New study affirms that fewer copyright restrictions benefit the economy

Wait a minute. We all know from reading your comments on which side of the Apple/Google divide you fall, but how on earth do you come to that conclusion? Can you download and redistribute the complete source code to iOS?

From what I've read (I'll add sources as I find them), the patent process takes more than two years on average to get approved, patent examiners are given patents that they don't have domain expertise in, and they don't get enough time to review patents.

It seems, on the outside, that lots of money and time is spent on patent lawsuits and purchasing patent portfolios and none of it really leads to the advancement of anything besides lawyers and lawsuits.

Do you think the patent system is fine how it is, or is there reform you would like to see?

Quite.

> because there would be vastly less communication and understanding of how other people's inventions work.

You must be familiar with the term 'reverse engineering'. There isn't much that can't be unwound. If secrecy of how things work was an effective protection there wouldn't be a patent system to begin with. Once you release something 'how it works' will be evident to anyone determined enough to find out.

Are you talking about meeting someone on HN? How about HN user grellas, a Silicon Valley business lawyer? I doubt his arguments against the status quo are made in ignorance:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=grellas+pat...

Edit to add:

Without patents, technological progress would be severely restricted-- not because there "would be no incentive to invent" (a straw-man that anti-IP people seem fond of knocking down) but because there would be vastly less communication and understanding of how other people's inventions work.

It is difficult to accept this argument when the majority of software patents we see in lawsuits are written as obtusely as possible. Software patent language is the antithesis of "communicat[ing]... how other people's inventions work."

Listening to you rail against single-mindedness and groupthink when you're probably the single most self-righteous and closeminded and ideologically intolerant frequent poster on HN is surreal. It's really not easy to find people that are so reliably certain they have the answers to everything. You're certainly the first self-professed anarchist I've met that's a staunch proponent of patent and contract law.

But the patent system applies to a super-set: things that are plain, too.

Therefore, by your own argument, the patent system is operating beyond its justification, and so could indeed be described as 'broken'.

In any case, the patent system is a trade-off -- of increasing production against restricting access (see: the standard economic model of it). If it is badly calibrated, the net effect is negative. And the current state of economic knowledge is that no-one knows whether it is set correctly (see: 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.). When there is a whole big system, of various obvious costs, and you do not even know the net effect is positive, the sensible thing is to stop doing it (probably by phasing out), until something proves otherwise.

Clearly something in there is broken. I think the real contention on HN is whether or not there's a big enough baby in all that bathwater to be worth saving.

You should instead ask, how can I setup my environment so that I am not subject to the will of others... Don't ask the government for your freedom, take it from them.

This is known as regulatory capture, and is what is to be expected once the government starts to grant monopolies: instead of competing and innovating, corporations dedicate themselves to much more lucrative rent-seeking.

When the government is the one who decides who can do business and how, it becomes much more lucrative to put your energy in lobbying the government for rules favorable to you, than to put the energy in competing and pleasing consumers.

Without patents the only thing that matters is execution: pleasing consumers, with patents all that matters is how you can milk the system and use it to crush your competitors that might have more competitive products.

In the 1990s the democrats decided that the banks were not lending to blacks out of racism... later studies that accounted for ability to repay the loans showed this wasn't the case, but at the time the Clinton administration imposed regulations that basically said banks had to loan to people who couldn't repay, and that fannie mae and freddie mac woul buy up those bad loans.... this literally created the housing crisis that blew up 10 years later. It wasn't wall street, it was clinton (and a bush as well, for keeping interest rates artificially low).

Milton Friedman found that over the past 100 years government regulations drove up health care costs 26 fold and reduced availability. So that $100,000 operation that would bankrupt you now would only cost $5,000 without government regulation-- you could put it on a credit card.

The ACA is destroying the health care industry and will dramatically make the situation much worse.

But most people are never told these things. They are told political lies spread via propaganda that blames Wall Street (or "Glass Steegall" - I can't tell you how many times peple have evoked that phrase, people who obviously know nothing about what that law did).

Most people are ignorant and believe propaganda, and that makes them easier to control, which is what politicians like to do.