I don't understand why half of the current comments on this article are currently bashing the Financial Times for such an underwhelming/"not very enlightening"/"poor" article.
This article is akin to the lobbying that any interested party does when they want to see change... To make a comparison... half of what Chris Dodds said from the MPAA was utter balls and constantly full of inaccuracies and litter picking his facts to suit him...
I don't particularly care if the Financial Times do the same here. Not every FT reader will be clued in to the inadequacies of the patent system, and I think this article does do a fantastic job of explaining in lay terms how much of shambles technology patents are.
Back when I studied Law at University, I actually remember my first lecture on IP and Patents; it was on "Justifications for Intellectual Property Rights". We talked about Venetian/Florence Glass Blowers and the Pharmaceutical Industry...
Comparing the different industries makes it easy to see how you can justify patents for one use case. Providing a limited monopoly in pharmaceuticals (for the most part) guarantees the incentive for the ridiculously high research and development costs that goes along with bringing a product to market.
Providing a monopoly right for technology where you position your fingers over a device to interact with it, is ridiculous and just shows how antiquated and behind the times the Law is.
Yes, the article might be muddling up some things, but it does a great job of bringing to attention how broken the patent system is for technology/software/computer implemented inventions.
There are many problems with patents in drug development as well, as Derek Lowe discusses in these essays, http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/patents_and_ip/ . It may be time to try to develop something new, maybe based on patent law, maybe not, even for pharma.
ADDED: One problem pharma shares with software is "patent thickets" where there are many applicable patents, applying to different layers of technology, that the current development relies on.
This article is akin to the lobbying that any interested party does when they want to see change... To make a comparison... half of what Chris Dodds said from the MPAA was utter balls and constantly full of inaccuracies and litter picking his facts to suit him...
I don't particularly care if the Financial Times do the same here. Not every FT reader will be clued in to the inadequacies of the patent system, and I think this article does do a fantastic job of explaining in lay terms how much of shambles technology patents are.
Back when I studied Law at University, I actually remember my first lecture on IP and Patents; it was on "Justifications for Intellectual Property Rights". We talked about Venetian/Florence Glass Blowers and the Pharmaceutical Industry...
Comparing the different industries makes it easy to see how you can justify patents for one use case. Providing a limited monopoly in pharmaceuticals (for the most part) guarantees the incentive for the ridiculously high research and development costs that goes along with bringing a product to market.
Providing a monopoly right for technology where you position your fingers over a device to interact with it, is ridiculous and just shows how antiquated and behind the times the Law is.
Yes, the article might be muddling up some things, but it does a great job of bringing to attention how broken the patent system is for technology/software/computer implemented inventions.