The New Yorker on Business Process Patents

caledon writes "The New Yorker has a clear, concise, nontechnical essay by its finance columnist James Surowiecki criticizing business process patents: Patent Bending. 'Although we have always had a vibrant patent system, we've managed to strike a balance between the need to encourage innovation and the need to foster competition. As Benjamin Day, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries. In the past decade, the balance has been upset.' Makes the argument persuasively."

Comments

Re:an elegant solution

[PickaBooga]

The idea that patents help the individual inventor is a myth.

The best resource I know is Don Lancaster's "The Case Against Patents":

For most individuals and small scale startups, patents are virtually certain to result in a net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity.

One reason for this is the outrageously wrong urban lore involving patents and patenting.
A second involves the outright scams which inevitably surround "inventions" and "inventing".
A third is that the economic breakeven needed to recover patent costs is something between $12,000,000.00 and $40,000,000 in gross sales. It is ludicrously absurd to try and patent a million dollar idea.

Don Lancaster is a old-school hardware/AppleII hacker. On his website he lists a lot of alternatives to patenting that are actually helpful to the individual inventor.