We hear all the time that the patent system is “broken” and needs to be “reformed”. That it doesn’t live up to its original “purpose” of incentivizing innovation. This is all confused. The original patent system never served its original purpose either. Those who say that we should reduce the patent term assume that some finite term is better than zero; they are confused too (Tabarrok: Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin). People who say we should reduce patent terms, “fix” the problems, get rid of patent “trolls” or software patents, improve patent “quality”—but who think “we” “need” a patent system of some sort, are part of the problem, not part of the solution
from the that’s-a-patent dept
Well, this is nice to see. Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr at the NY Times have a nice long piecehighlighting just how broken the patent system is today. It kicks off with an anecdote of the type of story we hear about all the time: where a startup innovator gets threatened by a patent holder (in this case, not a troll, but a larger company), and the lawsuit effectively kills the startup. Even though it actually won in court, after spending an astounding $3 million fighting the lawsuit, the company was basically out of money… and was forced to sell itself to the company who had sued it, knowing that it still faced another five patent lawsuits. That’s not a unique story. The company who sued, Nuance, defended its actions in the articles with this line of pure crap:
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