A patent is a type of industrial property which legally acknowledges the intellectual ownership of an invention – “a product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem” (“What is Intellectual Property”). It protects an owner’s invention typically for twenty years during which time the owner’s consent must be obtained to commercially make, use, distribute or sell the invention. Patent law incentivizes the innovation of new ideas with the possibility of monetary gain. Socially, such innovation is to the benefit of all society; economically, new inventions bolster industry and create new jobs; and ethically, patent law protects innovators from having their hard work and ingenuity hijacked by other parties.
It can be argued that patents both promote innovation and hinder it. Thomas Jefferson once wrote to Isaac McPherson, “Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them [patents], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility.” It is true that mankind is driven by money and that the innovation of new technologies is usually in pursuit of wealth. There are not many who dedicate their lives to inventing simply for the common good. They invent with the hope of making money. Furthermore, humans are possessive – we guard both our possessions and our ideas. Patents allow innovators to share their ideas while keeping them safe from theft and provide the possibility for profit. However, Thomas Jefferson also said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.” In this spirit, it seems that patent law hinders the natural kindling and growth of ideas. One idea might build the foundation for the next. Patents prevent any building upon such foundations. Furthermore, patents create a monopoly on innovations, even those which are life-saving. Patents on medical treatments and devices allow pharmaceutical companies to control their prices and thus, the lives of sick patients. Recently, founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, purchased the rights to a drug called Daraprim used by AIDS and cancer patients. He subsequently raised its price from $13.50 a pill to an unimaginable $750. Additionally, ideas are not exclusive. Two people can think of the same concept, invent the same product. Take for example, the independent but simultaneous formulation of calculus by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz or the case of Elisha Gray, the prolific inventor who walked into the patent office the same day as Alexander Graham Bell to patent a telephone prototype. Without patents, competition would increase benefiting the economy and offering the best products at the best prices to consumers. Even without patents, the allure of monetary gain from innovation remains. In short, I do not believe that patents are necessary. The only case for legal action occurs when the conceptual blueprint of an idea is deliberately taken from its original inventor. We must remember that “[t]he exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right” (Thomas Jefferson).
Software patents remain a highly debated issue. Historically, software algorithms were not granted patents because of their mathematical, and thus abstract, nature (abstract concepts are not patentable). Later cases determined that software could only be patented if it manipulated numbers which represented “concrete, real world values” (“The History of Software Patents”). The computing industry is so young that much of existing software is the fundamental building blocks of every program. The concepts of data structures, sorting algorithms, etc. are used infinitely in almost every new piece of software. It would seem ludicrous to patent the alphabet. With computer science in its infancy, it should seem just as ridiculous to patent the alphabet’s equivalent of the computing industry. What if using a red-black tree violated a patent? Implementing quicksort? Utilizing HTTP? Where do we draw the line? Patenting software slows the growth and innovation of an otherwise booming industry.
According to Wikipedia, patent trolls “attempt to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent’s actual value or contribution to the prior art. However, their existence is not evidence of anything significant, really. They do not prove that the patent system is broken or that it is working. Every system has loopholes and can be misused; it’s simply the imperfect nature of human creations and of humanity itself. There will always be opportunistic parties who take advantage the structure put in place. However, we can continue to patch the patent system to hinder the advances of such underhanded individuals.
Ethics in Computer Science 