More patents

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More patents were issued in 2010 than any other year

Seriously, WTF? The patent office does something that has been proven again and again to lead to nastiness in the courts, and then acts like they're doing the world a favor. I hate it when people do that.

Nastiness is a byproduct of the patent process, not the goal. You may patent an invention, and the patent gives the inventor a temporary monopoly to build and sell it. This monopoly may be sold or licensed, and may make the difference between being able to profitably build it or not. Without patents, many inventions would simply not be made and sold at all because new inventions often are not profitable at first. Also, the monopoly one is granted for invention is the way the government rewards the inventor for describing how an invention is built and how it works. It serves the public good to disclose how things work, rather than try to keep it secret. It also gives an inventor a motive to provide a written description of ideas and place them into an archived, searchable database where others can see it. Without written, archived publication, much knowledge about how things work would simply be lost.

The putting of ideas out where others can see them, rather than just keeping them in one's head or sitting on them in hopes that they'll remain safe as "trade secrets", is one of the things that separates the legitimate scientists and engineers from the alien chasers. Of course, just like school, you can only get credit for what you turn in.

Yes, I believe patents should exist to some extent. But some software patents have been in existence for so long that the inventions they cover are obsolete. IMO, no patent should last for more than two years. Two years is plenty of time for an inventor to make a reasonable profit from an idea.

The other problem with the patent system is that people are allowed to patent things that they didn't invent, or to buy out patents and not use them. This makes it so that NO ONE is able to use the invention. In this situation, nothing is accomplished other than the inhibition of technological progress.

Look up MPEG-LA sometime. There are companies out there that produce absolutely nothing, but still make money by claiming patents on other companies' ideas and then licensing them back to the original inventors.

Two years is not usually enough time. Just bringing one company executive up to speed on what you've done might take at least that long. Some inventions can be conceived before a market exists for them. For example, one of mine covers a way to run an engine on ammonia. Oil is still cheap, and others are working on ammonia, so if I hadn't published, someone else would likely have published before me. However, because oil is still too cheap, the conversion is not practical yet but it will be needed, probably sometime within the life of the patent. It might make more sense for a patent's lifetime to start only after sales of an invention begin, then end five years later. Even 2 years of active coverage would be a better deal than a lifetime of 20 years, for inventions that end up taking 30 years to reach significant commercial importance.