Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
Patents would be fine if the bar for “innovation” would be much higher, software patents weren’t a thing, there was way more research done into prior art, and there would be different (shorter) lengths for patents depending on what industry they target.
Like, if it’s manufacturing or something like drugs where it takes years before you can start making profit, sure, make them 10-20 years. If it’ something you make money off of immediately, it should be shorter.
I actually agree that the patent system could be improved a lot. Not all things are bad about it.
What do you mean with “innovation”? How would that be defined?
Protecting innovative stuff is literally the point of patents and why the system exists. Anything “new” is by definition innovation, except the bar is really low currently, with very little research being done into prior art.
Patented stuff should be non-obvious, and not a simple derivative of existing stuff (i.e. when there are square buttons and circle buttons you shouldn’t be able to patent a button that has 2 corners square and 2 circle just because it’s “novel” because it’s just a very simple and logical step).
So basically, make the bar for a patent much higher, and require some proof into the research of prior art and explaining why/how your patent is different.
Also, patents should expire early/not be renewable if you don’t actually use them (so move a certain number of units / generate some amount of revenue using your patents). So you couldn’t patent random BS in the hopes someone else will break your patent by accident.
Or even better, just outright punish patent trolls.