# Should patents be forfeited if the product isn't produced? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 18, 2016, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440 "2016-02-18T13:47:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/41 "2016-02-24T21:30:45Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > Well, there’s something in that. If somebody had beaten Edison to primacy on the electric filament light we might never have had practical home electricity. Inventing the bulb was one thing, but Edison might have been the only person with the vision to put together the plan, the financing, the marketing campaign and so on (and, it has to be said, he might have been the only one with the killer instinct). You know Bill gates didn’t invent MS-DOS, right? It is possible for great businessmen to buy patents from inventors. Its happens all the time. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/42 "2016-02-24T21:39:51Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > No, I think I was right. > > The linked website does discuss some limits. First, this is all based on American law; other countries have different laws. Second, songs from musicals and operas have different laws. Third, you must cover the original song; a license can be denied if you make changes. Fourth, this only covers performances and recordings, it doesn’t cover other usages of a song; a songwriter can deny the use of his song if the cover is being used in a movie or television show, for example. That requires a synchronization license, which can be denied. “According to Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters, use of the section 115 license prior to the 1995 enactment of the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act was extremely rare, with the U.S. Copyright Office receiving fewer than 20 notices of such licenses per year.[18] By 2003, that number had risen to 214, which, while higher, was not considered by the Register to be significant.[18]” I think my way is the more common avenue but cumpulsory licensing might be a good way to make patents available for commercial use while giving the patent holder fair compensation for use of his patent. ---
**Author:** ![Rysto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecccb3/32.png) [@Rysto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysto)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/43 "2016-02-24T22:08:56Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > You know Bill gates didn’t invent MS-DOS, right? > > It is possible for great businessmen to buy patents from inventors. Its happens all the time. MS-DOS was never subject to any patents, and the world is a much better place for that. If early PCs had been a patent minefield, the likes of Compaq would never have been able to enter the market with IBM-compatible computers, and the market would have stagnated. Instead, we saw a number of competitors come in with better, cheaper computers, and the we all benefited tremendously from that. Current patent law is fucked. Vanguard, the mutual fund company, owns this patent related to the structure of their funds. The details are unimportant, but the upshot is that nobody else in the US is allowed to use portions of US law in the same way as them, because they own a patent on that interpretation of the law. That’s insane. In 1985, people started realizing that you could do novel forms of cryptography using a branch of mathematics related to elliptic curves. People started putting in patents for all kinds of things related to elliptic curves and cryptography. The end result was that the field stagnated for 20+ years, because nobody wanted to deal with trying to figure out the patent mess. Patents didn’t encourage innovation here. Instead, they retarded it. Patents are a valuable thing in certain fields. Nobody would spend billions researching new medicines if they couldn’t patent it when they found a working drug. The patent system does its job of encouraging innovation here. But patents apply to a large number of fields where they make no sense, and only exist to enrich patent lawyers and entrench large existing companies. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2016, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/44 "2016-02-25T00:10:16Z")
> [@Rysto](#): > > MS-DOS was never subject to any patents, and the world is a much better place for that. If early PCs had been a patent minefield, the likes of Compaq would never have been able to enter the market with IBM-compatible computers, and the market would have stagnated. Instead, we saw a number of competitors come in with better, cheaper computers, and the we all benefited tremendously from that. That has nothing to do with MS/DOS. It was not patented, true, but it was trademarked, and any company coming out with a PC bought licenses from Microsoft, as they do today. IBM allowing other companies to build clones is what really opened the market, unlike the proprietary PCs like Apple, Commodore and Atari. And there are no Apple clones to this day. IBM is no longer involved, but when Intel comes out with a new chip and chipset they build and distribute reference implementations that the PC makers can use. I assume AMD does the same thing. ---
**Author:** ![Rysto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecccb3/32.png) [@Rysto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysto)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2016, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/45 "2016-02-25T00:15:09Z")
IBM didn’t allow crap. [They sued their competitors and tried to shut them out of the market](https://books.google.ca/books?id=gy4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA15&pg=PA15&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=true), but then the Phoenix BIOS was written and licensed by the PC clone makers, and there was nothing IBM could do to stop them. If the PC had been covered by a patent, though? The market would have been dead. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2016, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/46 "2016-02-25T01:00:49Z")
> [@Rysto](#): > > IBM didn’t allow crap. [They sued their competitors and tried to shut them out of the market](https://books.google.ca/books?id=gy4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA15&pg=PA15&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=true), but then the Phoenix BIOS was written and licensed by the PC clone makers, and there was nothing IBM could do to stop them. > > If the PC had been covered by a patent, though? The market would have been dead. A BIOS would be covered by copyright, as your cite says, not patent, and a clean room implementation (already done for microcode before this) couldn’t be stopped. While the IBM PC was built from existing commercially available components, not proprietary ones like mainframes were, I suspect there was a patent or two involved. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/47 "2016-02-28T16:32:38Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Why can’t I simply invent stuff (what I am good at) and wait for someone else to come to me, instead of having to develop products based on that invention (something I may not be good at) or market those inventions (something I may very well be horrible at). After all anyone can go to the patent office and see what I invented, can’t they? Maybe they will have a cool idea about how to use my new technology that I never even thought of. Or is it too much to ask these multinational corporations to do that? It’s too much to ask corporations to be mind readers, yes. If you’re shopping the idea around to manufacturers, that counts as “effort”, and wouldn’t be a problem under my proposed system. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440/48 "2016-02-28T16:40:58Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > A BIOS would be covered by copyright, as your cite says, not patent, and a clean room implementation (already done for microcode before this) couldn’t be stopped. IBM took the step of publishing the BIOS code. I still have the original PC manual with code in it. Neil Colvin went to the effort of creating the Phoenix BIOS with engineers who had never seen the code to prevent lawsuits but it probably wouldn’t have mattered in the end, most of the IBM code was identical to CP/M BIOS implementations that already existed. ETA: “in the end” meaning after numerous lawsuits and small companies being forced out of business. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-patents-be-forfeited-if-the-product-isnt-produced/746440.md?page=2)