Bill to limit auto parts patents before House

[Blackbelt]

Originally Posted by herm

There are has to be an incentive to develop new drugs. Profit motive is powerful

Profit is fine. Profiteering and gouging is not. When a drug company increases the price of a drug 10% every year during the patent protection period, that is gouging. When a drug company goes to court at the point when a patent is about to expire to try to prevent the drug from going generic, that is gouging.
The morons in Washington can bleat all they want about lowering the cost of health care, but until they get big pharm under control, it's all just lip service.

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Originally Posted by AppleJuz

this made me chuckle a bit :P

But true: A car is made of parts. This could spell as a disaster for car companies as it could cost them more for manufacturing parts for automobile users. I vote scrap this bill and maybe think of some other thing that they could feast their corrupted eyes on.

As corrupt as a spammer sneaking a link into underlined text, huh?

[WriConsult]

Design patents just cover the looks of a product (a prominent example being Apple's suddenly infamous square box with rounded corners or whatever). I don't see much harm in this bill. We're not talking about shortening the lifespan of functional patents.

I should point out that Thomas Jefferson opposed the creation of the patent office, period. He thought that ideas should be the public domain, immediately available to everyone with no monopoly period whatsoever. I don't quite agree -- I support a limited period of protection (for both patents and copyrights, BTW) to incentivize creativity, but not too long. And for a lot of things we let it go waayyyy too long right now.