Patents seem an essential element of the economic machine. Protecting inventions companies that do research, they avoid the too easy to copy by competitors. Thus, the company is only to generate income from his invention: the traditional justification for patents is that they allow a return on research efforts. Indirectly, they encourage such research.

In the academic scientific research (in universities for example), we can assume that there is no problem of incitement to research: the researchers are there to seek, and they are paid whatever happens to it . Most so-called fundamental discoveries (eg, theory of relativity, or the discovery of the spin) have never been patent. However, this may