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Comment by robryan | Hacker News Reader

Things like this make it hard to ever really abolish patents, either a lot of companies would be out a lot of money or the government would have to reimburse they a lot of money.

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I don't see it that way. Abolishing software patents would only apply to new patents. Currently-in-force patents would just be allowed to expire at the normal timeline, which I think is around 20 years.

That's what makes sense, but it's not like the laws passed ever make sense. See retro-active copyright extensions for a good example.

They are a granted monopoly, you pay the filing fee whether it is accepted or not hence the gov't has no liability. Look at making gold illegal for examples of how the gov't can drastically devalue your assets with no recourse.

The government can indeed devalue or even confiscate your assets if it wants to. The problem is that legislators have no interest in pissing off well-heeled companies that can contribute billions to their opponents when the only people opposed to software patents are a few programmers and policy wonks with a whole lot less money than the companies that own the patents.

Also, keep in mind that lawyers tend to be much more politically connected than programmers.

The government is immune to lawsuit, hence it never has liability.

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