Intellectual Property: Is it a necessity?

[Zelig]

No, because neither company was sold nor went out of business.

So what's stopping every "buyout" of a company going out of business being called a "merger" for the sake of keeping IP?

I don't know if Bethesda is still supporting Fallout. As for Duke Nukem, since they did actually work with the series, they would keep the IP.

So you don't have to support any old products, you just have to put out a new product of terrible quality to keep the IP you purchased?

How long do you keep the IP you purchased after producing a terrible product with it?

 

[Ayatollah So]

The complete elimination of Copyrights and Patents would be better than continuing the IP system as it currently exists, although there might be some reforms that would be preferable still.

Pretty much my view, except I'm uncertain about whether complete elimination would be better or worse than the status quo. Both patents and copyrights need to be taken down a peg or two, and fair use allowances on copyrights need to be more robust. We should encourage idea creators to put more into the public domain - especially those who had government funding.

Copyrights that last long after death do not meet any reasonable criteria of "limited times." I consider a decade to be more than enough duration for intellectual property in most cases.

This - so very much.

The concept of patents is exactly about allowing innovators to don't keep their inventions secret but to offer an incentive to share knowledge. [...]

I am a patent owner (3 patents for software) but I still feel completely silly that a patent can be filed without implementation and keep the idea protected for over 20 years! [...]

20 years for the duration of a patent is not short nor long... it depends on the field.

All of the above. Patents can, in my personal experience, encourage the public exposure and eventual public-domain status of inventions. I recently filed for a patent on a process, and without the patent system, my company would have just maintained a trade secret. Since the process is used in-house - we don't sell the machine to others - it could remain secret for a while. Ironically, the main reason to file was probably the threat that another company might invent a similar process and patent it, and then we'd have to pay royalties to use a process I invented

Eventually, probably in less than 20 years, someone else would have hit on the most important aspect of my process. However, there are a lot of additional tricks that make it work better, and all of them are disclosed - so in 20 years, the industry will probably be ahead of where it would be if my company maintained a trade secret.