There's an old quote from a legal scholar to the effect that it was a mistake to introduce patents, but now that we have them, it would be a greater mistake to

There's an old quote from a legal scholar to the effect that it was a mistake to introduce patents, but now that we have them, it would be a greater mistake to get rid of them. I honestly don't know. With regard to software, it's clear that patents are causing net harm to the industry - so maybe TiVo makes more money off licensing DVR patents than they did from DVRs, but that's about as close as software patents have ever come to working. But then you have cases like pharmaceuticals, where the high cost of R&D and the long lead time to getting a product to market makes patent protection absolutely essential to recoup costs. I suspect that most industries are closer to software than pharma, but suspicion isn't enough to go on. I do know that the theoretical basis of the patent system, the exchange of public disclosure for temporary monopoly, doesn't work at all. A typical patent is written in a strange, pedantic style that obscures more about the underlying invention than it reveals. And a typical patented "invention" is usually a small aspect of a much larger product, parts of which can also be protected by trade secret and copyright as well, and those last well after the patent expires. So the rationale is utterly incoherent, but it's the law and we're stuck with it.