There are objectivists that do not understand "people don't understand owning oneself" including Leonard Peikoff

It is a monopoly in that it prevents anyone else from producing the protected item, even if the other person thought independently of the same thing.

I will accept patent lawyers have to perfect certain skills to work the system in accordance with its rules, and if you want monopoly protection, you have to pay the piper

Yes, indeed.

It continues to amaze me that, particularly in the US, people don't understand owning oneself. Further, that the ideas of one's mind that are implemented are also owned by the self and that government's only valid function is to protect individual rights which includes property rights.

One might validly argue about the government's implementation of that protection, but to argue against the right because of improper implementation is simply ignorance.

-1 for altering the concept being discussed.

If you are referring to the changes made in the early 2000's those were done in accordance with international treaty, not due to a "lack" of independent invention.

There is a significant difference between "simultaneous" and "independent".

In software we have quite a lot of independent invention of the same thing. Of course, you even admit it happens by saying "almost". Which only admits it does in fact happen, in which case your argument is that because it "only" prevents some people it is OK to dismiss it entirely.

Generally you only hear about the big ones where independent invention occurs, like say the telephone, radio, or the polio vaccine, the airplane, jet engines for airplanes; though there is an argument of copying a patent application to be made regarding the telephone. The smaller ones where someone is screwed over but over something which does not rise the level of the above fly under the radar.

The data on patent lawsuits actually show that multiple independent invention (MII) is more common than the opposite, with over 90% of patent lawsuits showing it. When you look at the true "sole inventor" cases most of them were essentially accidents and thus more of a discovery than an invention. There is actually quite a lot of research indicating that MII is quite commonplace, dating back to at least the 1920's that I know of. It actually makes sense that you'd have MII because in a even time period people generally have the same understandings, tools, and often the same problem to overcome.

What is rare is the overturning of a patent by someone else by showing they actually invented it first, and just as rare are lawsuits which assert copying caused the infringement. Even more rare is a verdict that coping was involved.

Interestingly, nobody seems to argue that in the realm of copyrights and trade secrets, independent invention is acknowledged and a legally valid defense against allegations of copying. over my entire career in the IT field, I've always been advised by the IP lawyers to never look to see if my possibly-patentable idea has already been patented but instead just apply for it and hope nobody notices if it has. The reason given is that doing so would effectively eliminate any claim to have independently invented it.

MII isn't limited to technology, either. We see it in science quite often. Indeed science is replete enough with it there is a law about it called (IIRC) Steigler's Law which basically states that no eponymous scientific discovery is actually named by the first to discover it.

It happens so much that it is the norm rather than the exception. For one example which would get you started on the data, consider this work http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf... which was undertaken to determine the extent of the "copying" problem in patent law. It found that copying is very rare, and that between 90 and 98% of all claims were actually about independent invention.

Consider also the comparison to Trader Secret law. Under that law I can invent something and tell nobody how I do it. If you do the same, that is fine. But it does not stop there. You can also simply reverse-engineer my product and make it yourself and I have no claim against you. However, if you send someone into my factory and then duplicate what I do I can sue and will normally prevail. Incidentally, if you can duplicate Coca-Cola they have nothing on you - they have avoided patenting it so the formula remains a secret.

With patent law, the assumption is that since patents are published, you had to have dug into the vast archives, sifted through tons of garbage, found my patent, then copied it. Yet as seen above even that allegation is rare - with the exception of the pharmaceutical industry. So no, DB, you are wrong to label the truth as propaganda and wrong to say it never, or even rarely happens. It happens from the big ideas such as telephones, FFT, color photography, and light bulbs down to the lesser known such as SIP and a while slew of software and IT related inventions.

And with regard to property rights based on creation, so we don't have a right to own land? I disagree with that as well, but am more interested in getting some dinner then having that side discussion at the moment. ;)

Yes bequeath - Which properly understand is not that property rights go on. They end and for practical legal reasons they are given are allowed to give a first right of refusal to others, not because it is purely consistent with property rights in a philosophical sense.

Well, I wasn't really talking about our U.S. patent system the way it is written, because we all know how good our laws are, but I was more referring to the moral right to our intellectual property. SHOULD patents be for life, regardless if they are implemented?

Also, to respond to dbhalling, people can bequeath property (including intellectual property) to others. Should that apply to patents? Is there a problem with someone who did not "earn or create" the property that was bequeathed to them owning something like that? This can spiral a lot of ways. Does it matter if the intellectual rights were purchased as opposed to being a gift? Purchased would imply that someone "earned" the intellectual property, while a gift does not. The benefit of the gift is only truly "earned" by the giftor. He might have satisfaction from making that gift, and he earned the right to do that. Once that person ceases to exist however, there is no more benefit to the giftor since he is dead. So does that mean that the giftee (who didn't earn or create anything) should be able to retain the right to that patent that can cure cancer? See where I am struggling here?? Hope I am making some sense. Once again, I am trying to decide what is "right", not necessarily what the law says.

Depends on the country - not in the US.

In my comment this morning, I made up on the spur of the moment the idea of a patent on "using a menu to select system options" as something that is an obvious common practice.

I did a google search on that and the word patent and found a Microsoft patent 5664133 which almost exactly matched this made-up example. The specific patent is for context sensitive menus, not menus in general. It was file in 1996.

Now as near as I can tell, I wrote code that did exactly what the patent described in 1989 as part of a graphic application that was pre-windows. At the time it seemed an obvious way to handle the problem and not particularly innovative, yet almost a decade later Microsoft got a patent on it.

Now, you can say that I am not competent to read the patent because I'm not a patent lawyer. But then, how does someone write software? Do I have to have you vet each of the 500 plus menus in the million lines of code?

Perhaps a patent attorney can correct this, but my understanding is that if someone hates society, for example, and does nothing with the patent, it will be considered abandoned and the field open for competition.

well term, we don't. But imagine the work that goes into drafting complicated documents. It is a special langauge (claims) and attorneys, like db go through years of schooling and lives working in the industry (s) before they can practice. In db's case, he is a EE, MS Physics, worked as an engineer for seveal years, then got his JD. He had to pass multiple Bars. But he charges flat fees for his specialized work. I disagree with your use of the word "monopoly." look it up. a patent holder does not even have the "right" to practice his invention in an industry. I completely agree with your first statement.

It wasn't a win, but it avoided a loss. I did a little better than break even, but not enough.

-1 for propaganda.

1st of all property rights are not based on scacity, they are based on creation. Second of all there almost no examples of simultaneous invention. The US patent office had a procedure for that situation until several years ago. The argument for eliminating it, was that they almost never occurred.

No. Rand has an explanation on this point and it is a good start. No property rights go on forever. Dead people cannot own land or anything else. Practical questions in the law kick in then. For instance, there is no purely philosophical reason recording deeds.

Sounds like it was a win to sell out when you did.

As hard as it was, I sent my colleague an e-mail telling him that I did not want to be a Robert Stadler and sending him the following link:

http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Y...

Just last night I read about Ineos Bioenergy, the company that beat my company to get the job to convert Vero Beach's Mount Trashmore into chemicals and fuel, closing up shop in Vero Beach because the price of natural gas and syngas has made biofuels cost-prohibitive.

So what about the shelf life question? I have struggled with that my whole life, especially when it comes to medicines. If a patent is forever, and the inventor (patentor) decides to not sell his "cure for cancer" to anyone because perhaps he hates society, how is that rationally handled? I am all for someone having the right not to sell their invention, or to have the right to choose to sell it to whomever they wish. So, I would assume that 100% staunch Objectivists would only conclude that his patent should last forever. "Greater Good" is completely irrelevant, correct?

IP is definitely and demonstrably not like physical property. There is a ver clear way to demonstrate this: independent innovation.

History is actually quite rife with independent innovation. The main problem with patents is that they fail to recognize or account for this. Let us say you and I working entirely without each other's knowledge or assistance devise a way to make Galt's Motor. A patent is awarded to whomever gets to the patent office and files first. The one who is second gets the right to benefit from their own, independent hard work and mental effort revoked or refuted. In other words, his IP is effectively "stolen" simply because of arbitrary paperwork for the government. This is why IP is not the same as RP. You and I can not independently produce the exact same physical car - we can produce two separate instances of a car even if they are identical. Yet we do so quite a bit of the same idea being developed by multiple people.

The patent system does not reward and incentivize invention, it rewards and incentivizes publishing it in exchange for a government monopoly granted through the use of force. It is easy to say patents are all about letting you benefit from your work and effort, as long as you ignore the very real world phenomenon of independent work, discovery, and invention.

The idea behind the patent system in U.S. is explicitly stated as an privilege grant of a temporally limited monopoly in exchange for the knowledge becoming public and usable at the end of the granted monopoly. At that time most innovation was not "published" - it was a competitive advantage to know how to do something better than someone else. The thinking at the time was that the "freeing" of this IP from behind closed doors would spur innovation after the monopoly expired. It is an open question as to how much this effect has occurred because doing genuine comparisons is difficult and few are motivated to do it.

The patent system we have right now in the U.S. is frankly terrible. As some have mentioned it is truly expensive, which favors the corporates, and "patent trolls" at the expense of the individual innovator. There is no objective way to determine when a patent should expire - it is far too broad of a category. Yet lifetime patents are against the intent of releasing the knowledge into the public domain spurring innovation - especially in an era where that may be 80 or more years.As our rate of innovation increases, the value of a patent producing additional innovation decreases quicker. yet the presence of the patent can still be used to prevent others from benefiting from their own effort.

Further with the rise of the Internet and with Patents needing to be made public by nature, they create a risk to a would-be patent holder in that people from other nations, such as China, can see them and run with them without benefiting the patent holder - even harming them under the system.

And that isn't even going into what the government has done to thousands of us who have essentially had our patent confiscated for "national security" concerns.

I think those of us who do innovate (or at least try/hope to) want the patent system because we want to reap the reward of been gable to force others to pay us more - and in same cases prevent competition. But we also lose sight of the problems inherent to the basic idea as well as the tradeoffs such a system creates. The first casualty is the independent inventor. The second is the one who obtained the patent.

But we can't be objective about it by ignoring those aspects and proclaiming patents to be the savior of inventor.

I am not a fan

hear hear

Yes it is amazing

While protection of intellectual property is essential I do have a philosophical concern about patents because they can prevent someone from using ideas that they have independently created and developed if someone has filed a patent previously.

This is perhaps more relevant in the software industry where there are many patents on relatively obvious technical solutions that any experienced practitioner could and often has independently developed. This information is organized in such an obscure manner that a software engineer simply has to hope that no one sues them for "using a menu to select system options".

By the way, I made that up, but I can't really tell how much US5664133 applies to any program -- and it was the first hit on google searches.

Without patents and copyrights there is less incentive for creators to create. It is as simple as that. Instead of discouraging those who keep the wheels turning with their innovation, the state makes it increasingly difficult for them to do so. As with everything else, the state continues to make difficulties, whether it is opening a new business, continuing to run a business, patents, copyrights, you name it. We will soon be regulated out of productivity.

There are few legitimate functions of "government." The most fundamental of those functions are 1) to protect me from outside invaders and 2) protect me from my neighbor and my neighbor from me -- that would include we stealing from each other our physical property and our intellectual property.

I didn't realize there were people out there actually fully against patents. There is no logic whatsoever in being patently against patents.

So the real question lies with length of patent. Does thinking a patent should have a shelf-life disqualify one from being a true Objectivist?