Second, the fact that I had to read that joke about “knowing where to put it” again is an excellent example of why certain kinds of intellectual property should be restricted. If I had the patent on that joke, I’d never license it, just to get it off the market.

But, we can’t afford simply to look for a solution within the existing system, because that system is legislating itself to death.

Development will eventually shift to current third world countries, where there are no legal hindrances, and there will soon be billions of paying customers. This will happen, if we look forward 25 to 50 years and over technology as a whole.

By that time, the United States will be irrelevant on the world scene of technology, and Americans will only be buying products that are not only manufactured, but also designed and developed in China, possibly by American engineers who have migrated to China.

I also don’t believe, that patents serve the economy, and prevents development and sale of products in the United States, if Americans with a good idea are simply afraid to start working on it.

I admit, that there is no easy solution for medical patents, due to the huge investments in research and development of drugs, although cheaper development of drugs would be the first path to take.

So, trying to fix something in the existing system, I don’t think is ambitious enough, and certainly not forward-looking enough.

There are lots of problems, beginning with finding a precise and workable definition of when exactly a patent application is a “software patent” and when not. I doubt we are going to see a dramatic change here in the next decade, although I have seen a few interesting proposals. Most of these relate to replacing the traditional all-in-one patent right with domain-specific protection rights (say one only for chemicals, one only for machine parts, one only for manufacturing technologies, one only for GM organisms, one only for extremely clever algorithms and circuits, etc.), each with tailored examination criteria, application exclusions, and expiry times. It is a bit silly that a pharmaceutical product that cost 100 million dollars to develop and a little software trick that I thought up this morning under the shower are currently offered the same very strong 20-year monopoly.

But how to get there in a world interlocked by international patent treaties, I have no idea.

Hence my much more modest proposal: merely transfer a limitation of granted rights that is already well established in copyright law (allow compatible implementations to protect competitiveness of the market) over to patent law. That’s why my ambition is merely to remedy a minor oversight of the patent legislators that is has started to cause real problems in standardization of IT protocols for the networked society, rather than fundamentally change the patent system.

There is an even simpler solution: Abolish software patents altogether and let the market and best implementation decide who wins.

http://xiph.org/press/2011/ftc/ftc-comments-20110614.pdf

(FTC page at http://www.ftc.gov/opp/workshops/standards/index.shtml )

If it’s no longer in effect than any use starting after that date is not infringing.

I don’t think drug companies wait 6 years after a drug patent expires before rolling out the generics.

good luck with that.

Ideas that require hardly any measurable investment to be invented or implemented (a single “if” statement in a program!) …

This reminds me of that joke about the retired engineer called in to fix a problem that has everybody stumped… He takes all day studying the faulty machine, and finally makes a single chalk mark on the blueprint identifying the faulty component. Replacing that, the machine works perfectly. The engineer sends a bill for $50,000. The company is shocked and demands an itemized bill.

The engineer responds briefly: “One chalk mark $1. Knowing where to put it $49,999.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/motorola-now-in-eu-antirust-crosshairs-over-standards-essential-patents.ars