It is actually not that easy to imagine a world without patents. At least, not if you really try. If you are the kind of person who is generally opposed to patents, or who thinks that the patent system is fundamentally ‘broken’, you might suppose that you can easily imagine a world without patents. And you might imagine it as some kind of utopia: no software patents, no ‘business method’ patents, no gene patents, no patent trolls, no ‘FRAND abuse’, no Apple v Samsung v Oracle v Google v Motorola v Microsoft v HTC v …But this is not really imagining a world without patents. This is just a world without some of the messier consequences of patents. If you really want to imagine a world without patents – or, indeed, any other form of intellectual property rights – you have to try to imagine all of the other consequences of this hypothetical scenario.
First you need to ask yourself, what kind of scenario are you actually trying to imagine? Do you want to visualise what the world might have been like if there never were patents? Or do you want to imagine what would happen if all patents were to be abolished overnight? The second scenario is more practical, in the sense that it is at least theoretically possible (although astronomically unlikely). However, the first is more interesting, in the sense that it encourages one to imagine completely different models for innovation and technological advancement which may have developed in the absence of patents.
Tags: History, Law reform, Patents and society, Venice
