Re: Innovations

[bgirard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bernard Girard)]

Michael Perelman wrote :
>Speaking of innovations, Jerome Lemelson just died.  As I understand the
>career of this inventor, he would file patents, let them sit, and then
>sue anybody who would do something similar at a later date.  He became
>very wealthy by this route.
>
>It is very difficult to think of innovation without getting into the
>muck of intellectual property and the legal system.

Exactly. The role of intellectual property is important but also ambiguous.
It played almost no role in the growth of the computer industry. You cannot
patent chip (you can only protect the design of its mask), you cannot
patent software (you can only copyright it, which is different), you cannot
protect an algorithm. It's even difficult to protect disk drives.
If this industry knew such a quick growth, it's  because of this bad
intellectual protection. It was very easy to imitate innovations and
companies who wanted to benefit from their investments had to be very quick
in building economies of scales and market power. In other words, the best
way to keep ahead of imitators was to be the first on the market with an
industrial product.

Bernard Girard
<bgirard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>