As for the Topre patent, you can rent the patent if you really want to. You can ask for a license to manufacture, and they may grant you one, but of course you have to share your profits with Topre. They may also demand cash upfront, or a bond, or some other surety. Also they may require certain quality assurances, and they may require design approval as well. But there is a deal that will work. So there is no reason somebody who wants to make keyboards with Topre switches cannot do it. There are some hoops to jump through, but it can be done.
As for supply and demand curves, in the real world, things don't always work out like they taught you in school. Those eggheads in the Econ. Dept. never spent a single day in the real world, just remember that. (I sound like Thornton Mellon in "Back to School", lol.)
What you wrote there has the external appearance of logic but it's nonsensical. The point is not that you 'can' do it but that it's very high priced, potentially, compared to the real difficulty of manufacturing.
Nobody said you 'can't' do it. Of course you can do it. You can go to the moon if you have the billions. This is about difficulty of manufacturing reflecting, or not, the actual market value. So you're off topic.
Hmm, I guess I did not read your posts closely enough. I guess you were just complaining that the price of a Topre RealForce keyboard is too high for your liking. As for the "difficulty of manufacturing reflecting, or not, the actual market value", I have no idea what this means. But I think you are trying to say that you do not like the idea that the price you pay for a Topre RealForce keyboard is higher than the cost of manufacturing the keyboard? If so, well, you are correct.
Let me try to address your concerns without being "nonsensical". First, there is something called "profit". And it is part of an economic system called "capitalism", and profits are defined to mean the surplus money that the capitalist gets to keep from the proceeds of every sale he makes, after subtracting his costs of producing the goods or services he sells. There is an alternative economic system called "communism" where the seller is not allowed to charge more than the cost of production. The communist system, is not a bad system, tbh, at least not theoretically. In practice however, it's proven problematic, but that might be simply because the implementation was flawed. Well regardless of the reason for the failure of communism to flourish worldwide, we have the opposite system: the capitalist system. Now I want you to know that everybody in the USA believes that the capitalist system is perfect, since they all know that all extraordinary profits will be driven out of the free-market by the great equalizer called "competition". Under competition, if somebody creates a great keyboard, then he will get a high price for it since it will be in high demand, and all the customers will flock to him, and he will get extraordinary profits. But then "competition" will kick in, and may other competitors will flood the market with keyboards that are just as good, driving the price down, making you happy. But there is a bugaboo - patents. Patents allow the capitalist to capture monopoly profits for a specified amount of time, as a reward for innovation (allegedly.) The capitalist with a patent has the right to earn monopoly profits by preventing other producers from entering the market to drive down the price of his monopoly goods. Of course, you have discovered that patents distort natural market forces, and you don't like that. Nobody likes the fact that patents distort market forces, except the monopolist, who argues that he needs the patent system to encourage him to continue to innovate. And you want innovation, you said so yourself.
Now, what I was saying in my earlier post is that you could increase the supply of Topre keyboards by acquiring a license to manufacture Topre Keyboards, well maybe not you, but somebody with some access to capital, and some business acumen could do it. This would drive prices down somewhat, because supply would increase. However, it would not totally eliminate the monopoly profits for the patent holder, since the licensee would be kicking back some of his profits to the patent-holder/ licensor, under the license agreement. In the end, the problem is that there may not be enough profit for the licensee to make it worth his while to invest in Topre keyboard manufacturing. But it seems that Leopold is trying to do such a thing right now with the FC660, and it seems that my theory of price pressure is working as well, since the price of the Leo FC660 is lower than the price of any Topre RealForce keyboard available anywhere.
