This article in groklaw.net is a good one. IP laws were introduced during the 19th century to prevent someone else quickly copying your physical product and selling it while you the innovator would have lost the game. Made sense at the time, innovators could innovate, patent their ideas and then get value out of the time spent in innovating. Well things have changed since 19th century and innovation and IP are not anymore necessarily the same thing. We have patent trolls who try to benefit from various patents just suing companies trying to make money here and there. These trolls never did any innovation. We have the US patent office which allows business models (essentially ideas) to be patented. One good demonstration of this is the Amazon's one click purchase button. It is just a few bloody pixels on a screen who any kid can create. There is no real innovation on this patent (it is merely a business model). Luckily in Europe the patent laws are stricter. Then we have Asia where everyone seems to be copying everyone else without any real concept of intellectual copyright. So we go from the extreme patenting laws in the US to the complete chaos in Asia. Allthough apparently in China the number of patents are on the rise.
In any new start-up, what the investors are always looking is IP. What patents you have since they think this has value. Since there are millions of patents already around the world for various things it is very expensive to know what is already patented and what is not. Hundreds of thousands of dollars must be spent to patent one thing and a wait for 6-18 months. In the 19th hundred you just walked to the patent office and you were done pretty quickly. For start-ups I do not think it is so much about patents anymore it is more about ideas. But ideas cannot be in general patented and thus investors like patents.
Then we also now have laws especially in the US that you cannot patent anything that is risk to the national security. Initially you would think that it makes sense. Since security is important, the "terrorists" out they may kill you in an instant if the get access to special weapons. But looking into the list (
see my earlier post here) its not only about weapons, it is also about advanced ways to produce energy. Since access to cheaper energy is actually risk to the national security since if you would have a device that creates cheap or even free energy you would not need your country so much. This is obviously a controversial subject but the military is where most of the real innovation happens nowadays I believe. And these innovations do not see the light of the day in decades preventing our society to benefit from innovations which could improve our life quality and make this planet a better place to live.
There was also an article recently somewhere (lost the source sorry) that everything useful has already been innovated. We already have the mobile phone, computer, satellite TV and microwave. What else do we need? Wow - I could not disagree more. I think we are at the brink of innovating lots of really, truly cool stuff.
Like how to store hydrogen efficiently.
However access to patents is only available for those who can raise substantial amounts of money to patent things. Also in many companies which I have worked with the patents they owned did not really relate to the products they innovated, they were something just to keep the investors happy. We have an IP portfolio. We are good. That's how though it is with IP nowadays. Many companies even buy patents to take competition out. This is making creating a new company even harder.
The real road to re-energize the world of innovation is to move beyond patents. I do not know how this would be done but if we solely rely in IP this will lead the big companies eventually owning everything and killing the competition as it has happened in many cases. The amount of patents increase but real visible innovation is going down. Patents have become completely disconnected from
true innovation.
