A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Patents are basically rights to try and develop a commercial product.
If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.
If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.
Inventions are rarely just a sudden bright idea. Even if they are, they usually have antecedents in the form of pieces of the idea... Piecing these things together gives one a sense of where inventions come from, and that's interesting.
Inventing is a skill that some people have and some people don't. But you can learn how to invent.
I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.
In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions.
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.
Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.