Re: Ethics of patenting O&P ideas

Re: Ethics of patenting O&P ideas

David Hendricks, CPO, FAAOP

This is a public reply to Harold Anderson's posting about the practice of
keeping secrets in O&P by patenting ideas and processes in order to
personally benefit from them. I agree with most of what Harold said and I
applaud the selflessness of his motives, but I disagree on one point.

Harold wrote: By patenting an idea or making it secret, we are throwing
walls up in our profession.

My answer is that the whole idea of patent law is to get new ideas into free
circulation. It's part of our free market system and it works like this: By
granting a researcher a monopoly for a limited time, our government
encourages the researcher to spend the time, energy and money involved to
develop a new process. It is the profit motive the provides the impetus for
the innovation. But after that limited time of monopoly, which is designed to
repay someone who has undertaken the expense of developing a new idea or
process, the idea or process becomes in the public domain and no one can
either keep it secret or personally profit from it.

So actually the patenting process is a force designed to get new and useful
ideas into the public domain. Without it, many innovative people simply would
not to through the expensive and time-consuming process of inventing only to
have someone copy it as soon as they had perfected it.

For example, suppose a prosthetic researcher works for six years testing
chemical after chemical until he develops an AK prosthetic skin that flexes
just like human skin around the knee without the AP squashing and the
peripheral wrinkling which accompany all continuous AK skins today. He
comes out with it in a sprayable resin which costs him $30 a gallon to
manufacture, but which he must sell for $150 a gallon to repay himself for
his six years of research. And even at that, it will take him three years of
sales to do so. Remember, he could have been earning $90,000 a year as a
clinical prosthetist during those six years of research. But a month after
his new product is out, another prosthetist sends a sample of his new resin
to a chemical lab to have it reverse engineered. This new prosthetist pays
$400 to determine exactly what is in the resin and within two more months he
has a knockoff on the market which he is selling for $60 a gallon. Without
patent protection in the form of government enforced monopoly, the first
prosthetist will go bankrupt and will never be paid for the six years he
spent, without remuneration, in the quest of something on one guaranteed him
he would ever find. That's why we need patent law. That's how it encourages
new ideas.

This, of course, is IMHO.

David Hendricks, CPO, FAAOP