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Subprime patents #
Posted Thursday 25th September 2008 13:32 GMT
Innovation causes patents. Patents don't cause innovation.
At best, they provide an incentive to *commercialize* an innovation in markets where the time-to-copy would be too low to otherwise commercialize the idea.
At some point this has been lost on management of the EPO and US PTO. They start to flip the causal link, patents now *are* innovation, so if they issue twice as many then there is twice as much innovation. Look at those stupid business process patents, and other subprime patents. Trying to make places that can be patented to grant more patents regardless of benefit. Software for example, more about locking Microsoft and Adobe into their markets than creating innovation.
Like all fake bubbles, if they continue to do this, we will end up with the bubble bursting, where nobody can make anything in the west because it's too expensive paying all the 'inventors' to use their 'inventions'.
Lets get the quality better before that happens.
