Quotes About Patents

Dr Syngmann: Gott ist der Gott der Juden, sage ich! Deswegen sollst du ihn in Ruhe lassen, John. Was du gestohlen hast, wird niemals deins. Die Juden könne diese Gottesliebe verklagen und sie ins Zuchthaus bringen nach der Berner Konvention, die für Diebstahl von Patenten und Ideen schwere Strafen androht.

People equate patents with secrecy, that secrecy is what patents were designed to overcome. That's why the formula for Coca-Cola was never patented. They kept it as a trade secret, and they've outlasted patent laws by 80 years or more.

We also need a way to regulate the way some companies and individuals buy up patents of promising ideas that would threaten their sources of revenue.

For a decade, makers of AIDS medicines had rejected the idea of lowering prices in poor countries for fear of eroding profits in rich ones. The position required a balancing act, because the companies had to deflect attacks on the global reach of their patents, which granted exclusive marketing rights for antiretroviral drugs.

Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.

Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He was a great believer in exercising his mind and the minds of his workers and felt that without a quota he probably wouldn't have achieved very much. His personal invention quota was a minor invention every ten days and a major invention every six months. To Edison, an idea quota was the difference between eating beefsteak or a plateful of Black Beauty stew.

The new plants are novel enough to be patented, yet not so novel as to warrant a label telling us what it is we're eating. It would seem they are chimeras: "revolutionary" in the patent office and on the farm, "nothing new" in the supermarket and the environment.

I would just love to create a bunch of patents, I have a book of 50 right now.

Edison was not a wholly attractive human being. He didn't scruple to cheat or lie, and was prepared to steal patents or bribe journalists for favorable coverage. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he had "a vacuum where his conscience ought to be." But he was enterprising and hardworking and a peerless organizer.

The quality of American patents has been deteriorating for years; they are increasingly issued for products and processes that are not truly innovative - things like the queuing system for Netflix, which was patented in 2003. Yes, it makes renting movies a snap, but was it really a breakthrough deserving patent protection?

Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high yielding and usually patented varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing.

The international regime of intellectual property rights has significantly shaped the control and distribution of knowledge for hundreds of years. It's a story that began innocently enough in the fifteenth century, when Venice started awarding its famed glass-blowers 10-year patents to protect their novel creations from imitators. Show us how you made it, promised the law, and no one is permitted to copy you for a decade.

Some big pharmaceutical companies have engaged in dirty tricks to extend their patents, holding monopolies on certain drugs to pad their profits at consumers' expense.

America is the only major country that tries to ascertain who was the first applicant to invent the product or procedure. This may seem fair, but long proceedings to determine precisely when each party conceived an idea result mostly in keeping innovations from hitting the market.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing "climate-ready" crops—seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.

With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

Incluso las ideas se pueden considerar abundantes, en cierto modo, porque es posible propagarlas sin límite debido a su naturaleza «no competitiva». Como escribió Thomas Jefferson, el creador del sistema de patentes en Estados Unidos: «Quien recibe una idea de mí, recibe una instrucción para él sin disminuir la mía; como aquel que enciende su vela en la mía, recibe luz sin dejarme en la oscuridad».

Intellectual property has profoundly shaped who makes money in the modern world.

Entrepreneurs do not try and create new types of smartphone technologies now because they know it's pointless: They're going to get sued almost immediately.