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Law in Contemporary Society
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Patent Restriction-- By TylerCope - 13 Mar 2015 A huge problem our society faces today is that of patent law. While most people merely accept that patents are a part of our lives, a select group of people are abusing and profiting off of the patent laws in this country. I admit that I was guilty of the former; merely following the crowd and not challenging the idea that our patent laws were seriously stunting the growth of creativity in our country. However, once I became aware of the serious adverse effect of patent laws, I knew that they must be changed to reflect our growing technological society. Patent laws in the United States allow patents to last too long, can greatly reduce the amount of technological innovation, and cause something akin to an arms race for patents. Under our current laws, patents generally last 17-20 years. On the surface, this appears to be a reasonable amount of time. It gives time for the creators of inventions to profit off of them, while not lasting long enough to adversely affect society. Another key point is that patents usually last the shortest amount of time out of all the forms of intellectual property. If investigated further however, it is easily discovered that patent length does in fact hurt our society. The basis of patents is that nobody else can use the idea or creation without expressed consent from the original creator or creators. Whoever patents something gets the benefit of profiting off of that technology for a certain amount of time. This set amount of time is extremely detrimental. Companies have a nasty habit of buying up patents and leaving them dormant, just to fire up a lawsuit against anybody that “infringes” on their patents. Since our current laws allow patents to last almost 20 years, buying up patents is an easy way for corporations to make some money. They do not care that they are not contributing to technological innovation. It is all about making money. This is why the length of time for patents needs to be reduced. If all of a sudden the amount of time a company can hold a patent is significantly reduced, it will in turn reduce their incentive to buy patents just to have them. Also, as a current consequence of patent laws, technological innovation is significantly reduced. People do not want to try and be innovative if they are scared of the big, bad corporations waiting to slap them with a lawsuit. Who is going to spend days, weeks, months, privately developing a new technology when a company can so easily sue for patent infringement? Patent laws not only disadvantage individual producers, they also hurt other companies and the overall market of the technology the patent is in. Companies who possess patents for groundbreaking technology for example, can easily hold all the cards and designate the production and sale of the new technology however they see fit. If a company’s patent allows them to protect too much of an innovation, they can theoretically hold a monopoly on the market. This in turn is always bad for the consumer. When a company has little to no competition and people are still buying the product, it gives them no incentive to try and innovate. It also allows them to potentially artificially inflate the market if people are intent on buying and using the product. Herein lays another problem with patents. They are allowed to protect too much. Innovators should be allowed to use certain ideas in creating their own products. However, our patent laws simply do not allow this to happen. This is taking the abuse of patent laws too far. Companies seem to be completely focused on preventing each other from innovating and creating new technologies. They use this tactic to make their own company more popular and sell more of their own items. Instead, their focus should be on their own internal affairs and allow their creativity and marketing to dictate which company dominates the market. They should not be allowed to pigeonhole consumers into choosing their company’s products by default. This back and forth battle between companies can create a “patent war.” Examining this phenomenon from a historical perspective, we can look at the case of Thomas Edison. He was extremely successful in suing over the patents he and his researchers owned, which allowed him to push out competitors and aggressively take over the interior lighting industry. This picture of Thomas Edison is quite a bit different than the one painted for us as children. This also seems to be the mindset of many people and companies today. They pursue the creation and purchase of patents with almost warlike intentions. The goal is to be the very first to be credited with an invention and push other competitors out of the market. While this may seem beneficial to consumers, it is actually to their detriment over an extended period of time. When parties engage in these “patent races,” oftentimes they run into the problem of simultaneous invention. Both parties argue that they were the first to invent something and thus they should be the ones to own the patent. This process can lead to very expensive litigation that ties up the party’s resources and prevents them from concentrating on other areas of innovation. Although the complete abolition of patents seems implausible, steps should be taken to curtail the problems they cause. It appears the main contributor to these problems is the length of time patents are allowed to be held. A plan should be implemented to begin reducing this lengthy patent-holding period. I believe the ideal patent length is between 3-5 years. This would allow original creators enough time to profit off of their creations. It would also reduce the incentive of companies to buy and hold patents for no other purpose than to sue over patent infringement.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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