| I am pro-patent because I've seen it successfully used to protect a startup from an evil corporation-- in this case Microsoft. Wait... what? No, seriously... what? Somehow you've bought into this patent-everything nonsense so deeply that you think patents are good because having patents protects you from other companies with patents? I'd be hard pressed to find a pro-patent argument that makes less sense. For the record, I'm not anti-patent. I'm anti-stupid-dumbshit-patent. Patents were designed to provide an incentive to invent when the cost of invention is high, and others "freeloading" off your sunk cost could severely hurt you. When your "cost" of invention is simply "I sat around for 5 hours and thought of this cool idea to patent", you've come up with a stupid-dumbshit patent. Unfortunately it just seems that most of the patents that fall into this category are software patents. If, however, you spent millions of dollars developing something that, after being specified and documented, can be reproduced at a fraction of the cost, sure, by all means, get yourself a patent on that and enjoy it. Obviously it's hard to draw the line: at what dollar amount or length of development time should we consider something patentable? It's a hard question, but surely we can answer it better than we are now. At the very least, limit damages or licensing fees to be gained off a patent to some multiple of the difficulty in developing the patent. That's a hard thing to measure too, but again, it'd be much better than what we have now. |