the new economy: information is the new currency. currently, patents are worth money, but in the future money may be worth patents.

absolutely.

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What does company A gain if company B doesn’t do the same thing, what if there is company C that comes out of no where doing more or less the same thing, but then files a patent for a little tiny adjustment that makes their product better than yours… You now have a patent that can’t be enforced and they have a product that uses essentially your idea, and changes it enough to get an advantage on you.

Also, each company would want to do a cost-benefit, that would essentially lead to the total cost of this project to be the same as if you licensed the patent from the company, because why would any company leave money on the table? Doing so would be again against their fiduciary duty.

What I was trying to suggest is that companies that file patents on already-developed processes and inventions, in order to protect themselves from silly patents filed on obvious inventions, be able to secure protection from litigation while essentially “parking” the patent. This could be seen as potentially addressing the Tragedy of the Anticommons, at least partially.

I’m not going to address your deliberately belligerent remarks, except to say that both Sami and davidicus are friends of mine in the real world, and I value their opinions much more than some semi-anonymous, confrontational drive-by commenter.

If someone (wheter a company or a person) sinks $X into developing an invention and they DON’T have a patent on it, then as soon as it is rolled out the competitors can copy it. The competitors then get free R&D courtesy of the company that didn’t have a patent.

Maybe that’s OK in your imaginary universe where everything’s open source, but out here in the real world that quickly comes to mean that it stops making sense for the company to dump $X into developing new things when some competitor will reap the benefits of that investment. That discourages investment in innovation. The founding fathers understood that and that’s why they put the ability for Congress to secure exclusive rights to authors and inventors into the Constitution [Article 1, Section 8].

Your first poster is dead on. Companies that give away their assets aren’t doing their job. But instead of engaging his argument, you just mock him. That’s a sign or either arrogance or intellectual weakness (or probably both). You need to grow up, get out of your idealistic academic shell, and stop ignoring the obvious — that companies aren’t philanthropic organizations, that they do have fiduciary responsibilities, and that things like returns on investment are what drive most innovation, not goodwill.

Whether or not my proposal is the right solution isn’t the important takeaway message. There’s a problem with the way the patent system is set up. It needs to be solved.