Re:Trouble with complex systems (Score 1)

I think that is the whole point of the previous poster's suggestion (that you would have to pay tax on a patent even if it didn't make you money). The supposed point to patents is so that the patentee can have the oppertunity for the short term monopoly so they can make money to justify the R&D effort. Under his scheme, if you patent something wihtout a business model to make money off of it, then you are not even fulfilling what the patent was meant for. It would sure put a criimp in the plans of the patent and litgate companies which sit on thousands of patents in the hope that someone will breach it in the future. At a software development company where I've previously worked, after each phase of design and implementation, a team of patent lawyers went over the algorithms and processes to find any and all aspects that can be patented. Those numerous patents ended up sitting around in hopes that some other company would wander over them and hence the company could try to litigate them out of the market space. The r&d would have gone on anyways, the company was just using the patent system to try and build itself it's own little permenant monopoly over sector of the market.