SubscribeWhy patents are evil
The more I learn about patents, the more I wonder if the whole system should just be abolished — I’m not just thinking software patents here, which clearly are absurd, but patents in general. It seems to me that there is little or no evidence that patents do any good at all, and lots of evidence that they do harm.
An article in Techdirt demonstrates this:
Back in 2005, we pointed out that Seagate’s CEO, Bill Watkins, should be worried about the future of flash solid state drives (SSDs) eventually replacing hard drives. It’s taken some time, but those SSDs are starting to show up in laptops like the MacBook Air and the Lenovo Thinkpad x300. […] So what’s Watkin’s response? If SSDs get really cheap, he’ll just sue everyone for patent infringement. Yes, even though SSDs are totally different technology than a standard hard drive, Seagate’s holding on to patents that cover “many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer.”
If the USA (and other developed economies such as the EU) had a market economy, then Seagate would be forced to compete on the quality of their products — and they’d be successful to the extend that they made stuff people wanted, which would benefit us all — rather than using legal tactics to knobble the competition. The present system allows rent-seeking patent holders to harm competitors, consumers, and (indirectly) everyone.