Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively? Posner

E mais um material excelente, agora de Richard Posner, sobre patentes:

Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively? Posner

"The problem of excessive patent protection is at present best illustrated by the software industry. This is a progressive, dynamic industry rife with invention. But the conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industr are absent. Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral—most software inventions are quickly superseded. Software innovation tends to be piecemeal—not entire devices, but components, so that a software device (a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop, etc.) may have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of separate components (bits of software code or bits of hardware), each one arguably patentable. The result is huge patent thickets, creating rich
opportunities for trying to hamstring competitors by suing for infringement—and
also for infringing, and then challenging the validity of the patent when the
patentee sues you. 
Further impediments to effective patent policy in the software industry include a shortage of patent examiners with the requisite technical skills, the limited technical competence of judges and jurors, the difficulty of assessing damages for infringement of a component rather than a complete product, and the instability of the software industry because of its technological dynamism, which creates incentives both to patent and to infringe patents and thus increases legal
costs."