>There's also a public good argument. When you patent something, yes, you get >a temporary monopoly -- but the tradeoff is you have to publicly reveal it. >In the absence of patents, more technological advances would be treated as >trade secrets and kept out of the public eye. > >I do think there are a lot of abuses of the patent system, most of them >related to insufficient vetting of new patents and the expense of litigating >them later. I think something like the patent system is necessary, though. >
The length of the monopoly should be part of the discussion; I can see why a patent for a medication should be as long as it is now, but for software and perhaps hardware too, I'm thinking more of 5 years and not longer. Also, the law should be changed to disallow patent trolls: if you don't ship or plan to ship a product using your patent, then clearly you're not suffering when someone else is using a similar invention. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
