Patents and the Economic Incentive to Invent

Patents are regularly considered as an economic incentive for innovation, in the sense that they provide inventors (more properly, innovators) a possibility to obtain an economic reward for their creative efforts. The reward secured is then a means, if not the means to pursue the ultimate aim to promote the technical progress — the logic laid down, inter alia, in Section 8 of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. While there is virtually no disagreement that inventors do deserve a reward, the subject matter of dispute between pro-patent and anti-patent advocates is whether the patent system is an appropriate or inappropriate form of securing inventors a socially acceptable and justifiable reward.