

Abolish Patents - grellas
http://www.patenthawk.com/blog/2011/08/abolish_patents.html

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int3rnaut
The Patent system isn't that bad, it's just a little broken; the issue is the
application. If the main requirements were more thoroughly followed and
processed (the idea of inventing something new, useful, etc) there wouldn't be
a problem.

Abolishing the system would in my opinion do a lot of harm--as right now it is
not beyond repair.

Just spit-balling here but I'd like to see (and I encourage others to do the
same because that's how answers are found, so even if they are a bit dumb
(just look at mine haha) share them because maybe they'll lead to something):

\- Tech specialists/historians should be more entrenched within the patent
office

\- Shorter patent terms

\- Jury/Panel of peers? Haha, sounds dumb but maybe in the process everyday
people are put through a short explanation of the product and if at the end of
the explanation someone goes, "that kind of sounds like such and such" the
process is stopped and investigated.

Mark Cuban had some interesting ideas on blogmaverick too,
[http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/07/my-suggestion-on-
patent-l...](http://blogmaverick.com/2011/08/07/my-suggestion-on-patent-law/)

I guess the good thing about this situation is that it has people talking.

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VanL
I can agree with a lot of what this guy says, but note his bias: he is an
attempted troll who lost and now has a serious case of sour grapes.

Specifically, check the "Odom v. Microsoft" case he cites in this article -
the author of this piece is Gary Odom. He attempted to enforce his crappy
patent as an NPE against Microsoft for their "ribbon" UI. He tried to drive a
very narrow distinction through the court and lost on KSR obviousness.

I guarantee that if he had won, he would be singing a different tune - and
acquiring more patents to enforce.

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aneth
Without patents, secrecy would be the norm. Instead of revealing drug
formulas, companies would lock them up forever and sue people who stole them.
Patents serve a purpose, even if they are terribly broken right now.

~~~
rwmj
At one time it was very hard to reverse engineer chemicals and hardware.

Nowadays, finding out the composition of chemicals and drugs is routine, even
if it's not simple. Reverse-engineering widgets isn't much of a problem.
Disassembling computer programs is trivial.

If this is your reason to keep patents, it's not a very good one.

~~~
justinsb
I think you've missed the point here: without patents, we'd devise something
else to protect drugs. It's not the case that just because you can reverse
engineer something, it's good for society that you're allowed to copy it. At
least in the current system drug formulas are freely published, and we don't
make everyone jump through the hoop of reverse-engineering.

The argument is essentially "new medicines are good for society but expensive
to develop, drug companies will only spend the money to develop new drugs if
they can make a lot of money on the successes, drug companies won't make money
if other people can copy the successes."

If you remove patents, we'll have some other law to give drug companies their
profits. Probably something along the lines of the DMCA, which effectively
strengthened copyright to deal with technological developments, but was a huge
step backwards in terms of what interested parties could do with copyrighted
material.

