Jobs and skills
Contents
Reducing job security
When employees are working with patented ideas, companies can lay off staff without any fear that the layed off staff will start a competing company.
Companies can close their office in one country, open one in another country.
From the point of view of the ex-employee, they have skills that they're partially prohibited from making use of for finding a new job or starting their own company.
From the point of view of reducing unemployment, the country finds itself with many skilled people whose skills are unusable for 20 years.
This situation makes it clear that rather than being a form of "protection", software patents are a tool for exclusion. This argument is particular to software because with manufacturing, the layed off staff don't have a factory with which to compete anyway, so the existence of patents changes nothing in the case of jobs in the manufacturing industry.
Workers unions might see this as motivation to get active.
De-skilling experienced workers
When software developers work in companies that patent software ideas, if they move to another company, they face uncertainty about what skills they legally allowed to use without violating that their previous employer took out on their work.[1]
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- Harm to education - which also deals with the problem of learned skills being unusable
External links
References
- ↑ http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/06/mailing-out-patent-absurdity.html (See 8th comment, which starts "Funny coincidence. I was just thinking...")
