I've just been reading how the threat of US style software patents has delayed the Munich to Linux. Which set me thinking. Is it reasonable to provide the same protection for a software "feature" as for a new drug?
A new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and launch. A software idea takes at most a few months, all of which (in the US) could be spent writing the patent application rather than code.
It seems to me that the drug company has too short a window to recover its costs, hence the price of new drugs is inflated. Were the patent protection time extended, lets say to 30 from the current 17 years, drug costs would be the same in the long term, fall in the short term, and encourage increased pharmaceutical investment.
On the other hand, any company and their monkeys can generate software patents for a few thousand dollars each. Do they deserve the same protection as a new drug? I think not.
What if the period of protection was made proportional to the investment needed to develop / marketise the "thing"? A mere idea could get 3 years protection, a new drug 30, with the majority of inventions falling around the 10 year mark.
[Small inventors would still have the problem of affording to defend their patents. Maybe patent violations should be made part of the criminal code, and thus protected by the state. If that was considered, then it wouls only work if a patent was implicit in the 'publication' of the thing, similar to how copyright works.]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment