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As I note in my article "Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way," Mises Daily (Oct. 1, 2009), there is a growing clamor for reform of patent (and copyright) law, due to the increasingly obvious injustices resulting from these intellectual property (IP) laws. However, the various recent proposals for reform merely tinker with details and leave the essential features of the patent system intact. Patent scope, terms, and penalties would still be essentially the same. In the second article of this two-part series, "Reducing the Cost of IP Law," Mises Daily (Jan. 20, 2010), I propose various reforms to the existing patent system--short of abolition--that would significantly reduce the costs and harm imposed by the patent system while not appreciably, or as significantly, reducing the innovation incentives and other purported benefits of the patent system. I list these changes below in generally descending order of importance, without elaboration, as they are discussed further in "Reducing the Cost of IP Law":
Provide for Prior-Use and Independent-Inventor Defenses
Instantly Publish All Patent Applications
Eliminate Enhanced Damages
Add a Working/Reduction to Practice Requirement
Provide for Advisory Opinion Panels
Losing Patentee Pays
Expand Right to Seek Declaratory Judgments
Exclude IP from Trade Negotiations
Other Changes
Increase the threshold for obtaining a patent
Increase patent filing fees to make it more difficult to obtain a patent
Make it easier to challenge a patent's validity at all stages
Require patent applicants to specify exactly what part of their claimed invention is new and what part is "old" (e.g., by the use of European-style "characterized in that "claims)
Require patent applicants to do a search and provide an analysis showing why their claimed invention is new and nonobvious (patent attorneys really hate this one)
Limit the number of claims
Limit the number of continuation applications
Remove the presumption of validity that issued patents enjoy
Apportion damages to be proportional to the value of the patent
Copyright
Radically reduce the term, from life plus 70 years to, say, 10 years
Remove software from copyright coverage (it's functional, not expressive)
Require active registration and periodic re-registration (for a modest fee) and copyright notice to maintain copyright (today it is automatic, and it is often impossible to determine, much less locate, the owner), or otherwise make it easier to use "orphaned works"
Provide an easy way to dedicate works to the public domain to abandon the copyright the state grants authors
Eliminate manifestly unjust provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), such as its criminalization of technology that can be used to circumvent digital protection systems
Expand the "fair use" defense and clarify it to remove ambiguity
Provide that incidental use (e.g., buildings or sculptures appearing in the background of films) is fair use
Reduce statutory damages
Trademark
Raise the bar for proving "consumer confusion"
Abolish "antidilution" protection
In fact, abolish the entire federal trademark law, as it is unconstitutional (the Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyright and patent laws, but not trademark law)
An interesting lawsuit complaint as reported by CourthouseNews.com:
Andy Warhol's estate is behind an "insidious" conspiracy to monopolize the authentication and sale of the late artist's work, according to a complaint in Federal Court. Susan Shaer claims that the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board routinely defaces authentic Warhol artworks with a "DENIED" stamp, thereby creating "artificial scarcity" and inflating the value of the art owned by the foundation.
By falsely declaring certain works as inauthentic, the board can "systematically exclude Warhol from the marketplace," Shaer says in her 43-page complaint.
Shaer says that without the board's intervention, independent sales would compete with the foundation's holdings in auctions and private sales.
Shaer says board members feel "free to abuse the authentication process in pursuit of their naked self interest."
The board's stamp of approval is necessary for anyone in the world to sell a Warhol work, which allows it to wield "disproportionate power over the Warhol market," according to the complaint.
The upcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals, shows how copyright has outrageously criminalized the use of sampling, which has been disproportionately popular in hip hop music. In this, it calls to mind the racially disproportionate impact of drug laws on minorities...
An executive at Lilly, Bernard Munos, has written a very revealing and candid article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery link here.
The article, "Lessons from 60 years of pharmaceutical innovation" confirms what many already know - that the productivity of the pharmaceutical R&D enterprise is declining and has been for some time. Stated differently, the cost per new molecular entity has increased rapidly. This has occurred despite mergers and consolidation in the industry, changes in R&D management structures and changes to the technologies used to discover new drugs.
He also admits that "in many organizations, short-term priorities encourage marginal innovation, which provides more reliable returns on investment, at the expense of major change." He recognizes, in other words, that the current incentive system rewards the development of me-too drugs over novel therapies.
Finally, he admits that alternatives to the traditional patent system, including prizes, may be required to boost R&D productivity.
If composers could set still-unmatched records of productivity without copyrights while managing to earn a living, imagine what writers could do in an environment that did not give them the hope of forever subsisting off past accomplishments. FULL ARTICLE by Gennady Stolyarov II
For the record, the blog, Economics of Contempt, has what it calls The Unofficial List of Pundits/Experts Who Were Wrong on the Housing Bubble link here
It begins, "The housing bubble has precipitated a severe, and possibly catastrophic, economic crisis, so I thought it would be useful to put together a list of pundits and experts who were dead-wrong on the housing bubble. They were the enablers, and deserve to be held accountable."
It cautions, "The list includes only pundits and (supposed) experts. That means the list doesn't include policymakers such as Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, because however wrong they may have been, policymakers and especially Fed chairmen are undeniably constrained in what they can say publicly. I strongly suspect that both Greenspan and Bernanke honestly believed that there was no housing bubble, but alas, we'll never know for sure. The list also doesn't include pundits/experts who were wrong only about the fallout of the collapse of the housing bubble that is, the extent to which the collapse of the housing bubble would harm the economy."
Most of these names are new to me. But after the dot.com bubble, I stopped paying attention to "financial" experts. The current record doesn't make it any more likely I will change my judgment.
As I note in my article "Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way," Mises Daily (Oct. 1, 2009), there is a growing clamor for reform of patent (and copyright) law, due to the increasingly obvious injustices resulting from these intellectual property (IP) laws. However, the various recent proposals for reform merely tinker with details and leave the essential features of the patent system intact. Patent scope, terms, and penalties would still be essentially the same. In the second article of this two-part series, "Reducing the Cost of IP Law," Mises Daily (Jan. 20, 2010), I propose various reforms to the existing patent system--short of abolition--that would significantly reduce the costs and harm imposed by the patent system while not appreciably, or as significantly, reducing the innovation incentives and other purported benefits of the patent system. I list these changes below in generally descending order of importance, without elaboration, as they are discussed further in "Reducing the Cost of IP Law":
If composers could set still-unmatched records of productivity without copyrights while managing to earn a living, imagine what writers could do in an environment that did not give them the hope of forever subsisting off past accomplishments. 
