A Quote by Ha-Joon Chang

The days are over when technology can be advanced in laboratories by individual scientists alone. Now you need an army of lawyers to negotiate the hazardous terrain of interlocking patents. Unless we find a solution to the problem of interlocking patents, the patent system may actually impede the very innovation it was designed to encourage.

Ha-Joon Chang

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Actually Advanced Alone Army Days Designed Encourage Find Hazardous Individual Innovation Lawyers May Need Negotiate Now Over Patent Patents Problem Scientists Solution System Technology Terrain Unless Very

Quote Author

Ha-Joon Chang
South Korean - Economist
Born: October 7, 1963

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.

Craig Venter

Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.

Charles Duhigg

Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.

Linus Torvalds

Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.

Sarah Lacy

Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.

Miguel de Icaza

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

Larry Wall

Patents? Disappointed? Don't think of it that way. Software patents weren't feasible then so we chose not to risk $10,000.

Bob Frankston

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

Miguel de Icaza

"Patents make our product defensible." The optimal number of times to use the P word in a presentation is one. Just once, say, "We have filed patents for what we are doing." Done. The second time you say it, venture capitalists begin to suspect that you are depending too much on patents for defensibility. The third time you say it, you are holding a sign above your head that says, "I am clueless."

Guy Kawasaki

While I support granting drug companies patents to recover their investment and encourage innovation, companies that take advantage of this goodwill to build a monopoly must be stopped.

Mike Braun

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.

Vandana Shiva

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

Eric Maskin

The under-funded and over-extended United States Patent and Trademark Office does not have the resources to adequately evaluate the burgeoning number of applications, and too many low-quality patents are being issued as a result.

Viet D. Dinh

If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.

John Sulston

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?