>> Bah, the patent system as a whole is broken anyway. There are very few patents whose absence would have slowed down innovation. On the contrary, the presence

>> Bah, the patent system as a whole is broken anyway. There are very few patents whose absence would have slowed down innovation. On the contrary, the presence of patents tend to slow down innovation. >There is very little evidence of that. Given the abundant and widely-publicized examples of specific patents that obviously slow down innovation, I'm beginning to think a downvote is inadequate for comments that claim "little evidence". They should probably be flagged. Amazon's 1-click patent, GIF patent, JEPG2000, the RSA patent come quickly to mind right off the top of my head, and there are numerous more examples that I'm sure a little googling could find quickly. The part about US being most innovative...now that's just the basic scientific error of failing to isolate variables. A downvote suffices for that.