages to invent
the technique independently).

In addition, the description of a device can give other inventors ideas
about other ways to solve the same or similar problems.  This *promotes*
competition, by making it more likely that different solutions will be
implemented.

That said, I generally agree that software patents are a bad idea, or at
least being abused.  The "inventions" being patented are frequently too
obvious or general.  Also, the economics and dynamics of the software
industry are very different from those of other engineering disciplines, so
it doesn't always work to apply the same rules.

--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar