Why should we have patents? And why should we limit the period of patent control or ownership?

Question

Complete A's please! Q is a two-parter.

A to 2nd part interests me more

Haven't patents for some things been extended beyond 17 yrs in some cases to perpetuity? And some patents inherited and renewed by the inheritors? What about the patents for the image of dead Celebrities?

Sorry for adding the addt'l corollary Q's as its adding to the burden of those who have answered.

I know patents and copyrights differ, but the basic idea behind granting them is similar if not the same. Pls do not carp the Q w/o attempting to answer constructively(ie helpfully) the sense of the Q, esp part 2 of the 2-part Q

I also know there are trademarks, before someone brings it up. I don't know if the image of a celebrity is one of the three possibilities, But that is not the focus of the Q anyway. Sorry I even mentioned it, bec it gives a handle for the nitpickers to grab onto & who have no intention to try to help the Q-askers.

Answer 1

Patents are the impetus for research.. they protect intellectual property from copying or "infringement" so that an inventor can profit from an invention and pay back the cost of developing the invention and make a bit of $$ off of their intellectual property.

As for limited the period. This is a judgment question and a balance of private rights to public rights. If I remember a patent protects for 17 years -- which is a long time and should be long enough for many to profit from their inventions. However, the limited period also protects society, an inventor should not be able to profit from an invention (or worse yet hold something off the market) that society desperately needs indefinitely. The limited period also promotes society and advancement in other ways.. it promotes inventions on top of previous inventions, etc.

Answer 2

Patents and other Intellectual Property (IP) concepts are defined in the Constitution. The Founders did not invent them out of whole cloth, but they did derive the specifics from legal trends that had been brewing for centuries up until that point, and they adapted that for the society they were building.

The basic idea, as enumerated in the Constitution, is that IP is available in order to promote advances in the arts and sciences.

Why was that important? Because it was recognized that society is not stagnant, and that in order for society to grow and evolve, such advances would have to be made.

Why protect them? The idea there is that people will be motivated, or incented, to advance the arts and sciences for the benefit of society by granting them a limited economic monopoly in the invention or creation.

In the case of inventions, the economic monopoly is called a patent. for a limited period of time, the inventor has exclusive rights to market the invention and profit from it, and after that, the patent expires, and the public can benefit from the advancement without economic payments to the owner.

It is really a pretty effective system where it works, and quite a clever idea if you think about it.

Copyrights work similarly, btw, and there is a current debate if congress oversteps the Constitutional bounds and definitions of a "limited term of monopoly" when it repeatedly extends the terms of copyrights, in effect never allowing them to expire.

the figurehead for that debate is Mickey Mouse, because a few years ago, the earliest Disney copyrights *would have* expired, placing the material in the public domain, with more to follow every year, had Congress not acted for the umpteenth time to extend the copyright term.

Patent terms have not been extended so far into the future though AFIK.

Answer 3

"Why should we have patents?" - This encourages innovation by allowing the inventor to profit from their work. Otherwise someone can spend a lot of time and money to invent something and then another company can sell the item for a small portion of the price since they did not have the research and development expense.

Answer 4

OK, let me ask you, if you spent years of your life working on an original idea, wouldn't you want to reap some gain from all your hard work? If there were no patents, someone could take a look at what you've done, copy it, and sell it much cheaper than you could, because you're trying to recoup the costs of development and years of work.

Answer 5

Patents on the images of dead celebrities? Do you know what a patent is?

Answer 6

The easy answer is that capitalism is a great motivator for investment, invention and development. If you want people to invent new drugs, new technologies and things to improve our lives you reward them with the "rights" to it. Otherwise they won't bother to invent it.