DISCUSSION: In the first sentence of the first paragraph of passage B, the author of passage B says that patents impede innovation. That means they slow innovation.
To weaken this idea, we need to show that patents help innovation or at least don’t hurt it.
___________
- 20 years is a long time in software. The world wide web is only around 20 years old. So two decades is enough time to harm innovation.
- This doesn’t show that patents hurt the reliability of software. It could be that companies that produce better products also voluntarily avoid seeking patents, for ethical reasons.But the quality of those companies’ products wouldn’t suffer if the companies did seek patents. High quality causes no patents, and not the reverse.
- Who cares why vendors oppose software patents? This doesn’t help prove that software helps innovation.
- CORRECT. If innovation were less profitable, there might be less innovation. This shows that patents may in fact increase innovation by increasing profits.
- This doesn’t tell us much. We don’t know if large corporations or individual innovators produce more innovation.
Want a free Reading Comp lesson?
Get a free sample of the Reading Comprehension Mastery Seminar. Learn tips for solving RC questions
Kevin says
I’m confused by the answer to #21 in the RC section of test 69. I thought that all information necessary for answering a question should be in the passage. The answer is D, which associates innovation with profitability. But the passage does not make a connection between being profitable and being innovative (as far as I can tell). Thus I feel that I am expected to make an assumption in order to arrive at the correct answer, which contradicts what I’ve been told about what it takes to answer RC questions.
TutorLucas (LSAT Hacks) says
It’s true that your first instinct should be to look for answer choices that are directly linked to statements explicit in the passage. However, LSAC does also expect you to be able to make common sense assumptions in the event that you don’t have that explicit confirmation (this is increasingly true in more recent tests). The connection between innovation and profitability is a common sense one. In the same way, we can rule out (A) because it’s common sense to assume that given the rate of innovation in computing a patent that lasts 20 years (and not say 1-2) is going to impede innovation. There’s no explicit mention of the length of time a patent might need to cover in order for it to impede innovation, but this is the kind of assumption we can expect a college-educated student to make.