Exactly, but also for most products so does any company that does any manufacturing.
There are very few companies that manufacture goods themselves due to the massive capital costs. But that means anyone can buy one the devices you invented, tear it down and reverse engineer it, and then send plans of to a (maybe the same!) manufacturing facility. They can even undercut you on price because they don't have to spend any money actually designing anything.
The "remove patents" argument fails for the same reason "remove copyright" fails. Developing anything takes time and money, and if there is no ability to profit from that (because anyone else can copy it - in the case of software this is literally - they can sell it cheaper than you), so there are legal protections for the "intellectual property" rather than just the physical goods being sold. If you remove them all sorts of things break: OSS/copyleft requires copyright - if you remove copyright then any company can take any "opensource" software and use it wholesale, and you can't require them to contribute anything back, or provide sources, or even make the binaries available.
olliej|2 years ago
There are very few companies that manufacture goods themselves due to the massive capital costs. But that means anyone can buy one the devices you invented, tear it down and reverse engineer it, and then send plans of to a (maybe the same!) manufacturing facility. They can even undercut you on price because they don't have to spend any money actually designing anything.
The "remove patents" argument fails for the same reason "remove copyright" fails. Developing anything takes time and money, and if there is no ability to profit from that (because anyone else can copy it - in the case of software this is literally - they can sell it cheaper than you), so there are legal protections for the "intellectual property" rather than just the physical goods being sold. If you remove them all sorts of things break: OSS/copyleft requires copyright - if you remove copyright then any company can take any "opensource" software and use it wholesale, and you can't require them to contribute anything back, or provide sources, or even make the binaries available.