I agree with the article that broad patents are harmful - and if massive banks cannot get a fair outcome in the courts, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I agree with the article that broad patents are harmful - and if massive banks cannot get a fair outcome in the courts, what hope is there for the rest of us? I also agree with the implication that patenting "specific techniques" is beneficial. The history of the industrial revolution is littered with such innovation. It's only correlation, but the places with patent laws also had the most vigorous innovation. At that time, the newspapers were filled with new innovations and inventions, and people seemed to be falling over each other to invent something new, and to patent it. They thought patents promoted innovation - and the drafters of the US constitution thought so too. Personally, I would love to see new specific techniques being invented, rather than the next facebook, or the next webapp of something already done offline. The latter can be really useful and a great benefit to the world, but it doesn't stir my soul. I want new technology and entirely new ways of doing things! To make this more concrete: - I would say that while Card Case's geofencing payments (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3189438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3189438) is a new and cool idea, it should not be patentable. - I think that Ken Thompson's specific mechanism for rapid regexp matching should be patentable (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/beautiful.html http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea...) The idea of using regexp for search was new and cool (actually groundbreaking), but it's only the specific mechanism that should be patentable. Which is what Ken did.