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[quinnr]

Sooo...I've been in a chat debate for half an hour about IP. He thinks that you can't 'own' a thought or idea, that with 6 billion people, someone will always come up with that idea on their own, and that patents and copyrights are 'stupid'.

What do you tell them? (We both live in America, BTW)
I've tried explaining how patents help give people a reason to innovate new things, but apparently someone else would come up with the idea on their own anyways.



EDIT:

that's the exact issue, i don't accept society >_>

...it's a lost cause, isn't it?
and...and: "once a though has entered the brain it cannot be erased, once you see the world in a certain way its nearly impossible to see the world for what it truly is."

He's as stubborn as I am, I guess.

We can discuss IP here too...I personally think it's great, and is a good encouragement to innovators, and therefore good for the public as well. (especially once the patent expires.)

[forsaken1111]

You don't own an idea. You own the rights to an idea, and any profit made from the idea.

Anyone else can have the same idea as you, but if you have registered it first then you own the right to profit from it.

[Pathos]

He sounds quite stupid.

"I DON'T ACCEPT SOCIETY RAAAAAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE"

[ChairmanPoo]

If this is concerning internet piracy, you could point out that copyright and patents are different things.

Mention that (for instance) medical products require long periods of R&D, which must be funded. Patents give an incentive to big pharmaceutical companies to do this. And they are short-lived anyway (they last 20 years, and since normally they file the patent 10 years before they actually have the approved sellable product, this gives them ten years of exclusivity).

[olemars]

There are many very bad aspects about patenting that hinders development too, or are downright unethical. Especially in computer software and biology.

Big software and hardware corporations have "patent wars" every now and then where they sue a competitor over infringement over some overly broad/abstract patents, and the competitor sues back since they have similar patents. Take the mexican standoff currently between Apple, HTC and Nokia for instance.

In biology there's the whole patents on genomes thing going on.

The patent system as it currently exists is terribly broken really.

[ChairmanPoo]

On genome patenting, so far it has been denied. Craig Venter tried this first when he attempted to patent the human genome, and it wasn't accepted. Afterwards, Myriad tried to do something simmilar, but smaller scale, patenting the BRCA1 and 2 genes, in an attempt to forbid third parties to develop alternative diagnostic systems. The ruling has been against them.

Now Venter is at it again, and wants to issue a patent over the genes that were used in his "synthethic genome". And most likely will be denied again. Hopefully. Really, the man has done good things for biology and medicine, but if his views on what's patentable became widespread, he'd stiffle R&D.

[Cthulhu]

He sounds quite stupid.

"I DON'T ACCEPT SOCIETY RAAAAAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE"

This.  He's probably 15, and hasn't figured out that you can't solve society's problems by refusing to acknowledge them.

[ILikePie]

Hey, not all fifteen-year-olds are morons y'know.

Usually when I think of something I think is ingenious, original and whatever, I find out that at least two people have thought of it before me. Patents provide some incentive to think up new ideas. You wouldn't waste countless hours inventing something if you didn't know there was some kind of reward for doing so. They also make sure these inventions are useful.

[Cthulhu]

Of course not, but at 15 most haven't been sufficiently jaded by real life yet.  They're especially susceptible to latching onto idealistic movements, and then not doing anything to further those movements except asserting that they belong to them.

[Euld]

As someone who someday will spend years writing books, thus owning rights to them, thus enduring people pirating them, I give you permission to kill him.

Use a pen, it's appropriate for the occasion!

[Phmcw]

... I don't even think that the concept of intellectual property is legit.
You can claim property on an idea, but I don't think it is in the society's interest to enforce it as if it was mere goods.
I am for writer's fee for instance, but against the right for the author's, or worse the right holder to forbid the distribution of his work (not in the case of pirating but for instance, forbidding the distribution of his work in a country).
The pharmaceutic industry is actually a big problem, and a good example of the potential nuisance of patent even of the old kind.
Trying to forbid the use of medicinal herbs, not researching the properties of mix of old patented molecules...

There are serious downfall to the actual copyright/patent system. Not mentioning forbidding new, more efficient method of diffusion because old ones allowed a bigger profit margin.

[Cthulhu]

You're saying that I, who did implant the grim tome Necronomicon into the mind of the Mad Arab, do not have the right to say the Necronomicon can't be printed in x country?

[Phmcw]

No, indeed (and don't make any mistake, I'm not anti social, bien au contraire).
Another example of author's right abuse is that in Canada, a court has gone has far as forbidding bought book to be read by their author before the official release. (because obviously, Harry potter being spoiled is a state affair).  A rather dangerous precedent.

What is really annoying here is that a whole technology is being discarded to allow "business as usual", and a rather heavy enforcement force have to be raised because of that.
Of course he fact that all negotiation on the matter happen behind our backs is frightening enough in itself.

[Virex]

For all patents do wrong, they do have one important benefit people always seem to forget: patents are openly available. Anyone doing research can freely look in the patent databases to see what's already known. Would patents not exist, then even if companies wouldn't try to explicitly hide their technology, it would still be a lot harder to collect all that information that you can get with a single search in the EPO database.
It's also funny you should mention software patents and medicinal herbs, because in Europe, the rules for acquiring software patents are quite strict, even to the point that the amount of software related patents in Europe is negligible compared to those in other countries, while in Brazil and India you canīt even get patents on active ingredients in plants if someone knew those plants had a positive effect. There is also no country besides the US that I know that would alow patenting genes or things like that.

[Cthulhu]

Hasn't it already been established that the US is not allowing people to patent genes?