By that I mean all of us: the companies and people who directly interact with the patent system, the media that reports on those interactions, the analysts and experts who inform the media, and finally the large, active, and vocal readership that we try and service with our reporting. As a group, we have accepted and let lie the lazy conventional wisdom that the patent system is broken beyond repair, a relic of a previous time that has been obsoleted by the rapid pace of technical innovation, particularly in software, and that it should perhaps be scrapped altogether.That's what's been missing from this whole conversation (really more shouting and whining than anything, actually). Short of throwing out the patent system that has actually worked fairly well for the last 200 years, how do we reform what is patentable software, how does one patent it, and how long is it protected for?
So let's start over, shall we? Let's actually look at how the patent system works, where it's specifically malfunctioning, and how we can fix it.