So someone inventing something for say mobile phones in the 80s that is still used would have estimated their patentent to not be so useful because the number of mobile phones wasnt that high. And if Apple violated their patent they would just pay pennies because of that? It is extremly hard to estimate the worth of a tech 30 years into the future invented today. Take a tech invented today and tell me what the market value will be in 30 years and how sure you are about that predicition.
If you invented and patented something in the US in 1989, you'd have protections until 2009 at the latest. If it wasn't usable until 2013, then that sucks for you, but it is what it is. Your invention doesn't get 20 guaranteed years of profitability. You get 20 years to figure out how to make it profitable.
The two are very different concepts.
edit: this is why you don't patent every damned thing, just the things that you believe will be profitable over the next 20 years. Otherwise, the cost of researching and filing the patent, as well as maintaining it, may well exceed whatever profit you actually get from the thing.
> this is why you don't patent every damned thing, just the things that you believe will be profitable over the next 20 years
Unless you work for a corporation, that owns your intellectual output anyway, and encourages you to submit forms for anything that looks even remotely patentable.
I want to be clear here: you submit a form for everything, then people in the legal and business development teams decide if its actually worth patenting.
But even then, if you devise some thing that will be very useful if we ever get teleportation working, your employer may still not patent it, if they believe that teleportation is more than 20 years away.
Yeah, that’s roughly how it would work, except 30 years feels way too long.
If other people are better than you at seeing what some technology could be used for it, then maybe we should lower the barriers for those people. The whole point of the patent system should be to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people.
