

The Patent Troll You Don't Read About In Bar-Code Inventor's Obituaries  - arbuge
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/12/14/the-patent-troll-you-dont-read-about-in-bar-code-inventors-obituaries/
$500m siphoned out of the pockets of people and companies who actually did all the work...
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gruseom
There is this interesting passage at the end:

 _But Jenner has one suggestion: Require inventors to prove their technology
works before giving them a patent. Most countries require inventors to provide
a working model, he said, while the U.S. merely requires a description. “One
way to get rid of a lot of half-baked ideas would be to require that somebody
make it first,” he said. If Lemelson had been required to do that, his record
as an inventor might have been a lot shorter._

I wonder how well such a rule would work for software. It would probably cut
down the number of patents drastically, since most patent trolls don't
actually make anything. It would also guarantee much greater precision in what
is claimed, since one would have working code to refer to.

~~~
arbuge
On the other hand this would be far easier to do with software than with
hardware. I'm not a fan of this approach.

I much prefer banning software patents entirely and invalidating all existing
ones, as draconian as that may be.

