A patent is a special license granted to an individual or corporation so that they can protect their intellectual property rights from others attempting to make, use or sell them. Intellectual property rights can be inventions, trademarks, industrial designs, and many other forms of creative works. Now the idea of granting a patent can be problematic since technically someone does not own an idea or invention unless they are the ones who file for a patent. What this means is that two people could have the same idea but the one who gets the patents owns the rights or that people could steal others works if they have not file a patent already.
I think patents are necessary to maintain a control on the products that are put out into the world and their quality. Patents also do help innovation since as part of the process of filling for a patent the creator must publicly disclose information on their inventions thus increasing the technical knowledge around the world. Meaning a patent can be in part compare to a scientific research paper about inventions and what sort of things people have thought of making and how. It opens the doors to new innovative ideas and helps the creator feel secure that their ideas are not going to be stolen and misrepresented. Still a patent should not be granted either without a working prototype or demonstrating that they have the ability to actually create the product since there are many patents that are useless. There have been many cases were patents for certain ideas were filled but never actually created so when someone else attempts to make something along those lines the original patent owners try to sue or make money out of the new inventor.
The patent and trademark system is also hard to understand since it can be used in so many different ways. Even more recently the Fine Brothers from YouTube were trying to file for certain trademarks which included their format of making reaction videos which the community did not take lightly. This was in part because of a misunderstanding of what the Fine Brothers were actually attempting but also because the community has seen other corporations use their patents and trademarks to attack other people and thought that the Fine Brothers would do the same. Eventually Fine Brothers decided to drop all their current and pending trademarks since they were losing a lot of subscribers.
Another big problem with patents is when they are simply too generic. This makes it so that it is too vague and thus can be apply to a multitude of things. Sometimes this is done on purpose so that the owner of the patent can easily claim that any system even remotely similar to theirs is infringing on their patent and that they deserve compensation which is why software patent might be the worst. It its extremely difficult to approve in any way that software patents are valid and needed. There are many software ideas that are extremely similar especially things like “interactive applications (such as home, local, goods, etc.) on a computer network” with one part on a webpage and another on a menu bar. Too many systems can be applied that use a similar system or this exact system. I think a software patent should either be extremely specific about the system it is trying to explain or be exclusive to high complex algorithms that have mathematical proofs behind them but anything short of that has just been giving the technology company problems for the past decades.
Norman Morales 