Re:What happens to the world... (Score 2, Informative)

Understood. Patents are to protect your investment in R&D. Now, if some kid in Helsinki can replicate your invention in a weekend, precisely how much of an investment could their have been in the protected R&D? The point is(was) that if you had invested a year of your life developing some product, some bigger company with 100 times the resources wouldn't be allowed to reverse engineer it in 1/100th the time and begin competing against you. Unfortunately, this scenario has become inverted. My take - the pantent process should documenting the research that led to the invention more fully. Specifically, the man hours required. Then any challengers would be required to do the same. And there would be a minimum amount of time required for a pantentable invention. In the event that the challenger came up with the same invention independently and in 1/100th the time of the original patent, the patent is preserved for posterity, but its status is changed(modded) to 'unenforcable/now obvious'. I think this would this would end up protecting medical patents, while opening things like one-click-shopping the moment some marketing b0rk said 'There's too many screens in out ordering process', and the tech replied 'Well, we could tie users' billing and shipping profiles to thier cookie and just create teh orderz when they make the selection'. Not only would one-click-shopping not meet the minimum requirement for R&D man hours, but any challengers could show through their documentation that it was obvious.