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Comment by malachismith | Hacker News Reader

WHY have we not reformed our patent system yet? Is it purely because of the sway lawyers have over our legal system and regulatory system (and the inherent conflict of interest that results)?

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Despite what people might have you believe, lawyers are almost certainly neutral on this issue. Lawyers get paid either way. The patent system is the way it is because it serves the interest of the real monied interests. Too, there is a legitimate argument that changing something so fundamentally intertwingled with lots and lots and lots of economic activity is not something to be done lightly.

Personally, I don't have a settled opinion on software patents. I'm much more offended by the gruesome metastasis of copyright into an finite but unbounded bludgeon.

The more contention and ambiguity (in the patent system), the more work there is for attorneys. It would be in their best interest to keep the status quo.

I don't buy that. That's like arguing that janitors would have opposed the vacuum cleaner on the grounds that it would speed up tasks, therefore decreasing the amount of work available for them.

Or like textile workers would break into factories and destroy the frames invented to make the work faster and easier, calling themselves the "Sons of Ned Ludd."

Heh. Yeah. But remember also to get back to the original post, no lawyers would be forced into starvation if the patent system were fundamentally changed.

A threat of starvation could obviously make a man preform vandalism. Lawyers are not being threatened with starvation, but neither is anyone suggesting that they are actually engaging in vandalism. A threat to a cushy lifestyle can certainly inspire someone to act legally to protect their own lifestyle.

Yeah, but the number of practicing patent attorneys is very small. It's not really useful to talk about "lawyers" as a class when dealing with a very specific point of law, like software patents. It's not like changing the patent system will a) put lawyers out on the street or b) even reduce the overall complexity of the system.

The law is complex and difficult because it does so much, not by the iniquitous behavior of a cabal of lawyers. The only way to reduce the complexity is to throw away a lot of what we have decided is best handled through the courts. It obviously can seem perverse and weird, but the world is perverse and weird. Shit, even programming computers is an exercise in weird perversity.

This. There are some problems with software patents, but the solution is not to do away with them all-together. We as a country (and our founders in the Constitution) have decided that limited term monopoly is a fair trade for public disclosure. Exempting software would be an insult to software engineers, putting their work on a lower level than other fields. Let's change the discussion from the polarizing "burn it down" to "how can we do better?"

The legal system is complex, as is government, because it represents millions of opinions on how best to do something and has been evolving for hundreds of years. Imagine a 200 year old code repo. The original spec is ambitious in scope but extremely vague, the guys who started the project left the company years ago, and a few hundred co-workers give you vicious code-reviews. The project runs life support for 300+ million people.

Patent lawyers aren't to blame. As of today, there are only 30734 patent attorneys in the country, and only a portion will ever work in software patents. Sure they profit from the status quo, but they'd profit from whatever replaces the current system as well or they'd find work in other legal niches. The idea that there is a secret club of evil patent lawyers pulling the strings is laughable. If you want change, talk to your congressman.

Few IP firms make a notable chunks of their revenue from litigation. Certainly not enough to meaningfully lobby against reform.

Licensing, clearance searches, opinions and the like are much more the bread-and-butter of serious IP and that would be unchanged by any proposed reform this side of junking the system entirely.

Because Silicon Valley doesn't traditionally have much of a presence in Washington, and there isn't a lot of outrage over patents outside the tech sector. Also, it's hard to change a complicated system in a way that doesn't break it further (as most hackers can attest), so it will move slowly even once the will is there.

>Also, it's hard to change a complicated system in a way that doesn't break it further (as most hackers can attest)

So what you're saying is we need to apply BDD to our legal system?

  describe PatentLaw
    context "a patent troll with a super obvious patent"
      subject { PatentTroll.new(patents) }
      let(:patents) { [mock(:bullshit => true)] }
      it { should be_laughed.out_of(:court) }
    end
  end

It might be partly that many politicians have profited from IP of one form or another, but few have worked in software.

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