Unthinking Majority wrote:This is correct. It's not just about big business though, it's about any business including small businesses who profit from this also.
No, it's about the fact that relieving scarcity is good, and aggravating it is evil.
The question is whether or not IP is desirable.
No, the question is whether you can ever find a willingness to know the fact that it is not.
If you spend money and time/labour on R&D and anyone can just steal your idea for free
"Steal"?? What an absurd and disingenuous load of tripe. Try to get this through your head: copying is not stealing. If you have the bright idea of adding molasses to a pot of chili, and I like the taste and decide to add some molasses to mine, I have not
stolen anything from you.
Clear?
You still have your pot of chili, and you can still use your idea all you want. There is
no justification for you to forcibly try to stop anyone else from adding molasses to their chili, or for government to do it on your behalf.
Clear??then why would anyone bother to take the risks of creating anything new?
Because they
want it. What a concept! Why did you add molasses to your chili? Would you refuse to add molasses to your chili if you could not get a patent on it?
Give your head a shake.
The larger companies would just steamroll over the smaller ones even more i'd think simply from beating them on margins from economies of scale, plus brand recognition, previous distribution relationships etc.
IP monopolies hugely favor the large companies that can afford the legal teams. When I was working for Hitachi many years ago, I learned that they had a special team of engineers and patent lawyers whose
only job was to go through each new issue of the US Patent Office Gazette, identify promising new technologies, and file as many derivative patent applications as they could based on them. These people were not developing new products. They were not developing new technologies. They were
fencing off whole
areas of technology to
stop anyone else from developing them -- unless they paid Hitachi for
permission, of course. I have no reason to doubt that other big technology companies have similar teams.