Patents are both too cheap and too expensive. Too cheap for capitalized trolls, and too expensive for individual inventors.
Clearly the problem is that the novelty clause is not being enforced in any meaningful capacity.
The deeper problem of course, is that a hundreds-year-old institution is just incapable of dealing with the concept of software. The pace of development is orders of magnitude faster, and the cost is orders of magnitude lower than the type of innovation that patent law was originally designed for.
Imagine if you came up with a particularly clever idea in software and you got two years exclusivity to capitalize on it, assuming that the patent application included the actual code. If the novelty were properly enforced, I can imagine how such a system could offer an incentive to innovate and provide "open source" code to the world at large.
Of course I don't have any faith that the bureaucrats have the capacity to make such a thing happen, so honestly we're better off without software patents entirely.
Clearly the problem is that the novelty clause is not being enforced in any meaningful capacity.
The deeper problem of course, is that a hundreds-year-old institution is just incapable of dealing with the concept of software. The pace of development is orders of magnitude faster, and the cost is orders of magnitude lower than the type of innovation that patent law was originally designed for.
Imagine if you came up with a particularly clever idea in software and you got two years exclusivity to capitalize on it, assuming that the patent application included the actual code. If the novelty were properly enforced, I can imagine how such a system could offer an incentive to innovate and provide "open source" code to the world at large.
Of course I don't have any faith that the bureaucrats have the capacity to make such a thing happen, so honestly we're better off without software patents entirely.