Copyright Law

I believe current copyright laws also could do with a great deal of revising.

Personally, I would like to see far less copyrighted material. A broader definition of what constitutes fair-use might be a good first step, but I feel a completely new copyright system is needed.

A change that needs to be made is:

"Any product developed with more than 25% public funds may not be pattented"

We paid for it, why should we make someont richer at our further expense?

Can you suggest an alternative?

The original copyright laws worked pretty well the only problem is that political lobbying has progressively lengthened the number of years a copyright can be held for to an absurd degree.

Thats absolutely the opposite of what should be happening. Consider the example of a variable valve timing system (found in most modern automobile engines). I think there exists about 100 different designs for this; all of which achieve the same thing. Can you imagine how many man-hours and money was spent by the various car companies just so that they could have their own version that they wouldn't have to buy off another company? That is assuming the other car company was willing to sell, which under current copyright law, they have no obligation to. What a waste! And this sort of needless device replication exists everywhere in the industry...

I bet there are many useful inventions just being 'sat-on' because the patent holder can't be arsed to make use of it. Some inventions aren't even replicable, which means the industry has to wait a full 20-years before it can be freely used.

I say that a patent should last no more than 5 years, and there should be a clause whereby the patent holder is obliged to sell usage rights if they are deemed to have under-utilized the invention.

- Mike

There is also another flaw wherein a third party (probably a competing company) while overlooking a patent might cite a potential improvement to the invention, but does not inform the patent holder, as this would only serve to empower their competition.

Which is why I feel a completely fresh-look on the patent system is required. We need to start again from a clean-slate.

Perhaps some sort of open-source system could work? What sort of system would be most efficient at encouraging, facilitating, and implementing innovation?

Well patent law and copyright law are different beasts. The largest current flaw in the US patent system is that congress only pays for 3 men and a labradoodle to examine the patents which means each one only gets looked at for something like half an hour, so you get utter rubbish being patented because no one has the time to research it properly. But being woefully underfunded isn't really a systemic flaw, just bad government, much like the overly powerful influence of political lobbying.

As for open-source versus proprietary, I would be nervous with respect to its ability to foster true innovation and invention, a good team can be pretty efficient at re-implementing existing ideas in a sometimes more effective manner but I struggle to think of a piece of OSS that has actually broken new ground. As for hardware, though there are some OS projects none have managed to produce anything as of yet except maybe some nice websites.
I would think that a patent system where the initial fee is related to how long you wish the patent to last would be of more interest. A free patent is free to apply for, a five year patent $500, a ten year patent $10000, a twenty year patent $20000000, and so on. Every company would have to estimate the worth of a patent when they file it, trolling would be mightily expensive with possibly no gain, nuisance patents would be uneconomical and the small inventor still has access to intellectual property protection. Plus there would be enough crazy pharma companies buying decade long patents to fund the entire system properly, giving Einstein a living wage.