Topic: Patents
Patents have a long history in America, dating back to 1790, when Congress enacted the first Patent Act. Since then, patent laws have been changing and expanding, but the base concept of what patents are and why they are used has remained mostly the same. The most obvious benefit of a patent is that it provides people and companies an incentive to invent. There would be no point in wasting time and money trying to invent a new procedure or concept if you knew that the moment it was invented it would be reverse engineered by your competitors, and then people who contributed nothing to the invention would have just as much claim to make money off of it as you do. In fact, patent researchers have estimated that R&D research totaling 430 billion euros in 2008 would have been significantly reduced or even eliminated if companies did not have a means to protect their inventions from exploitation. Additionally, patents encourage disclosure of inventions to the public domain, while still setting a fixed time (usually 20 years) where the inventor retains a monopoly on the invention. This is very beneficial because it allows competitors to work off of an invention without directly using it, encouraging more competition and innovation in the future. It also prevents inventions from being lost to the World if an inventor dies without disclosing his/her process for making an invention. I believe patents are a positive force in the business world. Not only do they provide a significant incentive for R&D, but they also ensure that people will never have to waste time inventing something twice, which means humanity can continue to invent technologies which address the most pressing needs of the time. Additionally, I like that patents encourage companies to come up with multiple solutions to a problem. Instead of copying another company’s invention, a competitor would have to find their own way to accomplish the same task without infringing on the first company’s patent. This leads to a diversification of products which is not only good for businesses but is also good for the consumer.
In recent years, patent law has come under fire as technology has advanced, and people have come up with ways to “cheat” the patent system in America. As far as technology, the advent of software patents has been met with significant controversy, as established companies like Google and Microsoft have stockpiled software patents out of fear that their competitors would patent the technology first. Some have argued that this stockpiling of patents is largely trivial, and that software is not something that needs to be patented. I disagree with this sentiment. I believe that a software innovation is just as significant as a tangible, physical invention, and should therefore be protected by the same laws. If anything, the software patent stockpile race has only increased innovation in Silicon Valley and made companies work harder to make new technologies before a competitor does. However, there is an uglier side to stockpiling patents: the advent of patent trolls. A patent troll is a person or company who acquires patents not with the intent to commercialize the invention patented, but rather to litigate against companies who infringe on the patent. This can be a huge problem, as the patent office has a bad reputation of granting patents for very broad inventions. For example, a patent was granted to a patent troll that gave it exclusive rights to in-ap purchasing technology, and the company then went on to litigate at least 11 companies for using “their” technology. I do not believe patent trolls are an indication that the patent system is broken by any means, just that it is imperfect. Patents only last for around 20 years, so the mistakes of the patent office in granting overly broad patents do not have permanent repercussions. In order to fix the system, I would say that in the future the patent office should work to not grant patents for inventions that are simplistic or overly broad, and instead only try to reward patents for inventions that exhibit true innovation in a field. While this line may certainly be hard to define at times, it is much better than having no patents at all.