>"Patents should protect r&d cost, things that would not happen otherwise" //
Can you conceive of a method by which patents can fairly allow for R&D costs to be recouped but would not allow money to be recouped that hadn't been paid out? Does this removal of incentive trouble you at all - the premise on which patents are founded is reward for sharing an idea with the public, without that reward will inventors share the details of their inventions?
Personally I would just make the patent term significantly shorter. I think the pace of technological change has advanced enough that this won't cause a significant problem in recouping R&D costs. A term of 8 years, say, would allow enough time to recoup expense and gain a reward whilst allowing the public domain to benefit from the invention much sooner - it would be nice to put a revenue cap in place instead of a short term (to protect a small inventor who produces something beneficial for a small sector at great cost, or similar) but in practice I think that would be too difficult to legislate for fairly and without leaving too many holes for major corps to exploit.
I like the idea of a rebellion by the people whose names are on patents, where they help with the invalidation. It could be a reasonably successful prioritization strategy.
The public good is usually best served by healthy competition.
Problems occur when r&d for an invention is very costly. This is not the case for software patents.
Can you point me to a software patent that is protecting something of value (in term of cost of the invention)?
And, personally, no, it does not bother me. Both me and the companies I worked for would have been better off without software patents.
Like the author I do believe that copyright is a very important and useful legal construct (even open source software would not exist in its current form without it).
Also:
>"Patents should protect r&d cost, things that would not happen otherwise" //
Can you conceive of a method by which patents can fairly allow for R&D costs to be recouped but would not allow money to be recouped that hadn't been paid out? Does this removal of incentive trouble you at all - the premise on which patents are founded is reward for sharing an idea with the public, without that reward will inventors share the details of their inventions?
Personally I would just make the patent term significantly shorter. I think the pace of technological change has advanced enough that this won't cause a significant problem in recouping R&D costs. A term of 8 years, say, would allow enough time to recoup expense and gain a reward whilst allowing the public domain to benefit from the invention much sooner - it would be nice to put a revenue cap in place instead of a short term (to protect a small inventor who produces something beneficial for a small sector at great cost, or similar) but in practice I think that would be too difficult to legislate for fairly and without leaving too many holes for major corps to exploit.