However, it’s one of the easiest ways of getting paid for your ideas not mentioning lots of time behind the idea patenting.

Actually, it’s not. Two things that make it much harder are:

1. You have to show a working prototype and prove that it is the first of its kind to get the patent.

2. Legal charges stop most of the “regular people” from making money out of it.

Patents aren’t for making money. They are mostly for protecting intellectual property. But they don’t do a good job of protecting it, so they will die out or evolve into something completely different eventually.

As I said, something as common as a “wheel” has been patented more than once. People managed to phrase it differently and trick the patent giving office (like “a device to help carry heavy loads around” vs. “an essential part of the device for entertainment and fun”. But none of them made any money out of it, or managed to hold on the exclusivity on wheel production.

I’ve enjoyed the first article, because the second one examples typical bureaucratic stuff we can find in any administrative sector of the state

slow down the money making process…

However, it’s one of the easiest ways of getting paid for your ideas not mentioning lots of time behind the idea patenting.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/2036215&from=rss

quite a few smart people expressed their opinions against patenting system. One of them is a famous lawyer, who is a huge open source supporter – Lawrence Lessig. Here is one of his opinions:

http://www.lessig.org/content/standard/0,1902,4296,00.html

There are more around the web…

a lot of things sounded as utopia in their time… never-the-less they happened. It’s difficult to stop progress. It’s almost impossible to stop progress just by creating a bunch of laws (Kopernik is on fire, anybody?). It’s definitely impossible to stop progress which is backed up by lots of money making. Patents, being a purely bureaucratic issue, slow down the money making process…

Sounds like utopia, but It’s interesting!

we’ll drop this whole patent thing, as we did with so many other things that stopped making any sense (money in gold, calling each other “comrades”, wearing hats, etc).