A litigated court case? I'll have to think about that for a while. But the question you ask, are patents good for humankind in general, is yes. Transnational comparisons make it easy to see over the course of history that people invent more in countries that have secure rights for inventors. Patents can be overbroad (that's often what we talk about here on Hacker News) and patents can be for "prior art" already known to other workers (and that's what often gets litigated), but in general patents are a helpful public policy, along with copyrights (I think current United States copyright terms are much too long) and trademarks. Protection of legal rights in intellectual property encourages creative people to produce more intellectual property.

AFTER EDIT TO REPLY TO A QUESTION:

I was asked for a written account of transnational comparisons of intellectual property law and its effect on innovation. Here is one.

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/intellectu...

I have to go to a conference today for work, but perhaps other participants will join in with other comments on the international legal comparison issue. I have lived in two countries (the United States and Taiwan), and I lived in Taiwan before and after it developed intellectual property law enforcement, and it is plain to me that intellectual property rights encourage innovation (as contrasted with mere copying).

It's important to remember that this is not a question of patents or nothing; if you can't protect your inventions with patents, that require a thorough disclosure of how it works, then you might use other methods, such as trade secret law, which lasts quasi-forever and by definition has no disclosure.

Obviously you can't trade secret law in a variety of contexts, but if you're making something physical and can hide the secret details inside a factory....

(Of course, I'm not talking about software patents, which are entirely bogus ... although many encryption patents seem to have a lot stronger basis for validity. In particular think of RSA, which seems so obvious in retrospect ... but Diffie, Hellman and Merkle didn't think of it, and used a system they knew was weak so that they could demonstrate a proof of concept.)

The car safety belt was invented by Volvo, but either they didn't patent it, or patented it but allowed other car makers to use it at little or no cost. I don't have a source, but I've read something along those lines online.

Patents were not allowed to exist for the good of humankind. They were supposed to be ways to expose smart ideas and then we may use them all much later. More importantly if patents were to help mankind, they should be public domain.

That's like saying "does anyone know a case where trespassing laws were used for the good of humankind"; lawsuits are necessarily the bad outcome, we can't be sure how many times the law caused a good thing. There are certainly valuable things for the good of humankind that were patented, and that were produced by corporate (or even university) labs where obtaining patents was certainly a factor in the company's decision to fund that lab (taking computer industry examples I think of the nokia 3G tech, or RSA or LZW).

Because it forces the inventor to publish, they are a lot better for society than the previous protectionist default, which was relying on keeping trade secrets.

Part of what is interesting to me about open source is that it provides a system of development that is pretty competitive with the established protectionist models, so I am watching the open source hardware scene very closely.

To me the question isn't whether patents are good or bad in some absolute term, it is more whether they are becoming obsolete for many situations.

Who determines what is good for humankind? Ugh.

I am so sick of every political argument in the US being reduced to some kind of technocratic majoritarianism.