Patently Wrong

The Verge‘s Nilay Patel on what’s wrong with the US patent system today:

In the past few months, this rhetoric has grown to a furious roar, as the patent system seems to be affecting more and more of the technology industry in a negative way: small mobile app developers have been targeted with spurious lawsuits from companies that make nothing, a pair of multibillion-dollar patent auctions has sparked an unprecedented war of words between Microsoft and Google, and major players like Apple, HTC, and Samsung are locked in patent-related litigation that has resulted in devices like the Galaxy Nexus being banned (and unbanned) from sale. The most passionate critics loudly argue that whatever benefits our current patent system might offer have now been exceeded by its costs; that resources that should otherwise go to the development of new ideas are instead being misspent on the overzealous protection of the old.

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He’s right. But it’s worse than just patents. Congress has gone so overboard protecting all intellectual property, that it makes a mockery of its power to secure “for limited Times the works of Authors and Inventors.”

And I say this as someone who works in the field of creating content. IP is my paycheck.

We could start by repealing the DMCA and then go from there.

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