From the readings, what exactly are patents? What are the ethical, moral, From the readings and my experience of having a dad has a patent lawyer, a patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention-a product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem. It essentially provides patent owners with protection for their invention.
There are a number of reasons why granting patents can be helpful to society. The first is that the very essence of granting someone a patent gives merit to these people for their idea’s and protects them from being stolen. Therefore, people can actually benefit from their contributions and innovations.
In addition to the rewarding people for their new ideas, having the concept of a patten provides an incentive to individuals because the patents recognize their creativity and offers the possibility of material reward for their marketable invention. Patents fuel the progress of humankind by motivating people to take action when they see something that can be fixed. Overall, patents are necessary and definitely promote innovation. However this might just be my biased side speaking. Working at the law firm my dad works at and seeing patent applications and talking to my dad about what he does presents patents in a positive light.
There are challenges to patents, specifically in the technology world. The people making the patent rules are government officials. However the problem with this is that they are making rules on everything, software and technology included. However, the government does not fully understand what software means and thus cannot make the best policies in terms of patents for software and other technology.
Finally, I must address the notion of patent trolls and if they are good or bad. This is of course a difficult question to answer. To start off, the readings refer to a patent troll as “a person or business who takes advantage of the patent law stating that most patents are “twenty-year federally mandated monopolies on a novel, non obvious, useful invention” by filing for patents of which they have no intention of using”. These patent holders then sue corporations or businesses that develop the product or a similar product, sometimes without the knowledge that a patent for the technology already exists. Obviously this puts patent trolls in a bad light. However, on the flip side, one can argue that the trolls help the entrepreneurs, the little guys in the industry who would have their ideas stolen by big corporations. So, overall I am not sure if patent trolls are good or bad. I would need to delve deeper into the research and read about more cases to make a concrete, educated answer.
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