And probably also more patent litigation than in the entire history of mankind. Who knows whether we would have had more innovation or less in the past twenty years without our current patent system?
Scrapping the whole thing is madness, though. Some level of protection matters, but whether the system we have is the best of all possible worlds is hardly obvious.
At least in software, most of the fundamental innovations occurred before software patents started becoming popular. The twenty-year-old CLRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms) is still the standard bible for algorithms and data structures. To quote Joel Spolsky,
"Software developers don’t actually invent very much. The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.
The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours." (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html)
At least in software, most of the fundamental innovations occurred before software patents started becoming popular. The twenty-year-old CLRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms) is still the standard bible for algorithms and data structures. To quote Joel Spolsky,
I actually really enjoyed that book which is weird because I typically prefer the highly theoretical ones. I still need to get around to reading the Donal Knuth series on algorithms.
Comments
And probably also more patent litigation than in the entire history of mankind. Who knows whether we would have had more innovation or less in the past twenty years without our current patent system?
Scrapping the whole thing is madness, though. Some level of protection matters, but whether the system we have is the best of all possible worlds is hardly obvious.
At least in software, most of the fundamental innovations occurred before software patents started becoming popular. The twenty-year-old CLRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms) is still the standard bible for algorithms and data structures. To quote Joel Spolsky,
"Software developers don’t actually invent very much. The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.
The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours." (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2013/07/22.html)
At least in software, most of the fundamental innovations occurred before software patents started becoming popular. The twenty-year-old CLRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms) is still the standard bible for algorithms and data structures. To quote Joel Spolsky,
I actually really enjoyed that book which is weird because I typically prefer the highly theoretical ones. I still need to get around to reading the Donal Knuth series on algorithms.