Legislation To Overhaul US Patent System

FutureDomain sends us to a PC World report on the filing yesterday of legislation to overhaul the US patent system completely. The US has the only system worldwide that tries to ascertain who first invented a thing — everywhere else the criterion is who filed first, and the new legislation would bring the US into line. Identical bills were introduced in both the House and the Senate by, in each case, bipartisan sponsors. The corporate roster of backers includes Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and nearly everyone else. From the article: "The provisions of the Patent Reform Act would... restrict damages that patent holders can receive for infringement lawsuits, create a new procedure to challenge the validity of a patent after it has been granted, and boost resources for the US Patent and Trademark Office."

First Post!

Er... I mean "Prior art!"

Re:First Post!

No, no more prior art. If you filed first, screw prior art. It's yours.

I think this is going to break it worse than it already is.

Re:First Post!

I have to agree here - this is a horrible development.

In my view, the extreme solution is this:

1. No patents will exist as of 2025.
2. You can get new patents up to 2025
3. Any patent existing before 2025 will be in effect but expire on 2025.

A more agreeable solution would be this: Patents only last 5 years.

That will truly spawn innovation, because for anyone to make a buck, they will have to create new novel things. And the consumer will benefit, because innovations in manufacturing efficiency will mean that things take fewer resources to manufacture and last longer - differentiation will be in the product attributes, not in the patent portfolio. Sure, some people will claim they won't be able to recoup development costs or whatever, but that will just mean that development costs will have to come down or people will actually have to *gasp* do something truly innovative to get business. This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection, then they (and the public) need to rethink the model: The public can either have new drugs and pay a lot to support the development costs, or have cheap generic drugs and no new ones. Supply and demand, free-market style (without the protectionism of patents).

Re:

Mostly big medicine? How long are any of Intel or AMD's chips in development before they reach affordable levels? Sure, dual core CPUs may come come out right before your 5 year mark, but how expensive were these? Its true that if its 5 years, you'd see

Re:

This is mostly Big Medicine, and if Big Medicine can't manage to be profitable at the prices the public is willing to pay (generic prices) without patent protection, then they (and the public) need to rethink the model: The public can either have new drugs

Re:

The answer might be that we properly fund our universities and government research labs to tackle these problems at cost instead of for a profit. The, the governments charge a nominal fee for the agencies in charge (like the FDA in the US) to come in and c

Re:First Post!

Prior art determines patentability, not the determination of who the inventor is. Look, patents are issued to inventors. In order for that to happen, the inventor must be determined. Right now, the standard in the US is "first to invent", which means that the patent office has to examine the evidence and determine who invented the invention first. Now, since they obviously can't trust anyone's word on the subject, they have to examine evidence which is usually (always? IANAL) in the form of notebooks that have to be properly kept. In the absence of other evidence, the first person to file is declared the inventor.

Now, this is not to say that the bill would not break the US patent system any more than it already is, but one really can't tell that just from reading a summary. You should read the actual bill before concluding that it makes any problems worse.

Re:First Post!

I think it's already pretty clear that it will be bad as it will benefit patent trolls and hurt technologies developed by consortiums or open source projects (neither of which tend to patent their ideas--consortiums just establish standards that define the technologies, and open source projects normally don't waste the money on patents). For example, look at the Verizon vs. Vonage case where Verizon was the first to patent, but as of a Slashdot story yesterday it seems that a consortium of various IT companies actually met and established the standards/protocols/underlying technology of VoiP in question at least a year prior to Verizon filing for a patent.

Re:First Post!

You should read the actual bill before concluding that it makes any problems worse.

I have two arguments against your statement, and I'm only half joking.

First, the bill is backed by every large technology corporation. The only bills large corporations ever approve of are ones that increase their profits, usually at the expense of smaller companies or individuals. And if both Microsoft and IBM agree to it, this trips all my warning alarms and signals about "bad ideas".

The other argument is that Congress is horribly, horribly broken, and I simply do not trust them to pass good or useful legislation. This country needs fewer laws, not more laws. In general, if they're passing a piece of legislation, it's going to be bad for us regardless of the topic.

That said, I'm actually looking forward to reading the bill. I mean the USPTO is already pretty screwed up, so this offers the faint glimmer of hope that it really will reform them. But I'm also prepared to be severely disappointed.

No more prior art? I think not.

***No, no more prior art. If you filed first, screw prior art. It's yours.***

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. Prior art should still hold in that you can't patent something that was described by DaVinci, Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Erosthanes, or some dude in Ohio in 1998 on his web site. What first to file means is that the USPTO no longer needs to flip a coin when it gets three applications for the same thing and needs to determine who made the invention when.

See http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141 [heise.de] which makes if pretty clear that Germany -- a first to file country -- considers prior art in judging the validity of patents.

Of course, I'm no patent expert, and the US Congress with a little help from the lobbiests is capable of coming up with absolutely abominable legislation . But I'd keep an open mind on this one at least for a while for a while.

Are they going to patent this new system?

Are they going to patent this new system? or can I steal the idea!?

Re:

only if you file the patent first

Wouldn't this actually be a huge step BACKWARD?!?

The biggest problem with patents right now is companies patenting all sorts of things, ideas, systems, etc. that they didn't invent. A great example is Microsoft trying to patent [slashdot.org] "spectator mode" in games (despite the fact that PC games have been doing it for YEARS).

This legislation basically sounds like a free pass for companies to do this, and throw out the idea of "prior art" altogether. It's little wonder the big IP corporations are behind this (since they have the resources to file scores of patents, strong-arming out the little guys who may have actually invented them). And it's little wonder the patent office is behind it (since it GREATLY simplifies their job). But, for the consumer in particular, and for innovation in general, this could be one of the biggest bonehead moves out legislators have ever made (and that says a LOT).

Re:Wouldn't this actually be a huge step BACKWARD?

It also means that every company, big or small, will have to try to patent EVERYTHING. If you don't, you risk becoming an infringer later. The law will make patents a necessity for operating even the smallest of business, and could easily render nearly every business out there an infringer.

The horse had a bad broken leg before, now we're going to add a bullet through its skull and still try to ride it.

Re:Wouldn't this actually be a huge step BACKWARD?

And, that in turn means that innovation will stagnate because it will become impossible for any small company of individual to invent ANYTHING which doesn't infringe on some big corp's patent. Only the most powerful corps (with the connections, reciprocal patents, and $$ to make deals with OTHER big corps) will be able to innovate. The little guy (like the guys who founded Netscape, Google, YouTube, etc.) will be completely shut out of the game.

Re:Wouldn't this actually be a huge step BACKWARD?

In the rest of the world published prior art still disallows patents.

Filed first is just the decider when two applications are made for the same invention (which was secret until the applications).

In most of the world the person who gets to the patent office first gets the patent and the one who gets there second gets nothing. In the US you can claim that you invented it before the other party and try to prove it with dated notes etc. which were previously not published. In theory the first to have the invention gets the patent not the first to file. This leads to messy legal fights.

In the rest of the world the incentive is to file (and therefore publish) first which gives a clearer decision on this issue.

Joseph

Re:Wouldn't this actually be a huge step BACKWARD?

As for what the rest of the world does, who the hell cares?

We care because a lot of people here are saying "This couldn't possible work! I can imagine it will lead to all kinds of bad effects like this..." and they then go on to describe something that is known to not happen in the rest of the world where first-to-file has been the norm for decades.

These people remind me of nothing so much as a Renaissance mystic's response to Galileo's observation of the Jovian moons. He said that because there were seven seas on the Earth and seven openings in the human skull, there must be only seven planets in the heavens, so Galileo must be wrong. It "just made sense" to him that extra planets were impossible.

Empirical evidence is always the final arbiter of reality, and should be the final arbiter of policy, and the people here who are basing their beliefs about the consequences of first-to-file on the contents of their imaginations need to start looking beyond the end of their own cerebral cortex.

Just look at how attention to foreign implementations has been fucking up our copyright laws.

Actually, speaking in my capacity as a foreigner, what is happening is quite the opposite. The US is continually trying to bully us into adopting your crazy copyright system. [theglobeandmail.com]

Empirical fact. It's not just for scientists any more.

Re:

We care because a lot of people here are saying "This couldn't possible work! I can imagine it will lead to all kinds of bad effects like this..." and they then go on to describe something that is known to not happen in the rest of the world where first-to

Re:Wouldn't this actually be a huge step BACKWARD?

I smell large amounts of money, and am wondering which person in Washington D.C. suddenly has a huge wad of cash to spend.

It isn't just money, you know. It is the promise of jobs after government employment. Low-rate loans. "Speaking" engagements. Lecture tours. Book deals. Boats. Houses. Sex. Vacations, junkets and "fact-finding" missions. Access to people in power. Tips - market and otherwise. All manner of free dinners and drinks. Power for its own sake. Oh, and of course - money.

There is no more corrosive environment than a political position in Washington DC. It's a wonder our representatives don't outright grow horns the first day on the job. Sadly, a 100% corrupt person looks just like one that isn't.

Re:

It's a wonder our representatives don't outright grow horns the first day on the job.

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-Douglas Adams

Bizarroworld

This only magnifies the problem with the existing system where only the big guys can AFFORD to file patents and actually enforce them.

Re:Bizarroworld

It costs only $150 for a "small entity" to file a patent, and it doesn't take a patent lawyer to present the documentation to the court. If it exists, the patent holder can provide the documentation. The problem lies with inventors who don't patent their work, believing (often correctly) that it is obvious and unpatentable, but the patent office grants one to the "big guys" anyway.

Re:

The actual costs for properly documenting a patent are MUCH higher. IANAL and YANAL so look into it sometime. And even if you get one you have to be able to spend the money and time to defend it.

Frankly, this worries me

I think I understand the rationale for changing the law, but as an application developer it worries me. I'm not interested in trying to patent software that I create, or any of the techniques that I use. I'm more interested in creating applications that are so compelling that they set a high standard that is difficult for competitors to meet, and then continously innovate to stay ahead of them. However, I have always felt like I could rely on the fact that I would be able to prove that I had "invented" the software techniques I use in my applications by keeping good records of my design documents, source code control history, etc. My worry with this new proposed law is that someone could take advantage of the fact that I don't care to go through the hassle of patenting aspects of my software and swoop in and patent the concepts themselves. It almost seems like it could foster a new age of "patent squatters" similar to URL squatters. Opportunists took advantage of the fact that many companies didn't acquire their trademark URLs in the web's infancy. I could easily see a similar technique arising with patents. All you would have to do is: - pick some successful web sites - check to see if they're doing anything remotely worth patenting - see if there's a patent yet for that - file the patent if there's not - blackmail the web site, threatening to shut them down if they don't pay you a royalty/settlement for the use of "their" technique. Am I off base here? Of course, I haven't read TFA yet, so I very well could be.

Re: Publishing Defense?

Does this mean you can publish Alpha-Null versions of TurboJunk that "SortaWorks" to prove your key concepts, even though it has a thousand other bugs?

And is there a fast & dirty way to "publish" that's free?

Seems to me this could be a great sneaky gif

Pork for the big companies

"The corporate roster of backers includes Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, ..."

Each of these companies is well-known for abusing Software patents; the first two in order to maintain their monopolies. Usually "reform" by these folks means "give me a bigger piece of the pie in order to stifle innovation and keep the little guys out".

Pardon my suspicions, but I doubt this so-called "reform" is here to help us. TFA isn't clear on this, but it sounds like this is just to establish the first-to-file basis of patents, rather thna first-to-invent. First-to-invent is advantagous for the little guy, so it's no wonder the big companies are behind this dubious "reform". This is not good legislation.

If they really wanted to reform the system, it would be better to either toss out Software Patents (and harmonize our system with much of the rest of the world) or at least require a working prototype before a Software Patent is granted.

Re:Pork for the big companies

Each of these companies is well-known for abusing Software patents; the first two in order to maintain their monopolies.

Can you please tell me what monopoly IBM has? Are they a HUGE multi-national corporation? Yes, but a monopoly they hardly are. What share of the PC market do they own? Oh right, all that was sold off to Lenovo. What percent of the server market? Unix Market? Now, what percent of the OS market is Microsoft? Go re-read the definition of monopoly first. As for abusing patents, Microsoft and IBM have not sued anyone with their patents that I am aware of. In large part because the computer industry would be destroyed. There is sort of a *wink*wink* agreement within the computer industry as it relates to patents. I will give you that Amazon is basically abusing their really shitty patent for 1-click.

Usually "reform" by these folks means "give me a bigger piece of the pie in order to stifle innovation and keep the little guys out".

Actually, some of the reform these guys have proposed and the briefs they have written for SCOTUS cases have been in favor of things that would REDUCE the number of patents. At least one item would probably destroy half of their patent portfolios. It is actually kind of funny, but the people who always seem to be on the opposite side of the technology companies in these sorts of reforms are the big pharmaceutical companies. Makes you wonder who is the bigger evil.

Pardon my suspicions, but I doubt this so-called "reform" is here to help us. TFA isn't clear on this, but it sounds like this is just to establish the first-to-file basis of patents, rather thna first-to-invent. First-to-invent is advantagous for the little guy, so it's no wonder the big companies are behind this dubious "reform". This is not good legislation.

First to invent is a mess. Speaking as a former patent examiner, it is not pretty and creates about as many issues as it would ever solve. It is out-of-line with the entire world, which allows for other countries to issue the exact same patent to another company than who it was issued to in the US. It also allows companies to come back to back-date their date-of-invention to circumvent prior art, something they would no longer be able to do with the current system. It would also get rid of interferences, for the most part, something that takes up the BPAI time instead of working on appeals, which is far more important to the overall process.

If they really wanted to reform the system, it would be better to either toss out Software Patents (and harmonize our system with much of the rest of the world) or at least require a working prototype before a Software Patent is granted.

Um, working prototype is currently a requirement FOR ALL PATENTS. You do not patent an idea, you patent an invention, the actual item. It is actually within the right of the USPTO to ask for a working prototype if the functionality or existence of an item comes into question. This is very rare, but it can be done. So, for a Software patent to be issued, it would actually have to be in some form of use. Removal of Software patents and more importantly business-method patents is important. It would truly create harmonization with the rest of the world, since the US has failed multiple times to convince other nations to allow patentability of software.

Re:Pork for the big companies

"Can you please tell me what monopoly IBM has? Are they a HUGE multi-national corporation? Yes, but a monopoly they hardly are."

Certainly, since your claimed expertise isn't technology, I'll repeat this again. IBM has had a monopoly for over 50 years in the mainframe business. There was an anti-trust case taken by the U.S. government back in the 1950's IIRC against them. Contrary to popular myth, the mainframe business is very much alive and well, and in Q4 last year, it was their largest growth segment.

I say "almost all" because there's a small startup which is selling mainframe-class computers which runs IBMs software directly. IBM didn't like this, so they filed a Software Patent lawsuit against the company.

The company is called "Platform Solutions", and they are apparently using Linux to achieve their emulation.

So, in short, IBM has filed a Software Patent lawsuit against a Linux company. Here's some Press Coverage:

"IBM's decision to sue Platform Solutions is another indication that the company is becoming more aggressive about defending its intellectual property in an effort to extract more revenue from its extensive patent trove." [informationweek.com]

IBM has a VERY long history of patent abuse in the mainframe business; software patents are only the latest variation on a theme. Please check Wikipedia if you want to learn more about the Consent Decree that IBM had to operate under until possibly recently.

"Actually, some of the reform these guys have proposed and the briefs they have written for SCOTUS cases have been in favor of things that would REDUCE the number of patents."

Prove it (but you can't). The standard argument is that first-to-file INCREASES the number of patents, since large companies find it easier to generate more patents than small companies do.

"First to invent is a mess."

And First-to-file stifles innovation. It is pure pork for the big companies. The patent system was supposed to be about encouraging innovation, not stifling it. I agree the whole system needs to be redone. But First-to-file is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about the changes that are needed.

"Um, working prototype is currently a requirement FOR ALL PATENTS. You do not patent an idea, you patent an invention"

Really? Do you mean all those patent trolls who never ship any product have a working prototype? I'm a little surprised to hear this claim from a supposed Patent Attorney. I can think of several Troll companies which don't have a working product. This is usually their standard operating procedure.

A copy of the prototype binary and source code ought to be a part of any current Software Patent, IMHO.

Re:Pork for the big companies

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/i ndex.html#model [uspto.gov]

Models or exhibits are not required in most patent applications since the description of the invention in the specification and the drawings must be sufficiently full, clear, and complete and capable of being understood to disclose the invention without the aid of a model.

A working model, or other physical exhibit, may be required by the Office if deemed necessary. This is not done very often. A working model may be requested in the case of applications for patent for alleged perpetual motion devices.

When the invention relates to a composition of matter, the applicant may be required to furnish specimens of the composition, or of its ingredients or intermediates, for inspection or experiment. If the invention is a microbiological invention, a deposit of the micro-organism involved is required.

More like fine-tunning

Judging from the article this does nothing to limit the "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... over the Internet"; "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... wirelessly" kind of patents.

Or the "Get a bunch of specialists in a room and ask them 'How would you solve problem X' and then patent the solutions" approach to "innovation".

Not to mention that the change from a "Prior-art has precedence" system to a "First to patent wins" one means the anybody that has loads of ideas but no money to patent them will loose against "Big corp with loadsa money for whom the costs of filling a patent are short change".

Couple this with the ability to patent business methods (whether encoded as a software/hardware mix or not) and you'll see things like "selling ice-cream on a beach" being patented.

The real revolution would be dropping patents for business methods (software encoded or not) altogether.

The fact that BSA is for it (read: the big boys in the software world), should be ringing alarm bells in everybodies minds.

Re:

Judging from the article this does nothing to limit the "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... over the Internet"

Well, how do you distinguish that from an actual invention, which usually takes two or more ideas that already exist and

Re:

These kind of patents are filled before it becames economically feasible to do so.

It's a bit like officially staking ownership to a piece of land on Mars and then waiting until people get there.

The thing is, in IT related areas, given the speed of technolo

No, you don't want this

IF you think Patent abuse is bad now, this won't only hurt inventors, it will remove any recourse they have when they have been ripped off.

This is not reform we need, it is reform large corporations need.
Yes, the patent system needs some changes, but that is no reason to accept ANY change just for the sake of change.

What the patent needs is to remove business methods and software patents. The rest of it is pretty good, expcially compared to other countries.

Contact you legislators and tell them no, this isn't broken.

BSA

But several tech trade groups and companies ... Business Software Alliance (BSA) -- praised the sponsors for reintroducing the updated bill.

If the BSA is for it, I'm against it. They are by definition anti-consumer and anti-business (not named Microsoft).

Damage Caps Suck

The provisions of the Patent Reform Act would... restrict damages that patent holders can receive for infringement lawsuits

Ahhh, I love that. So it's going to be enough for the big guys (who are all backing it) to kill upstart competition. But if the big guys think they can ship a lot of product, they can simply; ignore the little guy's patent, bury him in lawyers if they do get sued, and in the unlikely event that the little guy can withstand that onslaught, the most the big guy risks is one quarter's worth of profits. Excellent.

Re:Translation ... Garage inventer will be screwed

No. Prior art stays the same. If anyone has published a the same idea before it is not patentable (in theory, in practice USPO will still not check it),

The old system just had the option of companies not filing patents and not publishing their results could come in and claim they invented the idea first.

The new system is much less corrupt and more open.

Re:

No. Under the current system, the first to invent has 1 year (I think) to use the invention without worrying about "race to the Patent Office" that exists in the "first-to-file" countries. If anything, changing the system to the "first-to-file" rule woul

Re:

The advantage of the 'first to file' rule is it prevents the situation where A patents something and B goes "Oi! I thought of that last year. Honest. Ask my cousin C and pal D". Big companies have an advantage in that kind of trick: 'Sure we did, just

Re:Hmmm

Why don't they do something useful like void software and business method patents while they're at it?

They never do anything useful, you silly person. They're the federal government. They're operating largely outside the bounds of the constitution and their primary foci are to (a) consolidate power, and (b) accrue money and distribute it to the power holders. See their current "interpretation" of the commerce clause for details. I'll give you a capsule: The constitution says the feds can govern INTERstate commerce. The feds say that means they can govern INTRAstate commerce. See how that works? Black is white, white is black, and your complaints are double-plus ungood. Now go back to sleep like a good citizen.

Legalized theft!

That's what it means, if filing first is all you need to do. Just steal somebody else's idea and file it first.
Also, I'm curious to know what provision there is, if somebody deliberately puts something into the Public Domain, and somebody else applies fo

Re:

No. OS/PD projects are copyrighted not patented. Whole different animal.

Re:Legalized theft!

I have mod points, and was looking for some-one to point out that the parent and grandparent are not insightful, just wrong. There really needs to be a -1 wrong Mod.

Anyhow. This legislation makes it much MUCH easier for open source projects. Instead of having to write something, and then find out someone else claims to have invented it, and they filed a patent before you published, you just have to search filed patents. If it isn't there, publish your general idea, and write your open source project.

Similarly, both the parent and grandparent seem to totally miss that you most definitely cannot patent something from an open source project, as, anything which is available as open source, is already published.

Here is the thing. Any public disclosure (prior to filing) invalidates a patent. Now, I am allowed to talk with a friend, to further developement, but, to cover your ass, you really should get him/her to sign an NDA before talking about it, because simply talking about it constitutes a public disclosure. Proving that public disclosure can be an issue.

Now, what this legislation does is, it says that between 2 people (corporations, groups, committees, whatever) who have the same idea, and both try to patent it, provided that neither has published anything, and it is a useful, non-obvious idea, we will give the patent to the one who files first. This eliminates confusion about who should gt it, with both parties "no, I had the idea first. So, for the most part, to avoid infringement, you just have to search relevant patents. There is still some time, between when a provisional patent is filed, and when the USPTO accepts (and publishes) it that you could have various "submarine" patents get into an open standard, or your open source project, but this legislation doesnt make it possible, at all, for some-one to take your OS project, and start filing patents based on it. Parent and GP are crying wolf, without understanding what they are talking about.

Re:

Alright, more digging. From the Patent Reform Act of 2007 [house.gov],

102. Conditions for patentability; novelty
(a) Novelty; Prior Art.—A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained if—
(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a print

honest reform = kill all patents

Yeah right, like this ever works

He's right, it never does, it's like slave reform. Any "solution" that puts off complete elimination only openes itself up to the next level of abuse. Patents are arguably more evil than slavery. Like 15 million impovrished Africans being sued in the world court not to purchase generic AIDS drugs from India, like safety devices in cars held back 20 years while over a million people died in auto accidents. Like 20 million elderly being subjected to overpriced drugs that have unknown chemichal distortions only because safer classes aren't patentable. It's amazing the number of people we are willing to torture and kill in the name of fradulent property rights. People say "well, we would never be so barbaric as to allow fradulent use of the word 'property' to justify the torture and murder of innocent people like they did in 1850, we would never be like those idiots who just wanted the slave states to get along with the free states". NOT!

Last time they did "patent reform" they created a patent court. But being a patent court means they had more incentive than ever to expand their influence by expanding the scope, role, and influence of patents. It totally blew up in our faces. This time it will probably mean that all the small company innovators who can't hire a staff of lawyers to file first are going to get screwed. Yeah, they may have prior art, but yeah they will need to hire an army of lawyers to defned it.

The bottom line is that innovators and scientists are good at inventing things. Lwayers and governments and conglomerates are good at controling things. Think about it. Patnets punish people who share and collaberate, and now with first file that will be more true than ever, who will share R&D when that very sharing could lock them out and screw them. If people think R&D costs are high now, just wait, and watch .... then they will say "wahhh, we need more patnets because R&D costs more than ever". The phrase, "the bad tree bears bad fruit has never been so true as with patnets."

Re:honest reform = kill all patents

Imagine a world without patents though...
There would be limited insentive for anyone to invent anything new. The people who spent the time, and invested the money in inventing new products and developing new ideas would have to live with anybody comming along and releasing a knock-off of their product. Honest inventors who developed new things would be very limited in their ability to capatilize on them. Patents allow for people responsible for something to get a head start to market before the patent expires (you might argue that currently they get too much time, and I might be persuaded to agree with you there).
You talk about the drug companies, and how evil they are. But regardless of anything else they invent things that extend and improve our lives, don't they deserve to make money from it? Perhaps a tiered pricing model, which would allow people who can't afford it to buy their meds at a lower price would be a good thing, but at the end of a day, they deserve to make back their investment in the research to create a new drug, and patents allow that to happen. Without patents there would be much less incentive for research companies to invest all that money in new drugs, which means no future drugs that could improve our lives.
There is more to the patent system than abuse, and just because some people abuse it doesn't mean that we should dismanle the entire system.

Re:

"There would be limited insentive for anyone to invent anything new."

Not granting exclusive monopoly rights does not mean not paying for the research. The damaging monopoly aspects of patents, such as litigation warfare, overincentive for marketing, reduce

Re:honest reform = kill all patents

True, so here's a solution: tie patents to individuals rather than corporations. Make them non-transferable, and make corporations ineligible for owning patents (and throw out the rest of the archaic, railroad-boss-purchased "corporate personhood" bullshit while we're at it).

Then perhaps the patent system can return to the way it was when it was designed.

Re:

You, too, are propagating the same lie [slashdot.org] that the pharmas do. The patent system, and all other IP law is designed to provide control, not innovation. Things will be invented out of need, with or without the patent system. We're not just going to sit around a

Re:

I just can't believe that your post is being modded insightful...

So what you're saying is that countries where half of the population has AIDS, need to pay up or wait 20 years for medication?

Mmm, I wonder why they don't agree with your view of things... Th