Note: This is from my original blog, written December 2008. This is US-centric. I’ve decided to revive some of them.
And now to part 3. This is much shorter because I really don’t care much for patent laws.
Patents are mostly to protect inventions. Patented inventions are protected against other people from making, using, or selling them. Utility patents extend about 20 years, while design patents only last 14 years. Utility patents also require maintenance fees for the 3½, 7½ and 11½ years into the granted period; the patent can be removed then. Patents can be extended, but this is much fuzzier than trademarks: the U.S. patent office chooses if and for how long the extension should be for. Like trademarks, patents must be filed for each country.
Patents have much more criticism than copyrights and trademarks. These include:
- Prevention of new inventions: Pharmaceutical companies notoriously patent chemicals and do no further research with them; this prevents the chemicals to be used for other’s research. (See “Patent trolling“)
- Complaints against simultaneous inventions: It’s perfectly possible for two people, with no connections, to invent the same thing. That does not matter for patent law; whoever filed first (rather than finished inventing first) keeps the patent.
Some interesting aspects of patents, is that they can cover things not covered by copyright, like fashion designs and recipes. It’s still under debate whether software should be patented in addition to copyrighted.
Tags: engineering, intellectual property
