most of the wonders of the modern age, from mule-spinning to railways, steamships to gas lamps, seemed to have emerged without the help of patents. If the Industrial Revolution didn’t need them, why have them at all?
.. It has been the lure of membership of the World Trade Organisation that has pushed patent rights into emerging economies such as China’s. One of the reasons why talks on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal involving countries which produce 40% of the world’s economic output, ended inconclusively last month was the strong patent protection Western countries wanted for biotech-based drugs.
.. A growing amount of research in recent years, including a 2004 study by America’s National Academy of Sciences, suggests that, with a few exceptions such as medicines, society as a whole might even be better off with no patents than with the mess that is today’s system.
.. Reviewing 23 20th-century studies Mr Boldrin and Mr Levine found “weak or no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation”—all it does is lead to more patents being filed, which is not the same thing.
.. Mr Boldrin and Mr Levine argue that patent filings tend to be carefully written so as to obscure how the patented idea works even from experts in the field.
In his history of intellectual property, Piracy, Adrian Johns of the University of Chicago notes that such shenanigans were already under way in the 18th century, with inventors taking care to leave out as much detail as possible from their applications.
.. Mr Boldrin and Mr Levine reckon that once subsidies and tax breaks are accounted for, American private industry pays for only about a third of the country’s biomedical research.
Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful
The White House intellectual property adviser Colleen V. Chien noted in 2012 that Google and Apple were spending more money acquiring patents (not to mention litigating them) than on doing research and development.
Bruce Perens: Software Patents vs. Free Software
The original letters patent were the orders of a king. These early legal documents were often used to grant special privileges to the kings friends. Many letters patent granted a monopoly in a particular business to one family, forever. Anyone else who went into the same business would have been defying the orders of the king, so off with their heads!
Copyright notices for open source projects
So what date should you use?
There’s precedent for this practice. If you ever look at the copyright page of a book, it will likely say copyright 2001, 2004, 2006-2007, etc., noting each year of publication. Here, the same legal theory is at play, with the digital project being unbridled from the confines of the physical world, and thus publishing a bit more frequently, likely being “published”, the year the project was started, and every year thereafter.