In November I wrote a little piece entitled The Patent Cold War, outlining my frustrations with the patent system and a couple of thoughts on how it might be improved.
I stand by everything I said there, but it’s a pity that I hadn’t seen Kenneth Cukier’s excellent survey for the Economist, “A Market For Ideas“, published a month beforehand.
I was lucky enough to sit next to Kenn at a dinner recently and he listened with great grace to my outpourings without even hinting that most of them were a small subset of what he had worked on only a few months before.
This is a very interesting, well-researched and well-balanced 14-page survey, and comes highly recommended for anybody with an interest in this area.
It’s too bad that the Economist makes it so hard to get hold of a copy if you’re not a subscriber. I almost never pay for premium online content, but I would recommend doing so for this. It doesn’t look as if there’s any way to buy a copy of one survey without signing up for a subscription, though, so if you don’t subscribe I’d find a friend who does and ask them to order reprints.
Ah, and as a follow-up, have a look at John’s Observer column about the Blackberry proceedings.
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