Patents Vs. Innovation

If you follow the tech industry at all these days - and possibly even if you don't - you can't help but hear all about patents. Whether it's Microsoft suing TomTom over ridiculous FAT patents, or RedHat reluctantly assembling a defensive patent arsenal, the one thing that every agrees on is that patent law and practice has a huge impact on both the tech sector, and the economy at large.

One aspect that the guys over at Techdirt have continued to hammer at is the difference between invention, and innovation. Patents place a significant emphasis at protecting the "rights" of the inventor (rights which exist only because of patent law - how's that for circular reasoning for you?), to the point where innovation, the act of making the invention actually useful, is being harmed. I've come up with a simple analogy that I think helps clarify this argument.

Imagine that you're a manager with a couple dozen employees under you. (If you actually are a manager, this should be pretty easy.) Now, odds are that most of your employees are pretty decent. They're good at their jobs, you can rely on them to produce good quality work, but they don't often come up with game changing ideas.

Except for that one guy. You know, that one guy who, if you had to pick your replacement, you'd name in a heartbeat. He's the one who doesn't just come up with a way to make a work process faster, he shuffles things around and makes that entire process disappear, freeing up everyone's time to work more on things that make money.

Now picture he's come up with a new version of some form that everyone has to fill out fifty times a day. The new version is faster, more accurate, and will allow everyone to increase their client billable hours by 20%. Great! Everyone can start using it, the company makes more money, everyone gets raises, and everyone's happy.

Except that in this case, we're modeling our little company after the patent situation we're in. Now, the only person who can use the new form is your one go to guy. Everyone else is stuck with the old form. The company bottom line barely moves, no one gets the big raise, and everyone gets to just watch the one guy doing interesting work while they spend their day filling out the form they're not allowed to use because they didn't come up with it.

So I ask you this: as the manager, which set of rules would you rather try to run a company under?