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The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems. If you were to do so, you open yourself for further liability down the road. Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway.

> The problem is, patents are not a repository for searching for solutions and solving problems.

Tell that to the generic-brand pharmaceutical companies. ;)

> Not only that, you then harm the person who discovers the same solution independently, even though, your patent did not help them in anyway.

In the old way, where you had to actually present an implementation of the patented idea, I imagine this would have encouraged inventors to innovate more rapidly. The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine. (I'd try to provide a link, but engineers shouldn't be looking at patents.)

"Oh, you're trying to genuinely improve our lives? Too bad I already came up with the idea in the shower one day and wrote it down before you did! But I'm willing to let you go ahead and try for $40 million."

If it can be shown that you can show that you have a history of reading patents, then it can be argued that you wilfully infringed. It certainly makes defense much harder. Patent lawyers generally recommend that engineers NOT read patents for that reason.

What about reading only expired patents?

I don't know, I'm not a patent lawyer myself.

I suspect however, that they would advise you this is a risky activity.

> The current system is very broken, and allows patents for things like the perpetual motion machine.

Actually, they explicitly say 'no perpetual motion machines' or the equivalent (I think they say 'You must provide a working example of something you claim is a perpetual motion machine', which comes to the same thing.) It's a special little carve-out they have to fix that specific problem.

Sadly, that hasn't stopped all of those patents from being issued. See here, for example:

http://www.google.com/patents/about/6362718_Motionless_elect...

But why? If I patented something (that I'd spent resources on inventing), I'd sell a license for a reasonable sum, not block its use. That's the intent of the system.

Or if I found a patent that was a solution to my problem, I'd buy a licence.

People buy hardware, software, services all the time. Companies also do that and use them to build more value and sell that further.

Software patents have lots of problems but the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white.

You could for example have (international?) patent courts that would prevent monopoly-by-patent things.

  People buy hardware, software, services all the time.

There is a big difference between hardware and services, and patents. Software is a whole other deal, and I object to the whole model of proprietary distribution as well, but that's besides the point.

Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service.

Besides, arguing for the status quo by citing the status quo is a circular argument.

  the idea to just throw it all in the trash bin is a bit black and white.

We have a system built upon paradoxical, nonsensical and self-contradictory basics which does nothing but help create artificial monopolies and slow down or halt technological progress for the benefit of a few big corporations.

There is but this only option, and that's to completely scrap it and never try it again. I'm honestly tired of seeing 'but that's black and white thinking' in defense of a completely indefensible position. Sometimes there are things which are simply bad - patents are one of those things.

  You could for example have (international?) patent courts that 
  would prevent monopoly-by-patent things.

The solution to a massively broken system that, in large parts, relies on huge amounts of bureaucracy is even more bureaucracy? I think not.

You cannot fix this system - it's broken by default.

> Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service.

You're missing the point. Filing patents isn't (in theory) about hoarding ideas. It's a way to ensure that when you expend (often large amounts of) money and/or effort in order to develop a new technology, you are able to reap the rewards. Often, a new technology is most valuable to the first person to commercialize it.

"Fact is, an idea is an abstract concept, not a physical good or a services. One cannot own an abstract concept - the very notion of that is completely nonsensical. If somebody has a an idea, and tells (gives) that idea to somebody else, both people will have that idea now. You cannot say the same of a physical good or a service."

Actually that holds true for all digital content and also partially for a lot of hardware as well: if you release all the production documentation of some physical thing, it might cheap to produce a large amount of copies. Development of something like a modern car takes money in the billion dollar category. There might be all kinds of innovations that required lots of trial and error there to make this or that part reliably.

You could develop new chemicals or medicines that might in the end be producable by simple processes, ie they might be simple ideas in the end, yet you might have spent a lot of effort to discover them. If you can't patent them, then that means it's not a viable business anymore to try to create such new things, or then those new things must be hidden very well. These are exactly the problems that patents were created for to solve!

I know there are for example individuals (let's say a professor) who provide a service for money: they offer to create some algorithms to classify some customer's data. Then they give that algorithm to the customer in exchange for money. The algorithm can be seen as just an idea, it's not anything that can be touched. It is clearly valuable to the company as it is willing to pay money for it. The company saves money by not having to employ a person with that kind of expertise, since it doesn't need it full time. I's a bit the same how some company like id can buy a license for an image compression algorithm from Microsoft since it's not their core business to develop such. Both parties win. That's ordinary business.

That being said, I do think that really stupid things are given patents and it certainly is a problematic thing in the "idea" and software world. But there certainly was a need why the patent system was created in the first place, and if it's just destroyed, we'll see that that need hasn't vanished. We'd go back into a much more secretive world.

  These are exactly the problems that patents were created for to solve!

Yet they don't fulfill this purpose in the slightest bit. Besides, I don't care if some people suddenly stop innovating because there is no longer any money to be made - which is nonsense, anyways. It's the same as the ever so often repeated lie that you cannot make money with free music or software. It's simply the system's dynamics that change.

  That's ordinary business.

"Ordinary business" is both everything that is wrong with the patent system as well as quite a few other things on this planet. As I said, citing the status quo to argue for it is a circular argument.

  But there certainly was a need why the patent system was created

Yes, there was a need for monopolists to have even more tools at their disposal to control the market. As I said multiple times, patents were never meant to protect small businesses, or help the small, clever man with a clever idea. It's pretty much the same as saying that copyright was made for artists - it's plain wrong.

Patents have always profited those with power and influence on the system, those with much money to file law suits, and those who are already rich. While there might be some success stories of small men or businesses, those are the exception, and by no means the rule.

  We'd go back into a much more secretive world.

I disagree. We'd be in a much more cooperative world, since monopolizing knowledge is no longer possible. It would no longer be feasible to work on problems alone in the hope of making money from the eventual monopoly on the solution, as cooperation increases the benefits for everyone. Incremental development based on each others discoveries could lead to rapid advancement of technology, instead of the - excuse my language - clusterfuck of a stalemate we currently have.

> However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate

In the economic sense, that might be true, but on the contrary, patents prevent (or hinder) people who might have good ideas from innovating - and I'd wager that those people are way more numerous than the lot of people who wouldn't try to further advance current technologies (or invent new ones) just because there suddenly is no more economic incentive to do so.

> By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new.

I don't want to be told how to do it, and then be told that I have to wait 20 years until I can use it. I want to use it now, and I want to build on it now. So does the rest of humanity. 20 years is way too long, but so are 1 year, 6 months, 10 days or half a minute. It's plain and simply ridiculous - as well has highly paradoxical - to stop progress (even if only temporary) in the name of promoting progress.

There is only one alternative in this entire mess - abolish patents, completely. They never fulfilled the purpose they were intended for (even historically they caused quite the opposite, see Watt and the Steam Engine), and serve the few powerful and rich to the detriment of humanity as a whole (again, see Watt).

> 1) Make all information freely accessible to anyone. This is the one we'd all like everyone to do. However, there's very little (economic) incentive to innovate when you do all of the heavy thinking and anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation.

Indeed. Economic incentives to innovate don't always produce the best products for the users anyways. Examples:

Encarta : Wikipedia

Windows NT : Unix/Linux

IIS : Apache

The products on the left aren't "bad", but in my opinion, the ones on the right are generally more accepted and used because they're superior. There was minimal economic incentive to create the products on the right for the developers.

My opinion: people try harder to make their innovations of the highest quality when the incentives aren't monetary.

Unix is(was?) a commercial product. Linux was born out of the desire for a free version of Unix. There are economic incentives.

I agree that money isn't the best motivation for people. However, in general, things like robotics, medicine, silicon fabrication, etc. are out of most people's leagues financially. In order to be able to innovate in these fields, you need to convince some company that they can make more money than what they will spend by researching in the field.

Remember, patents cover more fields than just software.

> Unix is(was?) a commercial product

Unix was originally a non-commercial product, albeit produced by paid researchers at Bell Labs (owned by a commercial entity, AT&T). And actually, Wikipedia claims that {Thompson, Ritchie, et al} received no financial support for the first version, which was developed on a spare PDP-7, so I'm not even clear if they were using paid time to work on it. It was non-commercial because AT&T had been forbidden by a 1956 consent decree to be commercially active in the fledgling computer space. It was only in 1983 (with the breakup of AT&T and the consequent expiry of the consent decree) that commercialization of Unix started, over 15 years after its creation.

So the successes of Unix pre-1983 should be lumped with the successes of GNU (founded that same year) and Linux, as being non-commercial and not-for-profit.

> anyone else can just come along and beat you to the implementation

Pray tell, how might they do this when you know the method and they do not? Unless you developed the method, then went around telling random people before going about implementing it.

When someone loses a patent suit without a finding of willful infringement, none of your three points apply. The 'teachings' of the patent clearly weren't involved in the majority of instances of patent infringement. Almost invariably the infringer had no clue they were infringing.

By filing a patent, you're telling the world how to do something (allegedly) new. In 20 years, (or longer/shorter, depending on the country) everyone is freely able to use the idea.

If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently. The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer.

> If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently.

It's not reasonable to assume that discovering the same solution to a particular problem is inevitable for everyone.

> The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer.

That wasn't my point. After the patent expires, the knowledge is available to everyone. If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public.

If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public.

However, to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," as the Constitution states, it's necessary to demonstrate both that patents serve as a widespread source of inspiration and teaching (which they don't do very often, as demonstrated by the relative rarity of willful-infringement awards), and that trade secrets actually do keep advances from becoming more widely available. This is hard to show, at best.

Nobody refrains from producing a touchscreen phone with a swipe-to-unlock feature because they can't figure out how... they refrain because Apple is allowed to financially destroy anyone who tries. Most patents work the same way, in that they keep people from being able to use techniques that might have been obscure and irrelevant at one time but are now obvious, no thanks to the patent itself.