Patent trolls. Its a good thing the judge ruled against them, because imagine what the world would be like if someone could file a patent and then never do anything except sue people and prevent whatever was patented from ever being developed. That was not what the patent system was intended for.

Wait that sounds familar...

That sounds very familiar. You'll be seeing a lot more of it too, thanks to America's recent "patent reform". Moving to away from a "first to invent" system in favor of a "first to file" does little more than promote corporate abuse and idea hording.

Just think how much better off the world would be without a corporate-backed patent system. We would all have superior A/C power running everywhere and be driving water-fueled cars.

North Korea doesn't have that and yet they don't have those things either.

NK also doesn't have food or... um... freedom either.

But man can Dear Leader look at things..

Yeah, but there's no patents either. I'm just saying.

Without getting into the anti-government/anti-regulation feelings some people have, the reason for the patent reform is because it takes on average 3 years to get a patent in the US now. Patent trolls would exist regardless. If the system were more lax like Morari wants, there would be far FEWER innovations since companies would have less incentive to spend millions of dollars developing technology that they won't control. This is especially a problem with pharmaceuticals, as companies won't spend the money if the patent is already expired or they won't control it.

You just need to make sure companies can't just take out a patent and then only use it to sue others rather than actually make a product.

i thought part of the Patent law required you had a working model, that should really be part of it. George Lucas invented the Light Saber in theory, but there has never been a real working model. Gene Roddenberry invented the iPad...

It should, but it's not required (or else you wouldn't see patents for stuff like perpetual motion machines). All you basically need to do is describe how something works to patent it. Apparently it used to be that you had to have a working model, not anymore.

Actually there has, but the problem is it takes massive machinery and a huge amount of electricity to pull it off. That is assuming the lightsaber is hot plasma contained in a magnetic field. So that's been done, but the real challenge is getting that down into a handheld device. Technology keeps getting smaller, so maybe one day it could happen.