O mito do inventor solitário

A new paper on "The Myth of the Sole Inventor" by Mark Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford, reinforces Mr Sanchez's point.

  [S]urveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. ...
The result is a real problem for classic theories of patent law. If we are supposed to be encouraging only inventions that others in the field couldn’t have made, we should be paying a lot more attention than we currently do to simultaneous invention. We should be issuing very few patents – surely not the 200,000 per year we do today. And we should be denying patents on the vast majority of the most important inventions, since most seem to involve near-simultaneous invention.

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