As you may recall, Bezos had quite a spat with Tim O’Reilly over Amazon’s “one-click” business method patent. O’Reilly and others made a fairly powerful case that the patent should have never been granted. To his credit, Bezos responded to the critics and acknowledged that some high-tech patents should probably not received the same term of protection. He sent an open letter to O’Reilly advocating shortening the life span of software patents to three to five years instead of 17 as well as helping to improve the PTO’s “prior art” search capabilities before granting such patents in the first place. See this old Wired story for more details:

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34887,00.html

I’m not sure anything ever came of all this, but it would be worth exploring. One obvious problem, however, is: What standard do we use to determine term length for one type of industry or technology versus another? Why should software only be 3-5 years while drug companies get 20? And on the copyright front, one might ask why a copyright owner should be forced to renew – - for an increasing fee no less – - every few years. I think the idea still has merit, but someone needs to sweat the details here and justify the plan.

For more details on the “one-click” spat, see the O’Reilly site: http://www.oreilly.com/news/patent_archive.html

This would impose the highest fees on the works and inventions that intuition tells us should be the least encumbered: Old works and works which the author or inventor declines to license at economically efficient prices.

For instance, the copyright fee on an ordinary novel might be its list price for the first five years, twice that for the next five, four times that for years ten to fifteen, and so forth. Patents might work the same way but with a one year rather than five year renewal period, at least until the bright day when independent reinvention is legalized and patents can move to a term more comparable to that of copyright.

All this would result in a large number of “abandoned” works either becoming avaliable cheaply or falling into the public domain, and at the same time end the emerging and parasitic practice of patenting things to prevent them from being built rather than to profit from them.