Patents were supposed to provide enough information so that someone else could build a widget, in exchange for a limited time monopoly on that widget. "You teac

Patents were supposed to provide enough information so that someone else could build a widget, in exchange for a limited time monopoly on that widget. "You teach the world, we'll let you eat for a while on that." What we got: A convoluted, arcane and rent-protected process which is gamed by the big players, and in fact diminishes advances by sowing fear, expense and uncertainty. I'm a software engineer, but a while back I got a chance to read hundreds of patents (with expert help from some compan lawyers) in an attempt to carve out an "IP space" in an already crowded and contested space. Pretty eye-opening. In a couple of cases the parties we were looking at were trying to patent stuff you could have lifted from a textbook. The screening process for "is this a patentable idea?" seemed utterly broken. To this day I can't keep a straight face when a lawyer says, "... and here, the '843 patent teaches that....". /Teaches/, yeah right.