[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Malkuth

So I answered your questions several times already, it's just that you and aohige are not persuaded by the arguments... so please don't write again that I evade the question, disagreeing and ignoring are two very different things. Discussion between arguing parties has the purpose of enriching our understanding, improving and occasionally altering our mindset, and enlightening the audience... diverting attention, ignoring and twisting each others arguments does not fulfill any of those purposes.

No, you didn't answer the question. As I explained at length in my previous post. It's not a matter of being persuaded or not. Giving vague examples, without trying to explain how they apply, isn't an answer.

By the way, since there may be a misunderstanding, the question isn't "will there still be innovation without patents?", but "how will companies make money off investing in innovation?". I (and why was I the one who had to do it?) explained how it's done in some software. You didn't touch the subject except to say you preferred cheap music and old movies.

Now instead of going in circles, let me ask clearly... do you guys believe that the current patent and copyright laws promote technology and benefit the scientists and inventors?
Not if you think that what I and others consider a better alternative is better, just if the current one that you support is fulfilling even in principle its alleged purpose.

A meaningless question, since everything is relative. It's like asking if junk food is good for your health. Of course it is, when compared to starvation.

Also about the history of innovation. Almost all scientific and technological development were made without any laws privatizing and/or nationalizing them. Form speech, to writing systems, lightning fires... to typography, all transportation systems, programming languages... to the recipes for food and drinks. And those are far more important than the modern patented ones.

Define important. And do notice how long it took to make those inventions (speech? Seriously? why not lungs, while you're at it? Or the action of banding together to form multicellular organisms?). In the same time span, from the invention of patent laws, how many new things will we invent?

Keep in mind that I am arguing against both systems in principles; the main problem I perceive with both laws is that they promote financial oligarchies and monopolies as well as state protectionism. In this context I am arguing against them, and under the assumption that a globalized even partially free works patents and copyright prohibit innovation and technological development.

In effect patents and copyright end up almost immediately from the hands of engineers and scientists that should benefit from them in those of investors that alone have a steady financial gain. Now you want to believe that those many in large is reinvested, you can continue believing it, but I have a very different experience from all the companies I have worked in (independent of size).

What, you worked for companies that had one single idea, and ran with it in the hopes of getting bought, along with their patents, by something bigger? At least those companies got formed.

Also money not wasted on buying patents or wasted in legal power struggles, even if spent of advertisement is better, since that sector can benefit more scientists and developers.

Hell no. It'll benefit advertisers.

But realistic speaking if people become the resource (by not allowing the sale of the right to implement their work) they will benefit more and constantly from it, while now they don't since their work is dissociated financially from them and ends up as another product abused by people who are incapable of producing anything.

If you want patents to be held solely by the inventors (and good luck with the power struggles to get your name on that list), remains the question of who's going to pay for the labs and support personnel and other many expense those inventors are going to need to invent. What's in it for them?

Now very quicly on the examples:

• I was talking about both windows and tech used "illegally" for the iPod
• Those people prefering MS office are the same that prefer the older versions of MS office to the new "better" ones that incorporate features from their free competitors. What is more telling about what is more prevelent is to observe the trend among new users.

• We're both talking about anecdotal evidence, but the ones I talk about - the ones who really use Office suites, prefer the fuller featured newer versions. Guys like me can't stand them because it's not our job to write a lot of documents and complex spreadsheets and would just as soon keep things simple instead of trying to get familiar with a new goddamn interface.
  
  

  About games, you are ignoring the fact that these products are available because they use royalty free technology, otherwise the cost would be higher.

  They're available because there's a market for them.
  
  

  Also their paying customers (not the vast majority world-wide that has pirated copies) have bought windows so they are willing to pay a fraction of its cost. It not that games for windows are better because they are copyrighted, but rather because linux is an operating system for professionals that wouldn't buy a game to begin with.

  Plenty of Linux users are also gamers. I'm not saying the games are better because they're copyrighted (how silly would that be?), I'm saying they're better because a lot of money went into creating them. If you want game companies to keep making games, you have to find ways for them to make money off of making games. You'd think it'd be obvious. I suppose copyright isn't the only way. For games running on servers, they could make money from running servers. But that's rather limiting.
  
  

  I am also delighted that at least you agree that software (even as an anomaly) shows that intellectual property is not the best way to gain money.

  Depends which software, really. I'd appreciate more analysis on why it works when it does, instead of asserting that since in works there, it works everywhere.
  
  

  Addressing your worries about funding research without patents, think of a subverted situation. Intel supported with billions of dollars reasearch for CISC architecture, and this research after 20 years of more billions lost to the elimination of RISC competitors, ended up using a RISC architecture itself now that was available already. Patents lock also companies in their use, while they could offer higher quality and in greater quantity products.

  I see that as a rich person's problem. He ordered a meal that he finds out tastes bad, but feels he has to eat it anyway because he paid for it. Your argument is that if all restaurants served food for free, he could just throw away his meal and order another.
  
  Mine is that if all restaurants were actually soup kitchens, we'd all get whatever they serve there, and there wouldn't be enough for everyone.
  
  

  Finally, on the historical examples, the apparent accelerating rate of technological progress is not because patents and copyright generate money redirected into research, but because there is free access to past research that in principle patents and copyright try to halt.

Patents actually force people to document their findings and make them public. Without them, the incentive would be to keep the exact processes secret. That's all the more true in our world where trained personnel are a dime a dozen (compared to the middle ages).

Patents exist so there's an incentive to make something that's expensive to research, but cheap to reproduce. So innovators aren't in direct competition against people who are only good at aping others for cheap (all the more cheap that they don't need to invest in R&D...). That doesn't describe every technology or creation, but it describes a lot of them. Any replacement system will have to offer a solution to that problem.