Working Patent System

Premise:

The US patent office is granting invalid patents, and the patent holders are using litigation to impede progress. Obvious ideas, sole method ideas, and ideas already in use are getting patents, and being used as clubs to limit innovation. A 7 year patent for a mechanical invention is great, because of the time needed to build a factory and produce the items; a 7 year patent on a software process is bad - because it stifles all development in that area for 7 years. Until the Patent Office is computer-literate, there is too much lost to bad patents to make them even slightly beneficial.

Question: How do we fix it?

Kill all the patent lawyers (tongue in cheek of course)
Allow the patent office to set an expiration date appropriate to the scope of the invention
Allow patents to be invalidated by an appeal system outside the court system

Allow the patent office to set an expiration date appropriate to the scope of the invention

OK, so we've got long mechanical patents, and short software patents. Maybe we could abstract that even further to say "tangible" vs. "intangible"; the latter would apply to software, business processes, kitty exercise (sorry, patent-debate inside joke).

So what do you do when you have a patent that is legitimately a homogenous mix of tangible and intangible elements?

Trying to polarize it into tangible and intangible is the problem. What about the a patent specifying a new shape for an airplane wing? That isn't a tangible thing, it is a concept. If you were limited to patenting blueprints only, then someone could use the concept but design around the patent. There is no protection for the inventor. Is the argument really whether ideas should be protected versus things? If so, the climate has changed. The new economy (information age) has created an environment where entire companies can exist based solely on creation of intangible information. Look at the AOL-Time Warner megacorp. They don't make money from selling magazines or modems. They make money by disseminating information (mostly advertising I would guess.) The old media moguls of the past were still selling a tangible product, newspapers. The model has changed and the system hasn't caught up.

CategoryOxymoron (heh heh...)

CategoryLegal