Open source licensing incentivizes inventors to release their creations to the world to benefit humanity. Their copyright is protected and depending on the license that picked can control redistribution. Their work is protected against people passing their work off as their own, which is the intention of the patent idea.
Patents do nothing like this, in fact, they cause inventors to invent around “protected ideas”. Technology history is littered with examples of inefficient implementations become standard to avoid patent infringement. We end up with negative-incentives with patented ideas. In technology, a patent is a sure way to ensure that an idea is never implemented.
Nothing about patents, or the idea that an idea is exclusive and protection worth is worth salvaging. Patents do not achieve their stated goal.
Closed source software is inherently untrustworthy. The incentive to disclose ideas protected against plagiarism can be achieved through both public trust in our free and open source ecosystem without the need to enforce state violence because some dude dreamed an idea once and wrote a paper.
Can you point to any modern technologically advanced civilizations / nations that do not have something like a patent system? How did those without well developed legal frameworks for intellectual property perform over time relative to others in measures of scientific output and economic development?
What is the alternative? Wouldn’t open source have been the default prior to the invention of patent law?
I am sorry, but if you are arguing for the abolition of the patent system, then you need to provide some alternative solution for the problem the patent system addresses along with some sort of data / evidence that your solution is not vastly inferior. Otherwise the argument is just not very persuasive.
The USA is a great counter example. In the 19th century it took all kinds of european inventions, did very bad IP enforcement, and built out based on rampant IP theft. The IP relation between China and USA today is basically the relation between the USA and Europe then.
There is also Hollywood, the place where Edison could not get his film patents enforced, so every film maker ran to there. Rampant patent infringement made it great.
Or inside Europe, there were cities complaining how the guild IP rules were not enforced on farms. People bought e.g. cheap low quality pots and pans on the farms, with no frivolities or no correct marks, and no money was paid to the guilds. For shame! This was without patents, with guilds being very protective of their knowledge, and inventions still spread without much trouble.
Necessity is generally the mother of invention. Patents just slow things down to protect the established players.
Patents do nothing like this, in fact, they cause inventors to invent around “protected ideas”. Technology history is littered with examples of inefficient implementations become standard to avoid patent infringement. We end up with negative-incentives with patented ideas. In technology, a patent is a sure way to ensure that an idea is never implemented.
Nothing about patents, or the idea that an idea is exclusive and protection worth is worth salvaging. Patents do not achieve their stated goal.
Closed source software is inherently untrustworthy. The incentive to disclose ideas protected against plagiarism can be achieved through both public trust in our free and open source ecosystem without the need to enforce state violence because some dude dreamed an idea once and wrote a paper.