I'm sorry Benson and luca, but none of what you say holds water.

I agree that the patent and copyright systems need serious reform (copyright terms are now FAR too long for example). But to argue patents and copyright should be abolished altogether is like arguing that governments shouldn't collect taxes because it infringes on your civil liberties.

First of all patents.

Trade secrets are NOT a viable alternative to patents, because the profits from patents ultimately come from sales of a product. If you sell a product, it's by definition available to the public and can be freely analysed and cloned by rival manufacturers. Once a product is available, the only thing keeping profits going to the inventor or licensee is a patent.

Of course some people sell their developments as trade secrets to another company under licence, so they never need to manufacture it themselves.

But if you take away patents, then licences become worthless, and if licences are worthless then researchers have no way of making any money from their inventions.

Even if researchers wanted to do research for its own sake, where will the money come from? Who will pay the researchers' rent and food? Who will buy the equipment? Who will buy the materials?


Secondly, copyright.

All of the above applies to copyright too, as soon as you put a book (or whatever) on sale it can be cloned by rival publishers. That means no one has any incentive to pay the content creator anything: bookshops don't, publishers don't, readers don't.

Again, some content creators could work for free, and some do, but a lot of content requires profits in order for it to exist at all. I know someone who spent three years researching and writing a book as a full time job, and there's no way that book could have existed if the author wasn't getting paid for it, and the publisher only paid them because they knew there would be a good chance of profits at the end of it.

It's annoying, but profits are what make many things possible. Take them away and there's simply no one willing to fund a lot of projects.

The alternative, of everything being funded through taxes, works for some things but not everything, and a completely centralised government generally works very badly.