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"laws which were developed in the 19th century but on which billions of dollars of commerce are reliant"

We like to call this kind of reasoning "Appeal to Novelty" and "Appeal to Ridicule". Your tacit assertion is 'anything old must be flawed' and worse, we rely on these flawed laws to run big expensive things (which, by the way, is "Appeal to Fear".)

In fact, you've not established in any way that patent law is flawed - or if it is flawed, that those flaws are actually dangerous in this context.

There certainly are aspects of patent law that are problematic in the 21st century (and for the record, the first patent law in the US was enacted April 10, 1790, so it's actually an *18th* century law - the horrors), but ironically, most of those problems we're seeing now actually stem from two relatively *recent* changes: the inclusion of software patents and the inclusion of 'business process' patents: two things almost no other country in the world has.

As well, the movement of design and dress from trademarks and copyright to patent (again, a fairly recent change in patent law) just made things even worse.

I appreciate you're probably British - but Americans are rather fanatically protective of their Constitution - the foundation of all their federal laws.. and it's really old.. 1779. Even older than the patent law. Then again, as a Brit - you've probably heard of that Magna Carta thing?

15 June 1215

So, let's can the 'old laws are bad' rhetoric. Laws are bad because they're bad, not because they're old. And just because you don't like the outcome of a law doesn't actually make it bad. A lot of the time laws are there to protect minorities from majorities... not surprisingly, majorities don't like them.