The near-term prospects for fixing what is seriously broken with the patent system are very slight. I did a post just the other day on the so-called Patent Refo

The near-term prospects for fixing what is seriously broken with the patent system are very slight. I did a post just the other day on the so-called Patent Reform Act of 2010 and entitled it, "Looking for radical patent reform - look again" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1365788). The piece I cite to above is basically a law professor's proposal and hence academic only at this point. It could theoretically work but there is probably little or no impetus behind it. Didn't mean to suggest that the process of reform would be easy. It clearly won't (Bilski might bring some needed sanity to the area of software patents but congressional action is likely to be merely cosmetic along the lines of the Patent Reform Act of 2010 cited above). The entrenched interests are very strong here.