Journal RealAlaskan's Journal: Why Corps must be able to own patents
This is a rant I wrote on the subject.
I don't think that in general we should assign right to IP. But there are specific cases in which it is best to do so, and when we do assign such rights, it must be possible for corporations to own them.
There is a common misconception in the old Soviet Union: ``We'll have a free market, we just won't let anyone have property rights, because that's not good socialism.'' Of course, you can't have a market without property rights. Free markets are what happen naturally when people are free to dispose of their property.
The problem with the suggestion that ''...corporations should not have patent and IP rights, they should only be assigned to real people. '' is that if you can't sell your rights, they have no market value. Period. If you can only trade these ``rights'' among individuals, then you restrict the market to folks like you and me. I certainly wouldn't pay $400 for the rights to paper clips under that scenario. The only way that a corporation could justify paying for IP would be if it was assigned to someone who is a majority stock-holder. Why would a company buy its engineer a patent if he can walk off with it? Buying the patent for someone who is contractually bound to stay or sell the patent back seems pretty shady. If that doesn't violate our hypothetical law against corporations owing patents, it should.
But one could license the rights to a corporation. How about exclusive rights to use and sub-license, irrevocable, for the term of the patent? How is that different from an outright sale? It seems that this is really all-or-nothing: either you are free to dispose of your invention as you see fit (assuming that we are going to assign property rights at all) and it has value, or you aren't, and it doesn't.
A system which prohibited corporations from owning patents would work fine for folks who could innovate and produce on their own, but how about engineers and geneticists who need multimillion dollar facilities for research and production? How could a corporation justify paying out tens of millions for an individual to develop a patentable invention, which that person could then walk off with? Again, contractual ties which bind the rights-holder to the corp are no different than outright assignment to the corporation.
I believe that there is no natural right to intellectual property. That's exactly opposite to the situation with physical property, where there certainly is such a natural right. The difference, of course, is that physical property doesn't copy well: if I eat your hamburger, you can't. If I use your idea, you can too. All you have lost is the monopoly.
The absence of a natural right doesn't mean that we should never assign property rights in ideas, but rather that it should not be the default. We should only assign such property rights when it is clearly in our own interests. That's exactly what the US constitution calls for.
For all of human history, we have built on the intellectual shoulders of those who came before. It is right and natural that we should share ideas, and we are all better off when that happens. In order to encourage that, the US constitution (Article 1, Section 8)gives Congress permission
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
This was obviously meant to work in the public interest, by encouraging productive work and its public disclosure. Enriching inventors is plainly not the aim, though it is a necessary side effect. Nor does it suggest any pre-existing natural right. Quite the opposite, in fact; if there was such a pre-existing right, this clause would be nonsensical.
