hyc's Journal: More on Intellectual Property

So one suggestion was to cut back the length of time that IP protection lasts to a more reasonable length, like 7 years or so. This sounds like a good idea to pursue.

Remember, the spirit of the original IP law was to foster a creative person's ability to continue to creatively contribute to society. I think it's reasonable to expect to be paid for the blood/sweat/tears that went into developing the original idea. I think it's reasonable to expect to make a profit, enough to enable one to continue developing the idea and explore new dimensions. That's all great. But realistically, how much can you milk out of one single idea? The idea is only "new" for so long, and others will come along and build on it, expand it, or come at the topic from a completely different direction. A new idea's useful lifetime is extremely short, especially in this age of such incredibly rapid change.

The one thing that is worrisome about an extremely short patent duration is that an individual inventor may not have the means to market the idea within such a timeframe, and then once the idea enters the public domain a larger company steps in and runs with it. Certainly large companies are known to manipulate market forces precisely to prevent small innovators from disturbing their turf.

Maybe a patent should be valid until (e.g.) 7 years after the first commercial realization of the idea *by anyone*. If you never bring it to market, then it never expires. If you license it to someone else and they market it, that starts the countdown. If you just sit on it, never license it and never market it, then you own it forever. (This kind of defeats the original purpose though, since it's hard to see how your idea ever benefited society if you never really deployed it in society.)

This brings up one of the key concepts that needs to be understood - Intellectual Property has no intrinsic value. It's an abstraction, it means nothing in the real world. It only acquires value when you instantiate an idea in the real world. If you never develop the idea, and never share it with anyone else, then its impact on the world is zero. Utterly pointless.