This isn't so clear cut for me. In many endeavors, it is far easier to copy than to invent. Patents and the entire field of IP law exists to give innovators and creators more incentives to take on risky or costly projects that ultimately provide value.
Do people have a problem with:
1.) The concept of owning IP (and collecting the rewards)
2.) That there is human subjectivity in the process
3.) That the legal system for resolving disputes is broken and hackable via expensive lawyers?
For me I think I'm only angry at (3) and some of (2), and maybe there is a way to fix the system while keeping most of the current spirit of the law intact.
> Patents and the entire field of IP law exists to give innovators and creators more incentives to take on risky or costly projects that ultimately provide value.
This may be true, but has anyone ever verified that IP law actually brings about more innovation? It certainly provides a legal framework to build a business around a new idea, but it's unclear to me whether it actually causes people to come up with more new ideas.
There are no areas of computer science that seem to rely on patents to make investment worthwhile. The closest would be compression I guess, but unpatented video compression techniques seem to be advancing just fine. The inherently low cost of computing research means there is a massive amount of invention without the help of patents, and in those circumstances patents are just getting in the way.
Software, and for that matter, movies and books are already covered quite effectively by copyright. If we already have IP protection that provides incentives to take on risky and costly projects, why do we need yet another protection? Especially one which has been demonstrated to be bad for companies and consumers.
While I agree that we are better off without software patents, copyright does not fill the same role. Copyright protects against direct duplication of a work, while patents protect against a range of possible implementations.
For example, if you install a copy of Microsoft Word on your computer off of a friend's CD, you are violating Microsoft's copyright. If you instead write your own word processor from scratch, then you are not violating; Microsoft's copyright is independent from the copyright you hold on your word processor. But if Microsoft has a patent on a fundamental aspect of word processors, then your new word processor violates the patent, and Microsoft can limit what you can do with it.
The question is: Is the "risky and costly project" the act of implementing the word processor, or the act of inventing word processors in the first place? (And: Do patents provide incentives for these projects?)
I'd also like to add the Intellectual Property rights were originally supposed to expire a few (7, I think) years. The idea was to give innovators a chance to profit, before letting society follow and help improve the situation. Now, Intellectual Property is practically permanent, which I think prevents innovation.
> Patents and the entire field of IP law exists to give innovators and creators more incentives to take on risky or costly projects that ultimately provide value.
I don't think so, the purpose of the system was to make that knowledge open so society as a whole could benefit from it. Given innovators a monopoly was the price of buying that knowledge, otherwise they wouldn't give up their trade secrets.
Do people have a problem with:
1.) The concept of owning IP (and collecting the rewards)
2.) That there is human subjectivity in the process
3.) That the legal system for resolving disputes is broken and hackable via expensive lawyers?
For me I think I'm only angry at (3) and some of (2), and maybe there is a way to fix the system while keeping most of the current spirit of the law intact.