Reading 13 - Patents and Patent Trolls
By: Keith MacDonell - kmacdone According to Wikipedia, a patent is "a set of rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or assignee for a limited time in exchange for a detailed public disclosure of an invention." In order to receive a patent, a patent application for the invention must be submitted and approved. It would seem to me that there are several theoretical reasons for the existence of patents. The first is in the interest of the inventor. The patent protects the intellectual property of the inventor and allows them the opportunity to benefit economically from all uses of their invention. In other words, it keeps other people from stealing the inventor's idea and profiting off it for a specific amount of time. The second reason is in the interest of society. Patent documents describe in detail how the invention works, benefiting society with an increased knowledge base. It keeps the knowledge from dying with the inventor when he or she passes away.