Patent EliminationPatents are not necessary
Patents are often portrayed as protection for individual inventors from large companies, an image which does not at all conform with reality.
Large companies do not use patents as a form of protection, but rather as a way to prohibit or profit from advances which would have arisen regardless. Most parts of a product are now patented, not just the whole. The companies patent everything they can and as vaguely as possible, so then they may charge a license fee from the companies that want to use their patents on even barely related technologies. This is enabled by the policy of patent offices to grant dubious patents and then let the courts sort out claims.
Of course the only ones happy about this arrangement are those who can afford litigation and patent lawyers.
An Alternative to Pharmaceutical Patents
The current design of the patent medicine is causing serious problems with big pharmaceutical costs for (really) cheap drugs.
A generally accepted truth is that pharma. patents are the only possibility to finance research and production of new products. This is not true.
It is already the state that pays the bulk of all drug research, because it is the state which accounts for over 85% of pharmaceutical companies' revenues. If the state instead contracted research on new drugs separately, and then allowed for competition in the manufacture of medicine, it would lead to sharply reduced pharmaceutical expenditure, although more money than currently allocated for research.
Read more about our alternative to Pharmaceutical Patents
Software patents inhibit innovation
Software patents inhibit technical progress in the IT field, and pose a serious threat to both small and medium-sized companies and private programmers. Although current patent law explicitly says that computer programs should not be patentable, such grants are commonly granted.
Patent law should expresses the ban on software patents even more clearly.
-Originally appeared in Swedish on piratpartiet.se
Translated by Brent Blazek
