If you want to sort out the mess with patents, that's easy: no more patents. The biggest problem with patents (and copyright, for that matter) is that they're relatively easy to obtain and very, very, very difficult to get rid of the bad ones. This means they will grow and expand into areas there were not meant to be used, such as the human genome. The way to fix this is to make is as difficult to obtain as it is to get rid of them or make it as easy to get rid of them as it is to obtain them. Either case means they lose their effectiveness, so why bother with them?
And if you're thinking that there some middle ground where patents are more difficult to obtain and easier to get rid of, this middle ground is unstable. It won't take too many years before obtaining patents becomes easier and getting rid of the bad ones harder. This is what we started with with the first patents laws and we all know how that turned out.
Every OS has a shutdown feature. It therefore terminates. The calculations of infinite series terminate when the memory gets full. And if someone wants to patent a program that overwrites its own memory, go right ahead. :)
Authored Comments
If you want to sort out the mess with patents, that's easy: no more patents. The biggest problem with patents (and copyright, for that matter) is that they're relatively easy to obtain and very, very, very difficult to get rid of the bad ones. This means they will grow and expand into areas there were not meant to be used, such as the human genome. The way to fix this is to make is as difficult to obtain as it is to get rid of them or make it as easy to get rid of them as it is to obtain them. Either case means they lose their effectiveness, so why bother with them?
And if you're thinking that there some middle ground where patents are more difficult to obtain and easier to get rid of, this middle ground is unstable. It won't take too many years before obtaining patents becomes easier and getting rid of the bad ones harder. This is what we started with with the first patents laws and we all know how that turned out.
Every OS has a shutdown feature. It therefore terminates. The calculations of infinite series terminate when the memory gets full. And if someone wants to patent a program that overwrites its own memory, go right ahead. :)