Creation is hard and should have some potential for rewards. I think we need software patents (especially) to be shorter lived and non-transferable. They can only be licensed and the licensing schedule should have to be public and available for all people at the same price. The employer can get a free license as part of the patent process for company use. This gets rid of trolls and patent farms.
No, we have copyright and trade secrets to protect those things. There are many forms of IP protection, but patents are the most questionable by far IMO, and are more likely (in most fields) to be a net loss rather than a net gain for humanity.
> Creation is hard and should have some potential for rewards. I think we need software patents (especially) to be shorter lived and non-transferable. They can only be licensed and the licensing schedule should have to be public and available for all people at the same price. The employer can get a free license as part of the patent process for company use. This gets rid of trolls and patent farms.
Copyright protection is sufficient for software IMO. Very few pieces of software are novel enough to be worthy of a patent, and in the few cases that are, the greater number that aren't outweigh the benefit to the few. When you have to try this hard to salvage the system, it is usually best to not try and salvage it.
Of course! Maybe that's because in the sciences this is a normal thing in order to get published at all. If you present findings with a black box reviewers will want to pry in. And what do you know, the sky doesn't fall with all of this sharing of knowledge. People who put time into their findings are still considered experts and are rewarded. In fact its probably a lot easier to point to your accomplishments when things are actually public and you can talk freely about them, versus layered behind NDAs and whatever else other threats designed to keep you from talking about the work you do to other people who might do something generally useful with that information.