2 ms·

You can't just say something is an antiquated institution, and reference a wikipedia article just because a very similar system, successful or not, has existed

You can't just say something is an antiquated institution, and reference a wikipedia article just because a very similar system, successful or not, has existed for a very long time. By that logic: Democracy is an antiquated institution [1] that makes about as much sense in today's context as ... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy I'm not a huge fan of patents either, but let's try to pretend to be a bit more objective and sane about the arguments we are proposing and use some relevant references when making a claim like that.

zeteo 14y ago
I'm sorry, but that's an invalid comparison. We don't get our democracy straight from the Athenians. There was a two thousand year break in between, and our actual institutions that implement democracy are very different from the Athenian ones. (It was not a representative government. Office holders were chosen by lots. Citizens voted directly for legislative measures and even judiciary punishment. There was nowhere near universal suffrage etc.) Whereas the patent system in the US (and pretty much every other country) derives directly from the 1624 Statute of Monopolies, with a number of ad-hoc tweaks that were added and greatly multiplied along the way. The whole structure has become unwieldy and horribly unsuitable for modern technological development. (Unlike political representation, which might be somewhat facilitated by new technology but remains unchanged in its fundamentals.)