Harm caused by all types of patents

Some people think that the entire patent system should be done away with.

Why patents as a whole are the problem

A study a while back by Groklaw contributor Wayne "The Mad Hatter", which involved reading several hundred patent applications, which is mentioned in a post on. In this study, he found only one valid patent.Groklaw The patents checked were patents that:

a) He had an interest in. b) Were in a field he had expertise in.

None of the patents that I understood met the US Patent Office regulations for issuance of a patent. There were a couple of patents, about 1% of the total, which he noted he couldn't understand. He noted that the odds of reaching similar numbers with another batch of patents was, in his estimation, quite high.

Proposal to repeat the experiment

Wayne has proposed: "As a result, I propose that we look into a cross section of patents. I will evaluate those that I can for validity, and I'd like to ask others to do the same. While this will be ad-hoc, by using a larger sample size, we will be able to further prove that there are issues with Patents in general." (This can be discussed on Talk:Should the whole patent system be axed)

See also

• Why focus only on software
• Against Intellectual Monopoly, a book, fully available online
• A list of patents that appear invalid with reasoning
• A list of patents that need to be examined - post them here
• A list of patents that appear to be valid
• A list of patents that cannot be evaluated (we need someone in the field to evaluate them)