ReadWriteWeb:
According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate.
Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents.
The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility.
Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.
In the study, Torrance and Tomlinson explain how patents have been wrongly justified as a way to encourage invention. The justification has been that by excluding others from duplicating an invention or process, the patent owner is more likely to spend time, energy and resources on their product. However, past studies have proved otherwise. Data collected from PatentSim further substantiates these findings.
Photo by USPTO.