this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Disagree. Look at Sawstop. It took years to even get to the patent filing phase. Then he tried to get companies to adopt it. They didn't. So he spent years building a company and manufacturing base to support it. By the time he finally got things into stores and had a chance to pay back his investment the patent would have expired under your idea. There would have been zero incentive to do all that investment and the technology would have never become available.
Your five year rule would harm anyone not already extremely wealthy. It would further incentivize corporations to maintain control over markets. It would also create a situation where companies would be trying to recoup all their investment costs in that 5 year period which would result in extremely high prices. Like the pharma companies on steroids charging a 5000% markup.
How's about a patent that expires 5 years after its first use by a billion+ dollar company? 5 years after it is used in more than 10,000 products? 5 years after its licensing has yielded over $1M in profit? 5 years after spending over $100k on advertising? 5 years after your first major court settlement?
I think there are ways to protect individual innovators but also lessen patent abuse
The more fine-tooth details you put in it the easier it is to exploit or get exceptions. It's how you have a tax code where 10% tells you what to pay and 90% tells you how not to pay it.
But the only thing I would change would be a software patents should be dramatically shorter than hardware patents given the life cycle of software.
There are rumblings that all tablesaws will have to ship with something like that installed. It could make it illegal to sell your old tablesaws just like it's illegal to sell old lawn darts.
The patents are expiring and once they do regulators will kind of have their hand forced. Trying to mandate a solution only available through one provider is a nonstarter. And that's part of the darker side of Sawstop. He did try to have it mandated by law after companies didn't buy in. It was a very self serving move that made a lot of enemies.
So I'd never heard of sawstop so I looked it up.
Why couldn't he get anyone interested in using that? It's brilliant.
If one company took it up it would have created a war in the industry. Everyone decided to play it safe with business as usual. Because companies don't care about anything other than profit.
Technically there is no incentive for me to get out of my bed but i still do.
Lucky you that there is someone providing for you.