I just read a very thorough and (In my humble opinion) accurate article about what’s wrong with the patent system in the United States and a pretty solid plan to bring the system back into balance.

As an example of the patent system run awry, notice that Microsoft patented the “Double-Click“. Now, in the ideal world if you can show prior art (meaning that it’s been done in the public domain before) then a patent would be thrown out faster than you can sneeze. But obviously the system which examines patent claims for the existence of prior art is broken. People were using the double click before Microsoft’s operating systems even made use of the mouse. I believe Apple even beat them to it, too. :-)

This is only one of the problems with the current system. Believe it or not, the mess we have was actually the result of trying to fix even greater problems back in 1982.