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>> Interesting. I thought the whole point of a patent is to financially
>> cripple your opponents so you then have the whole market to yourself and
>> can then charge extortionate prices for a poor quality product...
>
> I assume you're not joking.
>
> The point of a patent is to promote the knowledge of technology. The
> government makes you an offer: Make your design public, and they'll give
> you exclusive rights to it for a limited time.
Yeah, that's the theory.
For example, the drugs companies have patents on particular molecules
because it costs hundreds of billions of dollars to get a drugs license
for one. If some company spends a hundred billion dollars getting a drug
licenced, they do *not* want a bunch of other companies then coming
along and making the same chemical, and selling it for 50p per tonne.
Typically at least, *making* the drug is dirt-cheap. But *testing* it to
make sure it's safe (and actually works) costs an absurd amount of
money. They don't want to pay for all that testing and then have
somebody else benefit from it.
> Sooner or later, the
> patent will expire and not be renewed, at which point anyone can make
> it.
Surely somebody has already come up with a way to get round this minor
detail?
For example, all of the Windows APIs are patented, to prevent ReactOS
from existing. But how many decades old is Windows? Surely those patents
should have expired by now. (Ignoring for the fact that a set of
function names shouldn't be patentable in the first place...)
> The requirement to disclose the design a product may not be amenable
> to a company. So sometimes they don't patent it, but maintain it as an
> industry secret. I'm told that stuff like the Coca Cola recipe is such
> an example.
Ah yes, Coca Cola. Seventy billion gallons of the stuff is made every
year, and yet, according to urban legend, only two people in the world
know how it's made. Yeah, right. ;-)
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Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieee org> wrote:
> And what would be the rationale of not requiring it?
My guess: If a working prototype would be required, then it would not be
possible to patent methods (rather than devices). A method (ie. a way of
doing something) can not, rather obviously, have any "working prototype"
because it's not a physical device. It's only a description of a way of
doing something.
(Of course being able to patent methods is a braindead idea all in itself.)
--
- Warp
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Mueen Nawaz <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> I'm told that stuff like the Coca Cola recipe is such an example.
At least here things like recipes have absolutely zero protection
from law. You can't patent recipes, nor can you get copyright on them,
or any other protection for that matter.
For example, it's completely legal to take eg. an entire book of recipes,
copy every single one of them to your own book, and publish it. As long as
you don't copy it *verbatim* (ie. you change the layout and wording), you
are not infringing anything.
(This little fact gives a whole new ironical light to the fact that
if you use something like 10 consecutive notes from a copyrighted song,
amounting to something like 5 seconds, and publish your own rendition of
it, you can get sued and jailed.)
--
- Warp
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On 26-6-2009 10:13, Invisible wrote:
>> Sooner or later, the patent will expire and not be renewed, at which
>> point anyone can make it.
>
> Surely somebody has already come up with a way to get round this minor
> detail?
What seems to work for drugs is finding a new illness for which it can
prescribed and getting a patent on use of the drug.
What seem to work in the entertainment industry is giving money to
politicians and asking them if they can change the law.
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Warp wrote:
> (Of course being able to patent methods is a braindead idea all in itself.)
I disagree. Patenting a method for manufacturing something seems quite
reasonable to me. Why would you want to deny a drug company patents on a
better way to make a particular drug, or deny a tire company a patent on how
to vulcanize rubber with less pollution? That's a serious question here. Is
there some reason I can't think of why such patents are a bad idea, assuming
that one believes *any* patents are a good idea?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Invisible wrote:
> analogue cell phone wouldn't be much use...
Why would you say that? It took bigger batteries, and could carry fewer
calls with more interference, but it wasn't really any different from analog
vs digital long distance lines.
> (OOC, does anybody know how long electricity has been around? I thought
> it was comparatively new.)
Electricity for communication (telegraph, radios, etc) has been around since
early 1800s. Mid 1800s saw widespread electric distribution, electric
lights, etc.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Invisible wrote:
> For example, all of the Windows APIs are patented,
I don't believe that's true. Do you have a patent number for "Windows APIs"?
Some things are patented, like the method for storing long file names on an
8.3 FAT disk in a way that doesn't mess up normal 8.3 file system drivers, yes.
> Ah yes, Coca Cola. Seventy billion gallons of the stuff is made every
> year, and yet, according to urban legend, only two people in the world
> know how it's made. Yeah, right. ;-)
I'm surprised how rarely things like Windows source code gets leaked, myself.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Warp wrote:
> At least here things like recipes have absolutely zero protection
> from law.
So drugs don't have any protection? You can go to your country and
manufacture and sell all the Viagra you want without asking anyone else for
permission?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > (Of course being able to patent methods is a braindead idea all in itself.)
> I disagree. Patenting a method for manufacturing something seems quite
> reasonable to me. Why would you want to deny a drug company patents on a
> better way to make a particular drug, or deny a tire company a patent on how
> to vulcanize rubber with less pollution? That's a serious question here. Is
> there some reason I can't think of why such patents are a bad idea, assuming
> that one believes *any* patents are a good idea?
I think that one major difference between the Americal and European
patenting ideologies has not been mentioned in the thread, which is why
not being able to patent ideas and methods might sound irrational:
In the European patenting system (at least in principle) you cannot
restrict what people do. The only thing the patent restricts is selling
of the patented products.
Here it's completely legal for someone to take a patent, build the device
described by that patent and use it for personal use. The patent does not
restrict that. Only if you start mass-producing the patented device and
selling it to people (or even distributing it for free), that's when the
patent restrictions kick in.
Being able to patent ways of doing things, like in the US, would restrict
what people can *do* in the privacy of their home. If you can patent combing
your hair in a certain way or exercising a cat with a laser pointer, you
would be restricting people's behavior and ways of doing things.
Those are, of course, quite extreme cases. However, there's a much better
example: Here recipes cannot be patented (nor fall under copyright). That's
because a recipe is a description of the way of doing something. You cannot
restrict what people do and how.
Being able to patent eg. a method for vulcanizing rubber is completely
akin to being able to patent a food recipe.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > At least here things like recipes have absolutely zero protection
> > from law.
> So drugs don't have any protection? You can go to your country and
> manufacture and sell all the Viagra you want without asking anyone else for
> permission?
If you mean without permission from some company who "owns" the original
product, then AFAIK that's the case. (Of course to manufacture and sell
medicine you naturally need all kinds of governmental permissions, but
that's different.) But IANAL. It's possible I'm being wrong here.
I can understand why an American would be surprised about such a thing,
even though I'm a bit surprised they would be surprised (tautology not
intended).
I think the only commonly-used products which sales are restricted in
Finland are alcoholic beverages. But that's not because of patents or
anything like that.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> In the European patenting system (at least in principle) you cannot
> restrict what people do. The only thing the patent restricts is selling
> of the patented products.
I see. Yes, the American patent system is more restrictive than that. You
can still build the stuff yourself, but only for research purposes. (Your
guess is as good as mine as to when you cross from research to commercial
use. :-)
> Those are, of course, quite extreme cases.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the one with the laser pointer was done as a means
of showing how stupid the patent system has gotten. :-)
> Being able to patent eg. a method for vulcanizing rubber is completely
> akin to being able to patent a food recipe.
So can you patent chemicals, like drugs? How do you pay for the R&D that
goes into something like a method for making a particular drug if you can't
charge more than it costs to manufacture?
Something like 1/2 to 2/3'rds of the cost of a CPU is paying for the
development of the first batch. I would be surprised if it wasn't at least
as expensive to develop and test drugs.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Warp wrote:
> I can understand why an American would be surprised about such a thing,
> even though I'm a bit surprised they would be surprised (tautology not
> intended).
Because some things take a huge amount of resource to develop yet are
relatively inexpensive to manufacture. Why would I spend 20 years developing
a cure for cancer if the actual cost of manufacturing the final drug is $10
a dose? That's kind of exactly what patents are aimed at: encouraging
development by protecting the profits long enough to pay back the R&D.
It just seems like it would be bad for business. Worse than the cluster-fk
that's the current American patent system? Hard to say. But we already have
things like substances which are very cheap and *seem* to do very well at
curing a wide variety of cancers inexpensively that nobody is researching
because you can't earn back the research costs by selling it.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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Darren New wrote:
> Something like 1/2 to 2/3'rds of the cost of a CPU is paying for the
> development of the first batch. I would be surprised if it wasn't at
> least as expensive to develop and test drugs.
I would suggest that testing drugs is *absurdly* expensive. (Having seen
some of what's involved, as that is my line of work...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I would suggest that testing drugs is *absurdly* expensive.
Sure. And so is designing a CPU and everything it takes to mass produce one.
The point I'm making is that manufacturing a drug might be quite cheap,
once you figure out what works.
Sort of like mass-producing software, once you get the first version running.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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>> I would suggest that testing drugs is *absurdly* expensive.
>
> Sure. And so is designing a CPU and everything it takes to mass produce
> one. The point I'm making is that manufacturing a drug might be quite
> cheap, once you figure out what works.
Indeed. Depends how you make the drug, of course, but it certainly pales
into insignificance beside the cost of testing it.
[It seems that drugs which you can make just by mixing some chemicals
together are a lot cheaper than ones where you have to actually *grow*
something and extract the chemical, for example.]
> Sort of like mass-producing software, once you get the first version
> running.
That too.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> So can you patent chemicals, like drugs?
To be honest: I don't know. They aren't devices per se, but they aren't
algorithms either.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Why would I spend 20 years developing
> a cure for cancer if the actual cost of manufacturing the final drug is $10
> a dose?
Many scientists do their job for reasons other than to get rich,
you know... (I'd go as far as to say that if you want to get rich, or
even a moderate salary, you don't want to be a scientist. Science is
a vocation.)
--
- Warp
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090603224807259
>
> Why is it that I find myself thinking this will have precisely zero
> effect on anything?
>
Because this warning:
"Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their
publishers had permission from the owners of the words."
is not a warning to a government official, but rather, and enticement.
"Hey, let's make *ourselves* the owners of the words!"
Regards,
John
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On 27-6-2009 18:27, Darren New wrote:
> (Your guess is as good as mine as to when you cross from research to
> commercial use. :-)
Ask the whales.
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Why would I spend 20 years developing
>> a cure for cancer if the actual cost of manufacturing the final drug is $10
>> a dose?
>
> Many scientists do their job for reasons other than to get rich,
Certainly. But would you do it for free? And could you convince all the
manufacturers of the equipment you needed to buy to do it for free? And the
folks who own the hospital where you do the trials, do they decide they'll
rent you their space for 20 years?
I'd be an astronaut for free, too. But I wouldn't mine the ore for the
steel/aluminum/whatever for the space shuttle for free.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Insanity is a small city on the western
border of the State of Mind.
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