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Somewhat less draconian: 1. Make patent applications free of cost, so anyone can play unless they start clogging up the system. 2. Applicants must wait 2^n da
by neurobro 12y ago
Somewhat less draconian:
1. Make patent applications free of cost, so anyone can play unless they start clogging up the system.
2. Applicants must wait 2^n days between applications, where n is the applicant's number of rejected applications within the past 1,000 years. Non-human persons must be at least 1 year old before applying.
3. Examiners are paid approximately the nation's median income, but also receive rights to 1% of license fees for patents they approve. If an approved patent is ever overturned in court, the examiner is fired and loses all future royalties for any other patents they approved. Those royalties then go to the patent office. Budget surpluses go toward scientific research or maybe education grants.
4. Patents assigned to biological human inventors expire after 20 years. Others expire after 5 years.
- Alupis 12y agoHow about -- No Patents? Patents are ideas... if you can think of it... so can someone else. Patents were intended to protect someone's investment into an idea. Today, they just serve as cash cows. With no patents, a company would be forced to continuously innovate and stay ahead of the curve -- which would replace their patent warchest with a warchest of talented individuals and innovators instead.
- epa 12y agoThe idea that patents are not necessary, useful or relevant in today's society is childish. Patents still play a very key role is spurring innovation and allowing innovative players to profit off of their development and creation of new products. Clearly the system is broken to the point that people patent anything just so they can sue others who meet the general ideology of the patent. Clearly this is not what the spirit of patenting was designed for. A system overhaul is more appropriate than to rid all patents.
- cscurmudgeon 12y ago> The idea that patents are not necessary, useful or relevant in today's society is childish. Also, highly impractical.
- Alupis 12y agoHow so? (honestly asking) The entire idea of capitalism is to have fierce competition between companies -- patents, by design, allow one company to innovate once, then nobody else can make something similar. That seems, very anti-competitive (and open for abuse as evidenced by today's "patent wars"). If nobody could "squat" on an idea, then instead of innovating once, you would have to continuously innovate to stay in the lead of your industry.
- groby_b 12y agoThat's a rather naive view. If you need to pay billions of research cost for something that can be immediately copied, you simply don't do the research. There's plenty of cheap more or less useless improvements instead. We already see that in medicine, where R&D has become so ludicrously expensive for many actually needed drugs that people would rather create a new ED pill. Capitalism & "free markets" (as if!) fail as a motor of progress, per se. The only thing they're good at is extraction of wealth. That's why we have government regulation in the first place - to direct the efficiencies created by the market place.
- shiven 12y agoI have no clue why you're being downvoted. But what you write is the gospel truth when it comes to drug discovery. Speaking from personal experience here.
- dnautics 12y agoThe polio vaccines were not patented. Neither is metformin (for diabetes). Unpatented drugs can be done. (I'm trying fwiw)
- nickbauman 12y agoYou mean pharmaceutical, not "medicine". The reason why the costs have gone up is because big pharma has become so bloated and top heavy they can't even fart straight. They no longer even develop new drugs, they buy little, fleet-of-foot companies that do. You know: the ones actually trying to _make_ something: the ones competing. How did they get that way? Because of the patent system.
- shasta 12y ago> The idea that patents are not necessary, useful or relevant in today's society is childish. It's childish to believe that patents are not necessary?
- olefoo 12y ago> Patents still play a very key role is spurring innovation and allowing innovative players to profit off of their development and creation of new products. What is your evidence for this statement?
- Goronmon 12y agoI would say that patents seem to mainly be profitable for lawyers and the companies that employ them rather than "innovative players".
- neurobro 12y agoEliminating patents altogether may be better than what we have now, but I think there is a sweet spot to be found where they encourage more private investment and publication of research than there would be with no patent system.
- bld 12y agoIndeed. The growing free software & hardware communities, and the numerous companies they spin off, are an existence proof that patents aren't a requirement of a working economy. They aren't going away any time soon until free hardware makes up a larger proportion of the market, because the current patent holders have too much to lose, and can buy politicians who will keep propping up the current system. So, start more successful free hardware companies that ignore the patent system, gradually rendering patents less relevant and less damaging.
- Terr_ 12y agoProblem: Garage-Inventor Bob's patent will be thrown out, because if it gets challenged Bob will probably lose since he has no big pockets nor legal clout. (Not because the idea itself is good or bad.) Later, SuperMegaCo will submit a marginally different formulation of the same basic thing, and it'll get approved because they're probably going to win any long expensive court-battles.