An opportunity to End Software Patents: ESP briefs Court in its historic rehearing of the Bilski case

An opportunity to End Software Patents: ESP briefs Court in its historic rehearing of the Bilski case

I find that statement evocative. In fact, that is probably the most useful point of view I have come upon for distinguishing this idea of "patentable", a kind of looking at "patenetable" from the "other direction", by asking "What is the consequence of not patenting this idea?"

You make some good points, but leave out the situation in which patents are truly beneficial, which is not situations where the patent lures out into the open what would otherwise be a trade secret, but rather techniques which would never be developed if it weren't for the profit provided by patent protection.

For instance, the development of new medicines is incredibly expensive, but once a drug is developed, it's impossible to keep its formula as a secret. If it weren't easy to analyze it to determine what it's made of, we'd require that the drug manufacture publicize it anyways, so that we can reasonably test its safety.

I doubt that there are very many areas of technology in which a research effort is only justified by the possibility of patent protection. But on the other hand, as far as I know there is only one company left in the US that arguably does "pure" research (IBM), which suggests that perhaps the rules aren't overly biased in the inventor's favor.

In any case, as far as I can tell, the appropriate question when considering the utility of patents is not "What is the consequence of not patenting this idea?" but rather "Would this idea be developed if it couldn't be patented."