The Advantage And Disvantage Of Patent System

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The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Patent System - from an Approach of Patent Law After 6 rounds of lawsuits since 2004, in Dec 2010 Protech, a Chinese local company finally won the patent infringement lawsuit against Leviton Manufacturing Company, an American based global top 500 company. This is the first time that a Chinese enterprise prevails in U.S. patent legislation. But the cost is huge: 6 years time and over 30 million US dollars 1. The lawsuit has caused a hot debate in China on how and if patent should be protected. It is a long-time existing debate: is patent system really economically efficient or is it good for the development of the whole society. Traditional patent theory supports that patent law encourages innovation, increases the economic development and contributes to the technology improvement. Chinese patent law stipulates in its first term that “the legislation of patent law is to protect the patent right of the inventor, encourage innovation, help to widen the application of the innovation and to improve the development of sciences and technologies”. The patent-supporters hold that patent system will produce huge economic benefit, ie. patent system will incentivize more innovation and hence add more new products or new method to the society. They argue that innovation itself is a kind of public welfare and the society should encourage its realization. Yet the materialization of the innovation or other intellectual property requires big amount of manpower and monitory input, and if the innovation has been publicized, it may be copied or imitated easily. If there isn’t any protection over the intellectual property, other competitors can copy the innovation at a much lower cost. This caused the so-called “free-riding” problem, which means the inventor bears huge research and development cost while other competitors enjoy the

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