by teddlesruss dat who

Created on: October 29, 2008

Given that the environment has become an issue unlike any we have faced, and that the idea of patents is even now being held up to critical scrutiny and found to be stifling innovation and creativity to a greater degree than it is facilitating them, is it sensible to lock up technology that can save the world?

Suppose I have a very good idea - say a cheap $10 device for making clean water out of thin air, using sunlight, and then turning that water into a cheap clean alternative fuel. Under the patent/secrecy/fillmypiggybank regime, I would lodge a patent application to see if I had a genuinely novel idea, pay for and wait for the patent process to complete (or at least partially complete) and then the real fun would begin, several years after the idea was first conceived...

Now I'd have to find an angel investor or developer or venture capitalist, (trying hard to restrict them by use of non-disclosure and/or non-use agreements) and start the long dance to find one who will take the idea on board and assist me in getting the product out to the market.

Meanwhile one of the manufacturing processes, unbeknownst to me, is the subject of a pending patent to some university kid in upper Whoopwhoopistan, so we have to retool and redesign. We have to make the "Sunairfueller" out of a slightyl different material to get around the patent restriction, and the price is now $25. After another six months of struggling against several other patent suits and deciding to go ahead and risk the eventual shut-down, we get production units out into the market.

Some company with a few less scruples than us, has had an almost identical product on the market for a year, since they had all my patent research. And three months after it was released, a third company was making a cheap knock-off version of the knock-off of my version. It cost $5.

The Open SOurce (OS) model is surely better in this situation. As demonstrated in my imaginary product's journey above, all hardware is essentially open source anyway, because it's not hard to reverse engineer a product. It's where the term "reverse engineering" first came from, the realm of hardware.

So - I say that in order to get beneficial products to the market, in order to start making a real difference in the course to disaster we're currently steering, we should realise that the patents system is broken, and start making things that rely on innovation and good solid production skills instead of lawyers at twenty paces...

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