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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

A 5 year monopoly on software ideas is no more ridiculous than a 5 year monopoly on mechanical ideas or chemical ideas.

Very different. The cost of coming up with chemical compounds is often quite large. With software most new work is done by very few people.

At the same time, a successful chemical compound might mean tens of billions in sales. A modest software innovation might have a very niche application with much smaller sales.

Is a small research team less entitled to protect their novel work than a big corporation?

If you use the word "entitled", you're thinking about this wrong. Patents are not designed to protect fundamental rights (e.g. to a "reasonable" profit), they are designed to maximize societal good by balancing a monopoly incentive with the benefits of open use.

That will be solved in part if patents get assigned a value (on which 'damages' etc. are based) that are proportional to the work that went in. For a software product that contains thousands of good ideas, the value of each of those will be only a fraction of the value of the total product.

Then, of, course, the idea of blocking sales of a product because of infringement should also be completely abolished -- some money should be the most you can get.

True.

In fact, for every field X, most X engineers don't want patents to apply to field X.

Most drug researchers I have talked to have been in support of drug patents and only have issue with DNA related patents. I think the real issue is patents work best for well developed fields, and tend to have issues when things start moving quickly.

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