Austerity measures have they ever saved an economy?

Wait a sec... hold up...Are you saying... ? Could it be... ?I'll be damned! Patents actually do stifle innovation!I knew you'd come around. It took a completely unrelated thread to make it happen; but I knew you'd come around.Jon

You have misunderstood me.I've never said that patents cannot stifle innovation, and it would be foolish to suggest that patents were not a barrier to entry. I have tried to debunk some tired, well worn arguments, but naive arguments that I hear repeatedly from people who have apparently never even read a patent or deeply considered why the framers included an IP Clause despite the rather obvious downside. Historically, it has never the case that patents were for protecting only those inventions requiring huge investments in R&D.I've also heard some very compelling reasoning making the case that some patents, and in particular software patents and gene are particularly bad a large percentage of the time. But I didn't read too much of that kind of analysis in that other thread. I wouldn't and didn't challenge arguments that I thought were reasonably based.But patents also spur innovation, and protect revenue streams in a way that makes innovation profitable and worth pursuing. Samsung, LG, ViewSonic and have each managed to carve out very profitable niches in the same market, using patents to protect their investiment in R&D. Denying that out of hand with "patents are barriers to competition" is not, to my thinking a persuasive argument.In this case though, I am talking about areas of manufacture that Americans got out competed in years ago because of price competition. RCA used to make televisions, but does no longer.begin ABE:
And now Americans do not knowe those things, some not even protected by patents, that must be known to profitably run a factory to make large LCD panelsend ABEThe presense of multiple diverse, no cooperative, foreign companies making LCD and plasma TVs suggests that there is plenty of room for competion despite the presence of patents. Yet America failed to compete. If you think that failure is due to patents, then make that case.Edited by NoNukes, : See ABE

Nobody's asserted that it was, only that we would have a better system if that were the requirement. But the purpose of patents has always been to encourage the advance of the arts and sciences (and not baroque legalisms), and the way that it does that is by rewarding innovators for their hard work with a limited-time government-granted monopoly. And we know that's the reason because that's been the result.But clearly the patent system makes no sense if you can patent the trivially obvious, if you can patent all possible solutions to a problem, if you can patent discoveries (such as gene patents). Society has no need of disclosure of the obvious, and patenting discoveries creates a scientific "anticommons" - "you can't research this."Patents do, in most cases, spur innovation. Abuse of the system, however, suppresses innovation. All I'm asking for are reforms that would eliminate the most egregious abuses of the system.