Juries: The only reason ANYONE understands patent law AT ALL Apple's recent mobile patent trial victory over Samsung has raised the spectre of justice being done behind closed doors by self-appointed elites. Today, it's the norm for juries to decide patent disputes. Jury trials oblige the parties to speak in plain language. And there's plenty of wiggle room for cantankerous citizens to …
Your comments are meritless. The patent process is long and arduous. Patent's are routinely refused and hard to actually obtain.
U.S. juries however IMO are technically clueless. The education system and TV are a big cause of techincal illiteracy in America and that includes many Judges.
Re: the list of problems with software patents grants is practically endless
Agree.
I reject the assumption that patents, especially software patents, have net value to society at this point in history.
The patents that I have seen the fighting over could have been 'invented' thousands of times over by probably millions of qualified people out of the current 7 thousand million people available.
We do not have to grant a monopoly on a simple idea that would have shown up in the sea of ideas anyway. To the extent that things are (perhaps) legitimate such as LZW encoding (something I expect I could not have invented), the patent system has been a total disaster. The patenting of that algorithm stalled a bunch of things and generally created havoc. Arguments over compression wasted countless man-years of time shifting from .gif files to .jpg and .png files, re-writing archive utilities, re-compressing and redistributing things and wasted hideous amounts of bandwidth and storage back when they were both exceedingly dear. The patent holders made next to nothing and arguably the attempt to enforce the patent was net-injurious even to the patent holder.
SCO's entry into the patent trolling fray, beyond perhaps its entertainment value, did nothing but harm all-around.
If we made patents and copyrights illegal (I mean punished people who even tried to re-instate them), the world would be awash in new wealth created simply by brushing aside entirely unproductive (actually net-destructive) rent-seekers. The very best would be chosen for manufacture and distribution and creators could build upon the very best without being held back by rent-seekers. We would have better quality art and science, more of it and at radically less cost.
What is particularly sad is that even the majority of the rent-seekers are net-impoverished by the laws they think enrich them. Only a very small minority gain a net-benefit from patents and copyrights and they gain that advantage at an enormous and unacceptable cost to the rest of us.
We are entitled to our cultural, artistic and scientific heritage. Think of how much richer your life would be if you had immediate free access to all the world's music, literature and ideas. Is it unreasonable to think that if we dropped all the pay walls around scientific research that research would thrive?
"Is it unreasonable to think that if we dropped all the pay walls around scientific research that research would thrive?"
Yes, I'm afraid it is!
Whether we like it or not, we live in a risk/reward society, and that is what drives an awful lot of scientific endeavour and research.
Why would company X invest billions to develop say, a new cancer drug, if company Y could immediately pick up their work and produce their own generic version of the drug having incurred none of the development costs?
In such a world, for every company X there would be hundreds of company Y's leeching off them taking most of the revenue and driving the innovators out of business.
Patents do serve a purpose when applied to the right areas - it's just that in my opinion, for the most part, software isn't one of them.
But at the same time, you never see a private company develop CURES, only TREATMENTS (that have to be repeated). There are some socially desirable things that the money angle draws away. One-and-done solutions are one, devices and appliances that don't wear out after a few years are another.
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