Cutting Through the Patent Thicket:

I say this as someone who grew up believing in the value of patents. As a teenager, I sat raptly in the U.S. Supreme Court gallery listening to attorneys argue University of Illinois Foundation v. Blonder Tongue Laboratories, a landmark patent-infringement case involving my father’s company. As an inventor, I earned some 70 patents. And as a scientist, I managed research labs generating hundreds of patents a year.

…

SCIENCE OR INVENTION? More quantitatively, I have observed firsthand how easy it is for experts to generate good, but similar, ideas. While at AT&T … in the early 1990s, I sponsored two separate ideation sessions around a potential new market, bringing in 50 experts each time to brainstorm for applications. Both groups generated ideas with real commercial value.

Both groups, however, generated more than 95% of the same ideas in common. They were “obvious” in the fullest sense of the word and would have been commercialized with or without the incentive of a patent. But the Patent Office found them “novel,” and issued AT&T claims by the basketful. I would argue that none of those ideas deserved a patent.

(Via Danny Yee.)