Patents, in their current form, are 'evil'. There needs to be better control of the patent process and some means of relating the time spent on R&D towards the maximum licensing revenue prior to patent expiration. In other words, if someone scribbles something down on a piece of paper, then patents it without any research, this patent should expire at some multiple of input costs and will be expired pretty much immediately. On the otherhand, for drug companies that spend 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars researching a new drug, the patent will expire a very long ways out.
The patent process creates an artificial monopoly and considerably hinders the progress of the industry. Just think how more secure systems would be if we didn't have the 25 year patent on public/private key encryption!
We need much better controls on the patent process and the authorized patent office. Things are getting WAY out of control. It is hard to develop anything today, even completely independently without walking over some patent right along the way. This is killing innovation in the industry and is not consistent with the original intent of the patent mechanism.
This post was edited by ShanTheMan on Monday, August 25, 2003 at 12:36.
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