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RE: Against Intellectual Monopoly - Chapter 1
if you took the time and effort to invent something, you should have the opportunity to profit from it.
Well, you have. You can make profits perfectly fine without any patents. If you invent something, you are first on the market and you have a big advantage.
This is to stop people stealing someone's idea and selling it as their own while the inventor basically gets shafted.
Most of the ideas are not really original. A lot of people will come up with the same idea. It's really unfair to give a monopoly right to use the idea on the markets only for one of them.
That sounds reasonable - except when you look at who is doing a bunch of innovation (in my country). In many cases this is done in a garage with the inventor putting in countless hours and their own money into it.
A large corporate has the funds, means and market to take their idea and get it built tomorrow. In which case the inventor gets nothing because they don't have the ability to get their product to market as easily.
What you end up with is the corporations strip mining inventors, leaving them with no opportunity to profit from their innovation, time effort, insight.
This leads to two options
This completely stifles collaboration.
I go back to my previous statement that this has become about protectionism and greed, instead of a way of ensuring that those who invent something have a change to profit fro their efforts.
If I hold the patent on something - blockchain technology for example. That doesn't stop you from using that technology, or deriving from it.
You can come and ask me if you can use it and we can sort out a deal that allows you to do that. And / or you can look at how that works, gain insights of your own, leapfrog my development cycle and create something far in advance of where I am.
The problem is the mindset of Mine! You can't have it!