Originally posted by DrStiffler
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Good to see that you appear to realize that patents are basically a big lie. They are not there to protect "the inventor", they are there so the big companies can rip the inventor!
A good example is the story of Edwin Armstrong, as can be found in Lawrence Lessings' "free culture":
Free Culture - Introduction (by Lawrence Lessig)
Interestingly, some of Armstrongs earlier patents were used in the 1930's (IIRC) by multinational Philips to crush small producers of radio equipment, amongst which was the company of an uncle or grandfather of Theo de Raadt (Theo de Raadt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ), founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, and a founding member of the NetBSD project. There was a patent fight, and eventually the small businesses, operating together under the name "BORN" ( Bond van Ondernemers in de Radiobranche in Nederland - Wikipedia - Dutch ) won the litigation, because a famous radio engineer Idzgerda (who was the first broadcaster in The Netherlands The first Kurhaus radio-concerts ) found a way to work around Armstrongs patents.
However, even though they won the litigation, they lost. Philips was the only company that produced the bulbs they needed and simply refused to sell them anymore bulbs. And that basically ment the end of independent production of radio equipment in The Netherlands.
Also interesting is the story how Philips was able to build up their company, exactly because in The Netherlands we had a patent-less period between 1869 (IIRC) and 1910:
Royal Philips — Vrijschrift
The conclusion by Eric Schiff about the usefulness of patents to actually stimulate innovation:
All in all, the results for the two industries surveyed are in line with the tentative findings previously obtained for the Dutch economy as a whole. Industrial progress as such was not stifled by the absence of a patent law; in the case of the two particular industries it is, in fact, difficult to avoid the impression that this absence has, on balance, furthered rather than hampered development. Specifically with respect to technical improvement during the period when no patents were granted, the history of the two industries reveals that energetic and often successful efforts in this direction were made by the producing firms. Whether these efforts would have been even more intensive under a patent system it is difficult to say. But, with the possible exception of the 1911 episode at Eindhoven where the anticipated operation of the new patent law apparently did have some advance impact, the impression gained from the two examples is that in industries where technical talent of high order was available, there was no need for the stimulus of expected patent protection to translate its potentialities into achievements.

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