Abolish Patents
patenthawk.com
patenthawk.com
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...
I guess the good thing about this situation is that it has people talking.
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.
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.
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.
It also isn't like engineers or scientists would read patents to see which things have been invented. From knowledge implying higher damages to pure lack of readability, there are many reasons.
Secrecy without patents is fine. I find it hard to believe that any invention will not be re-invented within 20 years, even if there is no cross-contamination of ideas or any reverse engineering.