...all claiming that they would have done all the work.
Its worse than that. They claim that the speculative idea was all of the work, and you're nothing but a thief who stole it and did the easy part of, you know, actually doing stuff.
Its worse than that. They claim that the speculative idea was all of the work, and you're nothing but a thief who stole it and did the easy part of, you know, actually doing stuff.
If this continues, soon someone might claim that Gerdt von Bassewitz invented space travel (Peter and Anneli's Journey to the Moon - the German title is actually nicer - translated: Little Peter's travel to the Moon -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Anneli%27s_Journey_to... )
Ideas come in thousands and if not executed are not worth a dime. Doing it is the hard part and that's why companies building things generally get paid / make more money than science fiction book writers.
If you had to manufacture something before you could patent it, then your idea could be stolen by any potential investor. And some solutions you can't manufacture without help from entrenched businesses. Robert Kearns shopped around an idea to GM and Ford for a new wiper system. They stole it without paying him. If patents couldn't be held by NPEs, then the law would always be on GM and Ford's side, because Kearns didn't happen to own a massive automobile production line.
Why should owning a massive car factory be the only thing that qualifies you as an inventor?
Also, anyone who can beat you to market has a defense against your patent claim. The biggest, richest, fastest manufacturers win the right to produce everything they never invented.
Don't get me wrong, the patent system is definitely broken. The way it's broken happens to get exploited by certain non-practicing entities. But the problem isn't NPEs, it's _some_ NPEs, and really, it's just the features of the system those NPEs are exploiting.
The problem with our patent system is that no one actually seems to care about novelty or obviousness, even though they are supposed to.
Consider "a method for thermal refreshment of bread" (patent number 6080436). It's a toaster patented in the year 2000. David Martin, a patent quality assessor, claims that about 30% of the patents his firm reviews are for things that have already been invented.[1]
Software has it's own special version of this problem. Juries can't code, so they don't have any clue what's obvious, what's just an incremental improvement that anyone could produce if they knew the language. Juries can't tell the difference between design tweaks and brand new methods.
The problem is not that the system rewards intellectual effort, the problem is that the system rewards things that are effortless.
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/t...
E.g., a test for novelty and obviousness is that a skilled practitioner of the arts is shown the "result" of the patent (or a description of the result), but not the actual patent (which details how to achieve said result). If the practitioner can infer how the result is achieved, then the patent is not novel enough.