Patents received by FIRST Teams

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by 4throck

To go any further into this would get into a debate about the merits of intellectual property itself, an argument that this forum is not exactly conducive to.

On the contrary, that is exactly what this thread is concerned with.

The patent system was created order to promote the creation and sharing of inventions rather than keeping them secret. It provides a period of exclusivity to the inventor as a reward for making the invention public. Without that reward, we'd likely have a lot more "magic formula" inventions that would never become available for use by society at large. If every expression of an idea were considered to be in the public domain, ideas would be a lot less valuable. There'd be little economic incentive to come up with them in the first place, and basically no incentive to share them.

One of the cultural concepts that has emerged from the teams participating in FIRST is that ideas are worth sharing. The urge to compete tends to drive teams to hold the ideas close during the competition season, but the urge to contribute means they get publicized afterwards. Team 45 was a major player in getting this started, making available complete drawings of robot subassemblies. You can find the current fruit of this in the recently published book FIRST Robotics: Behind the Design.