I was toying with the idea of what would happen if we used an open model to develop technology (i.e. no patents).

Idea

People patent their ideas to protect the investment of time and resources that went into their development. For example, if Sony spends 3 years working on a fancy new TV tube, a patent would protect them from having someone else reverse-engineer their idea as soon as they release it, thus reaping the rewards of the R&D without paying the associated costs. In theory, it's quite fair.

Of course, it's not fair to everybody -- the poor Sony scientists who discovered this new technology did so on regular scientist/researcher wages. Sony will make huge amounts of money off this technology while the scientists only see a fraction of it.

This is just a side issue though. It's reasonable that the company which first created the technology should be able to have a temporary monopoly on producing it to offset R&D cost. This (in theory) encourages companies to innovate, since they are guaranteed profit from their invention. If there were no patents, they'd get screwed over by competitors' clones, and people wouldn't bother going out on a limb to create revolutionary.

Well, that's what people think, at least. What would really happen if there were no patents? And what if you had to release the plans for all your technology to the public? What if anything that gets invented was free and anybody who wanted to manufacture it could?

This would definitely be a huge boon for the average consumer! Technology would suddenly be dirt cheap, and people in developing nations would be able to create factories which would harness their surplus wasted labour to produce their own versions of technology which was previously only available to them at hugely inflated prices. They would no longer be slaves to the first world.

But, doesn't this mean that there's no more incentive to innovate and invest time and money into creating a new technology?

Well, it seems like that at first, but there's already an arena where this idea is in use: science! Most reseachers publish their in journals, free for all to use and improve! And they are used, and do get improved! If science was closed and competative, we'd still be in the iron age. Everybody would have to rediscover everything from scratch. We'd have to literally keep re-inventing the wheel.

So, what would happen if this model was applied to technologies that we patent?

The whole world would have free access to the plans for every device, and they would be able to improve them however they wanted. Since there are far more researchers in the world at large than are employed at the company who created the device, a massive amount of improvements could be made. They'd be small and incremental, but distributed over millions of inventors. It would be similar to evolution and natural selection -- the best designs would survive and propagate while the bad ones died out. A new level of quality would arise, and anybody could manufacture and enhance the design!

The main goal of a system like this is to reduce the cost of failing when trying to develop a competative product. If the cost of not succeeding is lower, then many people can all compete in the same market and will be free to experiment and try out the best ideas. It should be obvious that this would tremendously increase the quality of the products/technologies and decrease the cost.

Could a Star-Trek-like moneyless society really be created?

Other Resources

• I heard that Karl Marx wrote a great deal about the steps necessary for a society to progress from capitalism to a moneyless society. Communism as it was implemented in the USSR happened against Marx's model -- the society hadn't progressed through the capitalistic phase before trying communism. This bears looking-into.