The broken patent system

By Alex Singleton | 4 January 2006

BusinessWeek has an excellent article called The Patent Epidemic. Here at the GI, as Manchester liberals, we have been skeptical of the role of patents in facilitating progress: our gut instinct is that free markets, not legal monopolies, provide a better route to innovation. So it's good to see BusinessWeek discussing the problems with the current patent system. They kick off the article by approvingly quoting Thomas Jefferson who said that a man "has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?"

That sort of patent sounds too absurd to be possible, yet the patent system is riddled with absurd patents that should never have been issued. The article discusses the problems in deciding whether inventions should be patentable:

How to determine when an invention is "obvious" is one of the most critical and contentious issues in patent circles. Over the past two decades, critics say, the hurdle for passing the obviousness test has been steadily lowered, and the U.S. is now awash in a sea of junk patents. Some are just plain silly, such as a patent for "a method [of] exercising and entertaining cats" (basically teasing them with a laser pointer), or another for "an animal toy that a dog may carry in its mouth" (which not only sounds suspiciously like a stick but also looks like one in the patent drawings).

But many perceive a serious threat... Two dozen intellectual-property law professors have [made a filing to a court saying that over-patenting] "creates an unnecessary drag on innovation," forcing companies to redesign their products, pony up license fees for technology that should be free, and even deter some research altogether.

The tide shows no sign of turning. In 2004, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued 181,000 patents, up from 99,000 in 1990. New applications, meanwhile, are being filed at a rate of about 400,000 per year. If the Patent Office closed its doors today it would need two years just to clear the backlog.

(Via: Slashdot)