Mike Masnick notes in If You Have To License The Software You Claim Infringes On Your Patent, How Is Your Patent Valid? that:
It’s certainly beginning to feel like we’re hitting something of an inflection point in getting people to realize just how incredibly broken the patent system is. There has been a flurry of mostly excellent news stories from a variety of sources picking up on this and detailing specific cases of a broken patent system. The This American Life episode certainly helped kick off a lot of attention, but it’s definitely been growing in other areas as well. The latest entrant into the field is an excellent article from Ben Popper over at The Observer’s BetaBeat site, which focuses on one specific smaller patent troll, a company called IQ Biometrix, and what it’s done over the years… which is basically nothing productive. However, it does have two hugely questionable patents: 7,289,647 for a “system and method for creating and displaying a composite facial image” and 6,731,302 for a “method and apparatus for creating facial images.”
The patent proponents do indeed seem to be on the ropes. This is acknowledged by one guy offering a pathetic, tepid defense of the patent system, in Everybody’s Angry About Patents, But They’re Actually A Good Thing, which asserts, groundlessly:
it’s easy to lose sight of what patents actually do: they force inventors to disclose information about an invention to the public. In exchange, they get a time-limited monopoly on that invention.
The end result is MORE innovation, not less. There’s no reason to throw the whole system out just because we don’t like the way some companies are using it today.
As I commented there,
See also the various studies collected here http://blog.mises.org/10217/yet-another-study-finds-patents-do-not-encourage-innovation Yet Another Study Finds Patents Do Not Encourage Innovation.
