Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!columbia!cubsun!shenkin
From: shenkin@cubsun.BIO.COLUMBIA.EDU (Peter Shenkin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IBM lawyers and the patent system  (Was: Split I and D caches....)
Message-ID: <70@cubsun.BIO.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Date: 4 Aug 88 15:33:10 GMT
References: <62370@sun.uucp> <15086@apple.Apple.COM> <62555@sun.uucp> <8729@pur-ee.UUCP>
Reply-To: shenkin@cubsun.UUCP (Peter Shenkin)
Organization: Dept. of Biology, Columbia Univ., New York, NY
Lines: 53

>In article <62555@sun.uucp>, dre%ember@Sun.COM (David Emberson) writes:
>> The patent system was intended to protect inventors, not monopolies.

In article <8729@pur-ee.UUCP> hankd@pur-ee.UUCP (Hank Dietz) writes:
>No.  The patent system was designed to protect investment in technological
>development, hence encouraging development of innovative new devices.

<I write:
No.  Or yes?  I believe the original early-19th-century law setting up the U.S.
patent system states that the system is designed to facilitate the 
proliferation of technological innovation.  This is not at odds with the 
above-quoted comments, but it does give a different perspective.  

The idea was that without a patent system everyone would carefully guard 
anything innovative he discovered, so that no-one else could use it.  The 
question was how to get people to disclose their inventions.  Well, obviously, 
if you could disclose it, but no-one else could ever use it, that would be 
almost as bad as non-disclosure.  So the compromise was that if you disclosed 
it, you could have sole rights to it for a limited time -- the term of the
patent.

So why should anyone bother disclosing, if without disclosure one can keep
an invention a secret for ones sole use forever?  There are two reasons I 
can think of:  (1) you can license your invention while you still own it, 
and make extra bucks, if you want;  (2) if you don't disclose it, someone 
else might discover the same thing and patent it first.

In fact, if the invention is very clever and unlikely to be rediscovered,
an enterprise might well decide to not patent it and keep it a trade 
secret instead.  This would seem to have the implication that the the things 
that get patented are not the very best new inventions -- they're the ones 
people guess others might think of soon.  This would tend to keep the quality 
of patent applications pressed up against the fine line of just-bare-
patentability.

And another implication would seem to be that companies with larger 
resource bases can afford to file more questionable patents, since they
can research them, push them through the system and defend them more
capably than their competitors.  And if patent applications to press up
against the aforementioned fine line, there will be times when honest
people will disagree about patentability.

This doesn't imply that the IBM's of the world are unethical for doing this, 
in my opinion; on the other hand, I would feel it unethical for a large company 
-- or a small one! -- to file and defend a patent that they don't really 
believe is valid, just to tie up its competitors in litigation.

This non-comp.arch-itectural $0.02-worth brought to you courtesy of:
-- 
*******************************************************************************
Peter S. Shenkin,    Department of Biological Sciences,    Columbia University,
New York, NY   10027         Tel: (212) 280-5517 (work);  (212) 829-5363 (home)
shenkin@cubsun.bio.columbia.edu    shenkin%cubsun.bio.columbia.edu@cuvmb.BITNET