| > Is there a better way of achieving this? I am not a lawyer but here are some random ideas:
Societies have invented patents as an exception to a generic right to copy: Something which is patented must not be copied without authorization. They were also invented because copyright/brand name can't protect industrial objects which were often simple in design.
So the innovation that patent laws brought was to protect the way something is working to reach some goal.
Claim 1: This is a car toy equipped with rockets
Claim 2: Where rockets uses water
Claim 3: Where water is produced from thin air
There are possibly similar legal objects with similar goals.
For example some companies sell their knowledge to government in exchange of keeping it secret. Why not imagine the reverse? Could companies sell their knowledge to government in exchange of making it public? After all it's the interest of any government to make economy thrive and make non strategic knowledge to diffuse as quickly as possible. This is the model used by IBM/Oracle/Redhat/etc: They sell something now almost trivial (OSes, DB, workflows) yet which needs an army of consultants to be production ready and conform to current legislation. It's possible also to protect your product by the power of your brand. They were thousand manufacturers which tried producing pseudo iPhones but nearly nobody wants to buy one which would be obviously fake. If companies prefer patents, it's because they don't like competition and it is easy to kill nascent competitors with an expensive trial. |
To me, the two most egregious ways current patents fail is how they frequently don't explain the innovation to a skilled practioner, and then how they can be subsequently interpreted overly broadly.
The first violates the entire point of being granted a patent, and the second makes them a minefield for everyone else.
I wonder if the structure of patents as a series of claims is something that could be altered. What if a patent had to clearly state what the non obvious part of the claim is (the originality that requires protection). And only that original part is then deserving of protection?