Particular industries, eg drug patenting, could be far better addressed with targeted legislation but at this point it's mostly just momentum and vested interests. It provides huge benefits for a small group and diffused costs. It's hard to imagine it being possible to get enough momentum to change things.
One goal is to encourage inventors to publish their work, rather than hold them as trade secrets, so that others can learn from them -- and get eventually copy and extend them.
I've read a fair number of patents, both in and outside of software, and my biggest problem with software patents is that most of them are absolute crap: they are generally neither innovative nor insightful.
Anecdotally, in my field, the actual interesting ideas are kept a company secret. The ideas that are not being deployed for competitive advantage are shoveled into salami-sliced patents to be deployed as ammunition in the big-corpo patent warfare battlefield.
But here I am talking about a field where implementation trumps ideas. In some fields, e.g. pharma, most of the work and expense lies in finding a needle in a haystack. Once the product hits the market, the secret is out.
In both cases, I feel that the patent system fails its goal to make trade secrets public.
If it's not possible to verify that the system is fulfilling its purpose, and if the general consensus is that it doesn't fulfill its purpose, then what do we get out of saying that "encouraging inventors to publish their work" is it's purpose? It feels like it's mass self-delusion at that point, and for who?
I don't know how to test this in an experimental way because I don't know how to make it repeatable.
I can say anecdotally that I've used non-software patents to figure out how to level a door via its hinges, find out how Pop Rocks are made, and understand how they keep air sickness bags from leaking. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting. It is worth noting that I could easily follow all of these even though I'm a complete non-expert on any of the subjects.
I've never gotten anything out of a software patent. I have a hard time even reading mine. This leads me to the hypothesis (which seems testable) that software patents are particularly broken.
Imagine that you graduate university with some cool tech ideas. You develop a prototype and want to start building a business around it. You file a patent, hoping it will protect you long enough to get your company off the ground -- often a 7 year mission. Does it? Not necessarily, but it is nice, in theory anyway, to think that big tech can't just rip off your idea at scale the first time somebody sees it
In practice, my understanding is that you can't really afford to enforce your patent without a big legal team, and even then, the cost can sink your fledgling company
I think the real problem is the cost of accessing and navigating the legal system (including: the cost of invalidating bogus patents)
Both patents and copyright laws are monopoly rights given by state. They are evil and should be abolished without exception. IP is not property, and empirical evindence shows they do more harm then good for humanity.
There are some avid supporters of this strain of thought. Here is an example: albeit old, this may give some background:
> IP is not property, and empirical evindence shows they do more harm then good for humanity.
Although I agree with your position re IP not legitimately being property, I want to nitpick a bit here, and point out that empirical evidence can only substantiate empirical claims. Construing outcomes as "harm" or "good" is a normative evaluation, so this argument is an attempt to leap across the is-ought gap.
Reason I mentioned empirical evidence is for people who would not accept abolishing IP and copyright laws on philosophical grounds. Otherwise, for me its illegitimacy does not require evidence.
The core criterion for whether something can be property is whether it is economically rival, i.e. whether possession/use by one party inherently excludes others from equivalent possession/use. This is true for all physical resources, including most items that people regard as "means of production", making them natural property, but isn't true for most of the things IP laws apply to.
This is an amalgamation of ideas I’ve read and may be totally from elsewhere, but I think a good approach here would be to handle this more dynamically.
Every patent is taxed at some arbitrary rate - say 3% a year. The catch is the patent holder decides how much it’s worth. Low value means low tax. However, whatever value you pick is an open price for licensing by anyone else.
Ultimately, use it or lose it. If you don’t think it’s valuable and someone else does, the world still benefits.
Tune the tax percentage based on how much you want to hurt patent trolls vs impact on actual long term R&D
The problem is not patents, as such. The problem is the recent spate of patents of ideas, rather than inventions.
How patents are supposed to work:
You come up with an idea for a novel device. You spend time, money, and effort figuring out how to create your novel device. Once you actually have it working—or at least a detailed schematic, if building a prototype might be cost-prohibitive—you file a patent. That patent does two things: First, it ensures that, for the duration of patent protection, you have sole rights to produce the novel device. Second, it ensures that once that duration expires, anyone with the resources to obtain the raw materials and manpower can create as many of your novel devices as they want.
Then in comes the information revolution. There's much less demand for novel devices that do specific things; now people just want software that can run on general-purpose computers. Software is already protected under copyright law, so there's no logical reason for it to be patentable—but some people still want it to be patentable too...with a twist. They don't want to just be able to patent a specific implementation of an idea in software. They want to be able to patent the idea itself, so all they need to do is come up with a thought of a kind of software you could write, translate that thought into patent language, and submit it to the patent office.
This is how you end up with idiocy like saying you own the sole rights to "selling people stuff by adding it to a digital shopping cart—over the internet!"
TL;DR: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Get rid of software patents, and the whole concept of "patents on ideas", but keep patents on novel devices.
Patents, especially computing patents, need to be less general as well.
If you can accidentally stumble into multiple patent violations without even trying, they aren't really novel ideas by definition.
For example "slide to unlock" is a digital patent, but I would argue that any number of physical implementations predate it, and the motion itself isn't novel or unique enough to merit a patent.
It's regulatory capture. There's a network of big corps that make cross patenting agreements, and keep others out of the market, benefiting from the patent system. This kind of court case is the rare spillover that normally stays below the surface.
I think everyone has a list of inventions that are so great that a patent is a fair way for society to reward the inventor. Alas, the personal lists are often much shorter than the patent offices' lists.
For me, the Polio vaccine is an easy one. Of course, Salk chose not to patent it, but I would have been happy to make him and his lab very rich.
They're supposed to help small innovators get protection from the big guys when they invent something new, and then they're supposed to expire expediently so that they don't stifle innovation.
With stuff like this, it seems the reverse is true, but I might just be ignorant of how things work.