4 ms·

Patents need to expire quicker. Things change too rapidly in some sectors and these patents hinder innovation IMO. I can see the need for areas where I takes y

• Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  They need to be enforced far more narrowly and claims of patent violations subject to wider definitions of prior art. It's crazy how broadly some patents are on things that have long existed.
  • newsclues 2y ago
    That is a hard problem to enforce. Limiting patents to months or only a year or two is much easier (and cheaper) to enforce.
• newsclues 2y ago
  Time is a great way to change the regulatory environment. If you need to build a factory to produce a product, the investment and time scale make long term patents reasonable. With software, it’s not the same time/$ investment and therefore the term of protection should be much shorter.
• variadix 2y ago
  I generally agree, but the length of a patent should probably be proportional to the R&D costs (and possibly other factors). Pharmaceutical development is insanely expensive and risky, if we want new, revolutionary drugs to be brought to market the pharma companies need to be able to make a profit (this may be an unpopular opinion because of the price gouging pharma companies are infamous for, but this is part of the reason pharma companies aren’t developing new antibiotics yet, which will be a disaster when we need them). The fact that novel drugs can have the same patent lifetime as the bit operations required to average two integers correctly is insane. Evaluating the appropriate patent length in practice is probably difficult in that it would be gamed by applicants.