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U.S. Sets 21st-Century Goal: Building a Better Patent Office
- donohoe 16y agoHmmm - so they have a response time of about 2 years to each patent. Simple solution: disallow all software patents. Your welcome.
- jayzee 16y agoI cannot see the difference between software patents, process patents, or patents on pharmaceutical drugs etc. If one is against software patents then one is against patents in general. I think that the key differentiating factor for software patents is the rapid time-scale of innovation in the technological sector. Patents are awarded for long durations (20 years or more) because that is the time it used to take to extract value from them to justify the risk that the early stage innovators took and to reward them for their creativity. But with the rapid speed of development in the technological sector such long durations of protection benefit the innovator disproportionately, to the detriment of society which would benefit once the patent was in the public domain. I think that instead of arguing about whether software patents are valid or not, patent durations should be self-calibrating and should be tied to the time-scale of innovation in that sector. So a software patents should for example be awarded for a duration of 2-3 years. This will still reward creative innovators, allow them to extract value from their work, without hampering further growth and innovation in the sector.
- jayzee 16y agoWhat really threw me off my chair was the part where they say that they have incompatible systems and so they have to take the printouts from one system and scan them into the other. absolutely unbelievable