Bad patents---or bad journalism? A Coda

A bit of an unsteady trigger figger led this Kat to post the blog--"Bad patents--or bad journalism"-- without its concluding points. Readers, especially those who found this post to be of interest, are invited to read on.

1. This Kat simply does not understand what The Economist intends when it urges "greater disclosure requirements of the ownership of patent portfolios", or to what problem(s) this proposed solution is directed. Readers' insights are welcome.

2. As for instituting specialist patent trial courts, the idea is more seductive than convincing. Besides the increased public costs involved in setting up such a system (an unlikely prospect in a Tea Party-driven environment), issues such as the Constitutional status of such courts, their composition, their fields of expertise, and how each such judge, based on his/her expertise, would be assigned to cases, are all wholly unclear.

3. And while we are talking about establishing specialist patent courts, how about setting up a parallel specialist court system to hear disputes involving finanical instruments, lest a non-expert jury be charged with rendering judgment on credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and the like. After all, the loss to the U.S. economy due to financial shenanigans is a magnitude of two or three-digit multiples greater than losses due to a less than perfect patent system.

At the end of day, my dissatisfaction with the article is about the failure to match the complexity of the subject-matter with the limitations of the journalistic platform adopted to discuss the topic. Better to focus on one patent issue at a journalistic time than to shoot scatter-gunned in various directions. The magazine's readers deserve no less.