> Patents grant a government protected monopoly in order to encourage people to invent.
No they don't. The patent system was developed to encourage inventors to make their inventions public knowledge for the public good. It was never about encouraging invention, the limited monopoly was the means to and end, unlocking trade secrets for the public good. You've confused the means for the motive.
The basis for patents and copyrights is this clause in the constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Correct, the goal: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", i.e. make trade secrets public, Science is a public endeavor, the goal here is the public good, not the inventors good. The means of obtaining that goal: " by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." They key word here is "by" which makes it clear we're now discussing means and not the goal. The goal is the first phrase of the sentence.
The original claim was that patents exist "in order to encourage people to invent". You claim that that is wrong, and they exist in order to "encourage inventors to make their inventions public knowledge". Someone responds and says that they actually exist in order "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". You then say:
> Correct, the goal: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", i.e. make trade secrets public
I could just as easily say:
Correct, the goal: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", i.e. encourage people to invent.
My point is that it was left up to us as a society to interpret those words, and just claiming that your interpretation is the correct one does not make it so.
> I could just as easily say: Correct, the goal: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", i.e. encourage people to invent.
No you can't, inventions that aren't public don't promote the progress of Science. Science is by it's very nature a public endeavor.
> My point is that it was left up to us as a society to interpret those words, and just claiming that your interpretation is the correct one does not make it so.
It is so because words have meaning and under no interpretation can promoting science simply mean to encourage invention because invention alone, without making the knowledge public, does not promote science.
Except that the exact phrasing is "useful Arts", which refers to documenting technical skills like manufacture and craftsmanship. The original legal climate with regard to fiction was heavily pro piracy. Not even Charles Dickens managed to make much of a dent in attitudes over a half century later.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
So "useful arts" doesn't refer to writings? How about "writings"?
In an environment where inventors were not sufficiently motivated to produce sans patents, patents might quite legitimately be "promot[ing] the progress of Science and useful Arts" in part by providing that motivation.
That doesn't conflict with anything I said; I never said patents don't motivate inventors; I said motivating inventors was not the purpose of patents, it's merely the side effect of the method used to get inventors to give up their trade secrets.
But back to software patents, if the real societal good of patent law is disclosure than there is no need for it at all in the software world. As soon as Visicalc sold their first spreadsheet every programmer knew how to build one. There is no benefit to society to grant the monopoly in exchange for instructions on how to build a software idea.
No, that's an argument against patents functioning well to achieve disclosure. The purpose of patents is clear: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts and requires no debate nor arguments.
The straight forward way is to give a financial incentive for inventors to tinker and come up with new ideas.
The way you're suggesting is to give inventors (that are already inventing without need of incentive) an incentive to disclose their invention and then that will promote other inventors to build on top of the invention even though they will have pay the original inventor for the privilege.
My point is that neither of these methods are effective at promoting progress in software.
The reason patents exist, as you've repeatedly asserted, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. We are discussing two mechanisms by which that might be accomplished (and by which it is quite arguably accomplished in some fields).
> The reason patents exist, as you've repeatedly asserted, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Then our discussion is over as that is the only point I was making.
> We are discussing two mechanisms by which that might be accomplished
No we are not, as how to accomplish promoting science was not anything I commented on at all. You may be trying to discuss it, but I'm not interested in that digression.
"[M]otivating inventors was not the purpose of patents, it's merely the side effect of the method used to get inventors to give up their trade secrets."
You seriously need to explain how, because as far as I can tell your claim here is nothing but brain-damage. As we've agreed, "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" is the purpose of patents. PROMOTING DISCLOSURE IS A MECHANISM, and PROMOTING INVENTION IS A MECHANISM and YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT BOTH, dismissing the former as ancillary and pushing the latter as central. A claim that you weren't talking about mechanisms... baffles me. Without some clarification, I'm calling it quits on this thread.
No I was not talking about both, I dismissed them as mechanisms to bring the point back to the only thing I was discussing, the goal. I don't care about the mechanisms and if you can't see that then maybe you've got some brain damage to cope with and you should stop talking.
Holding on to the slim remaining chance you're not trolling...
I quote you again:
"[M]otivating inventors was not the purpose of patents, it's merely the side effect of the method used to get inventors to give up their trade secrets."
Let's break this down a little:
"X was not the purpose of patents, it's merely a side effect of the method used to get Y."
And now you're claiming you weren't talking about X and Y?
Note that I've shown this to others, and they don't understand your position either, so if it's brain-damage it's not uniquely mine.
You as much as said it's not a goal at all, whereas it can absolutely be an instrumental goal (which is what I'd read the parent as responding to, and how the issue is often - though not always - framed) without being a terminal goal.
I think this is correct. For example, the Wright Brothers' sole motivation for inventing the airplane was to patent it and make money. Without patents, they would've either kept it secret or not done it at all.
That is quite ridiculous. There were lots and lots of people that tried (increasingly successful) to create aircrafts, both before and after the wright brothers. If there is one high profile invention that would capture the dreams of inventors and invent just for the hell of it, then flying is that invention.
The results of the patents the Wright brothers were granted is quite evident if one compares the state of aircraft during the first world war - USA was woefully behind everyone else, mostly because the Wright patent(s?) stopped aircraft innovation there until it expired.
I have no idea what you're talking about, but the Wright brothers' primary motivation for inventing the airplane was to patent it and make money off it. You don't have to take my word for it.
Also, it wasn't at all clear what the way to invent flight was going to be. Most people were trying an approach called something like "inherent stability" where they were trying to design their aircraft so that it couldn't crash. I.e. instead of giving pilots three axis control, they felt it necessary to design their aircraft so that pilots didn't need any control. So it may be obvious in hindsight how to invent flight, but it was extraordinarily non-obvious at the time, as every invention is.
We'd certainly like to believe invention happens for the sake of invention, but empirically dollar signs make the world go 'round.
That they thought they could make money off of an airplane patent is proof that they understood that airplanes would be useful in their own right. Had they not done it, somebody else would have, with or without patents; it was inevitable. It might have taken a handful of more years, but it was inevitable.
A crude though reasonable way to estimate how inevitable a development was is to look at the period of time between when the prerequisites for an idea were created, and when the idea itself was created. Some ideas, such as the phonograph (which could have been created at least a few centuries earlier) have a very large span of time between these two things. These ideas could plausibly have been "missed" if circumstances didn't align. Other ideas were devised shortly after their prerequisites. Liquid fuel rockets burning LOX and LH2 were first considered by Tsiolkovsky just two years after hydrogen was first liquefied. Goddard did not know of Tsiolkovsky but that hardly mattered, that idea was inevitable. He, instead of Tsiolkovsky, went through with the idea.
In the case of the Wright brothers, powered controllable airplanes hit the scene quite shortly after suitable engines were feasible. They deserve credit for being the ones that actually did it, but there is really little reason to think that there was ever a risk of a future without planes.
Sole motivation? Primary motivation? I don't see the evidence for it. From "The Bishop's Boys", pg. 164:
"Wilbur was thirty-two years old in the spring of 1899. He realized that now was the time. He needed a challenge, a measure of himself—a problem that matched his skills and abilities. The recognition that flight was such a problem did not come in a blinding flash of insight, but grew slowly during the years 1896-99."
He'd been interested in flight since he was a boy.
Thank you, same thing happened with the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, and again is probably going to happen with Beeline(that lovely technology which helps your brain transition text lines).
And how well did that work out for the Wright brothers?
While they were busy trying to enforce their patent, they stopped innovating, and their competitors kept moving forward, exploiting the market the Wright brothers created.
It didn't work out very well for them (or the U.S. in general. Innovation simply moved to France- further away from harassment by the Wright's. I remember reading an article stating that this is the reason so many parts of the aeroplane have French names (fuselage, aileron, &tc)
If you can keep something secret, why would you bother patenting it?
I think that the most important secondary effect is that it puts all inventions on a more of less level playing field.
Inventions that can't be kept secret due to practical limitations(like the cotton gin, or the steam engine) are just as valuable as inventions that can be hidden (computer programs, chemical processes, etc.)
No they don't. The patent system was developed to encourage inventors to make their inventions public knowledge for the public good. It was never about encouraging invention, the limited monopoly was the means to and end, unlocking trade secrets for the public good. You've confused the means for the motive.