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Offshore Outsourcing World: Are Patents Producing New Ideas?
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Sunday March 23, 2003 at 6:13PM - Offshore Outsourcing World Staff

Are Patents Producing New Ideas?

The patent system was developed with the intention of promoting the development of new ideas. The idea is that inventors will be more likely to take the risks to develop new ideas, if they can then have protection to profit afterwards from these new ideas.

Economists are now arguing that in the software industry, patents are actually counter-productive. The reason is that growth in the software industry is based on small incremental steps forward. Each successive idea is built on previous ideas. When new ideas are generated, many groups with related ideas benefit. When the related groups benefit, so to does the group that generated the new idea.

In the United States, a patent will give an inventor special rights for an idea for over 20 years. Given the quick nature of ideas in the software field, a broadly worded patent could seriously impact the generation of successive new ideas.

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