A Case for Weakening Patent Rights

This Article provocatively asserts that lawmakers should weaken patents significantly—by between 25% and 50%. The primary impetus for this conclusion is the under-appreciated effects of new and emerging technologies, including three-dimensional printing, synthetic biology, and cloud computing. These and other technologies are rapidly decreasing the costs of each stage of the innovation cycle: from basic research, through inventing and prototyping, to marketing and distribution. The primary economic theories supporting patent law hold that inventors and innovators need patents to recoup the costs associated with research, inventing, and commercializing. Because new technologies have begun—and will continue—to dramatically decrease these costs, the case for weakening patents is ripe for analysis.

See also

• Patent Parasites: Non-Inventors Patenting Existing Open-Source Inventions in the 3-D Printing Technology Space
• Open Source Database and Website to Provide Free and Open Access to Inactive U.S. Patents in the Public Domain
• Towards open source patents: Semi-automated open hardware certification from MediaWiki websites
• Free and Open-Source Automated Open Access Preprint Harvesting
• Open-source 3-D printing materials database generator
• Quantifying the Human Mortality Costs of Patent-based Intellectual Property: How Many Premature Deaths are due to Patents?

News

• The Insane World of Patent Maximalism and Professor Joshua Pearce’s Case for Weakening Patent Rights Tech Rights
• Lobbying Disguised as ‘Reporting’ by the Patent Microcosm, Which Wants More Patents and More Lawsuits (Lawyers Needed)-Tech Rights