Waarom hebben we ook al weer patenten?

Een goede vraag, die bepaalde mensen in Europa zichzelf ook eens zouden moeten stellen.

"The purpose of government intervention and regulation should be to solve a situation where the market has somehow failed -- and the regulation is designed to solve that market failure. It's hard to see what market failure software patents are solving. The industry did incredibly well for many years without patenting software, and it was only recently that, as the federal courts clarified what was and was not patentable, that patent attorneys rushed to have companies patent their software. The market itself seemed to be providing plenty of incentives to produce software products. The richest man in the world became that rich selling software. It's hard to see how there's any kind of market failure that would need the government to support monopolies to create incentives for more people to write software. This is important whenever there's a discussion over intellectual property rights. Go back to the original purpose of intellectual property: to encourage new innovations where the market fails to provide those incentives."