Can you imagine how such a patent war in healthcare would affect your well being? But aren't patents necessary to motivate the hard work needed for innovation? Here is a TED Talk which addresses where innovation truly comes from.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Patents, More Harm than Good?
One of today's discussion topics was the upcoming Supreme Court case about DNA patents, which lead to the question if patents cause more harm than good. You can see the harm of patents by looking at the current patents war in smartphones. Here is a diagram of who is suing who:
Can you imagine how such a patent war in healthcare would affect your well being? But aren't patents necessary to motivate the hard work needed for innovation? Here is a TED Talk which addresses where innovation truly comes from.
Can you imagine how such a patent war in healthcare would affect your well being? But aren't patents necessary to motivate the hard work needed for innovation? Here is a TED Talk which addresses where innovation truly comes from.
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Hey Mike:
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the open source ethic does not extend to 3-D printers, as there are over 450 issued US patents on the subject. Two of the fundamental patents are attached. Both have expired. They last 20 years from the date of application for the patent. The technology in these patents is free for all now, which is how things are supposed to work. The inventor gives a complete disclosure of how to make and use his or her invention in exchange for a monopoly on that invention for a limited time.
I agree that it is very interesting (and to me surprising) that the open source community works without hope of financial return from the software they invent. There always has been a sense of “free to the world” attitude in some few academic inventors, although you don’t see that now days with the need of the universities for more money. Very, very few schools actually make money from their patents, although they all want to copy the success of MIT and Stanford in this respect. And who knows which invention will hit. The University of Wisconsin made a fortune from the invention of the anticoagulant drug warfarin (Wisconsin Alumni Foundation, owner).
I’m glad you brought up this discussion. For the record, I predict the Supreme Court will uphold the patenting of genes. This is fun. I won’t be at the gathering for the next two weeks as we are leaving tomorrow for a river boat trip in Holland and Belgium. Feel free to put this on your blog or whatever if you think there would be interest.
Regards, Bill Ramsey
Thanks for the info Bill,
ReplyDeleteMy comments about 3D Printers in the maker movement, was about the things being made or prototyped by 3D printers, not the printers themselves.
Yet there is a real battle going on the keep the 3D Printer itself patent free.
See this link.
The concern is that there are many new patents being filed for 3D Printing. Many of these patents were not needed to bolster innovation, but were actually based on prior art. They will only serve to collect "rent" from serious 3D Printer developers.