For instance, the constitution says that copyright must “promote Science and the useful arts”. If you can demonstrate that copyright law prevents more creations than it manifests, then it is unconstitutional. As written, the onus seems to be on the pro side to demonstrate that promotion happens.

It seems like we should be arguing about the numbers here. Too bad it’s illegal to set up a control for that experiment.

All I ever hear is hand-waving pop-economics justifications. Lots of people talking about “market forces” and “incentives” as if by using these terms it’s clear that the numbers support their argument rather than destroy it… Economic relationships like that of innovation and regulation are complex and often produce very counterintuitive outcomes. 

I wonder if there’s actually any evidence that we wouldn’t see an increase in economic growth and innovation rather than a decrease, as a result of eliminating intangible property rights.

If this were actually implemented, patents would simply never be invalidated, except in cases of willful malfeasance by patent officers. Judges would raise the bar enormously and obviously the patent office would choose to stop reexamining patents entirely.

Two different bits of code that accomplished a similar function weren’t (as I understand it, per This American Life’s coverage) a basis for litigation. Now that code is patented, like a machine/invention, affording such vague functional descriptions as “patent for a system where user clicks on an image,” the system is much more open to abuse, and completely independently developed systems can still be harassed if they are functionally similar, in some broad way, to a patent.

But if they keep having to file suits, either their patent was wrongly approved, or it’s so essential that people are constantly exploiting it.  So, if enough suits are filed, it triggers an outside review (by a division of the patent office, not the courts) on the patent to see if it is indeed appropriate.  If it is, great, they get a finding they can use in future suits to bolster their case.  If it’s not, then we solve the problem. 

If the possibility of losing something valuable if they access the courts counts as “limiting their access to the courts”, then not only does the current system do just that (because if they fight the demand to pay for the patent violation, they pay far more than they would if they just pay up, rightly or wrongly), but so does the SHIELD act (because if they go to court against somebody who’s violating their patent, and they lose, they have to pay a potentially significant amount of money to cover lawyer’s fees of the huge corporation who is stealing your idea).

And if ANYthing we do will limit people’s access to the courts, then I’d rather go with the one that potentially puts improperly patented things in the public domain rather than ties up courts with case after case.

I’d rather have something like the following (this is off the top of my head, so probably just as unworkable for other reasons): Lose more than 5 cases, and your patent is automatically reviewed by a non-aligned organization to determine if it should have been granted in the first place or if prior art exists, or it’s being used outside of its area.  The patent may then be modified, bought out via eminent domain, or cancelled entirely.

Threaten more than 25 cases in a given year, win or lose, your patent is automatically reviewed by the same agency because, again, of the possibility that it’s too broad, not enough of an innovation or an obvious outgrowth of existing technologies.

Side note:  demonstrate the system worked by comparing your household full of communist soviet inspired inventions vs your household full of western inventions.

Well, we’re still using Soviet space craft and Sovtek guitar amps are some of the best around.  Leon Theremin was a pretty prolific inventor/electronicist; the theremin is a goofy toy but that’s hardly all he did.  (It was decades before anyone in the US figured out how Theremin’s “thing” worked.)  Soviet education seems to have been really, really good — certainly better than most US public education — and this is reflected in the high-quality scientific research and mathematics done in the USSR throughout the 20th century.  (Of course, Soviet scientists often had to disguise their findings to make them consistent with Soviet ideology.  Nonetheless the research itself seems usually to have been pretty solid.)

When assessing the positives and negatives of the Soviet Union let’s try to remember that we’ve been bombarded with explicit pro-capitalist, anti-socialist propaganda our entire lives as well as a sort of implicit propaganda that’s simply part of our culture after all these decades of explicit propaganda.  Our culture can make it difficult to objectively (or as near as possible) assess the positives and negatives of the Soviet system.  And there were positives even if it seems to me they were outweighed heavily by the negatives.

One could argue similarly about the US “capitalist” system as well but I will not do so at this moment.

It is a distraction.

I seriously thought you were being sarcastic after your first sentence — I thought to myself “Yes, if someone is making a great point in context the grammar and spelling don’t detract from that in the least.”  I was honestly surprised when you went on to say no, grammar and spelling are totally as important as the content of an argument.

It is a bizarre position.

I think they tested this system in Russia, to help the oligarchs, before bringing it here. I wonder what happened to that patent on glass bottles…?

Regarding this patent (US8112504): They filed a patent app in 1996 that yielded other patents. The “family” of patent apps was kept alive until this new one issued. So no, the US system does not allow you to file something 16 years after the fact. That would definitely be stupid!

As far as the Wikipedia link, there *might* be something in there, but it would have to read directly on the claims actually patented, which would take a lot of digging and analysis (that I don’t have time to do).

Having to pay to invalidate someone else’s bogus patent due to a mistake on the part of the patent office isn’t really a suitable solution though – in fact it’s pretty stupid.

Also, are you saying that they filed a patent application in 2012 for something they claim to have invented in 1996? Is this something the US patent system allows? Because that’s even more stupid.