[open-science] Danes step away from patenting in favour of ‘open science’ | THE News

[Puneet Kishor]

"patents have a useful property - they expire in 20 years (usually) and at that point the technology is publicly and demonstrably open" – perhaps… let's examine:

1. Patents, once issued, are always public though not open in the sense we use the term. The very idea of patenting is to let the world in on our patented "thing" so others may get the necessary permission and use it. Of course, the necessary permission may be so onerous that effectively the patented technology might well be out of reach.

2. Unlike copyright, the concept of fair use doesn't apply to patents, for the most part.

3. Twenty years, while substantially less than life+70, is still a very long time. If you have a hard time imagining where the world will be 20 years from now, just think of where we were 20 years ago. Most of the technologies I use today were either still very new or not even invented in 1997. In some fields 20 years might well mean extinction.

4. If 20 years were not already enough, unscrupulous firms use what is called "greening of patents" wherein they make slight modifications and reapply for a new patent which, if they get it, is good for another 20 years. This happens a lot in medical/drugs field.

--
Puneet Kishor
Just Another Creative Commoner
http://punkish.org/About

> On Aug 11, 2017, at 7:04 PM, Jenny Molloy <jcmcoppice12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> One other thing to point out is that patents have a useful property - they expire in 20 years (usually) and at that point the technology is publicly and demonstrably open. An excellent situation compared to copyright.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/attachments/20170812/6f4969c2/attachment-0003.html>