Comments on: Patents are Imba http://ipinthedigitalage.com/patents-are-imba/ CPSC 182 at Yale College Mon, 18 May 2009 01:26:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: laurenhenry http://ipinthedigitalage.com/patents-are-imba/comment-page-1/#comment-1024 laurenhenry Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:59:50 +0000 http://ipinthedigitalage.com/?p=429#comment-1024 On the question of business patents, I'm more or less with Meyer. There's no economic justification for them. I'm not sure if the same is true for software patents, though. It seems to me that the problem with software patents is not so much the fact of software patents, but the way in which some companies use such patents. I don't know enough about antitrust law to make a specific argument, but it seems as though anti-competitive practices in the use of software patents could be directly addressed through the kinds of principles that led us to have antitrust laws, and that there's precedent for doing so. I found an interesting article from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology which deals with IP and antitrust in the digital age...http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v16/16HarvJLTech327.pdf On the question of business patents, I’m more or less with Meyer. There’s no economic justification for them. I’m not sure if the same is true for software patents, though.

It seems to me that the problem with software patents is not so much the fact of software patents, but the way in which some companies use such patents. I don’t know enough about antitrust law to make a specific argument, but it seems as though anti-competitive practices in the use of software patents could be directly addressed through the kinds of principles that led us to have antitrust laws, and that there’s precedent for doing so.

I found an interesting article from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology which deals with IP and antitrust in the digital age…http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v16/16HarvJLTech327.pdf

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