From How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at RiskIn "Patent Failure; How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk," (Princeton University Press, March 2008), James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer consider many reforms, most of which have also been advanced by other people. Of course, the devil is in the details. The authors readily admit that "In presenting this list of policy ideas, we admit that we really do not know what it will take to substantially improve patent notice. These policy reforms move us in the direction of an effective patent system, but we do not know whether they are sufficient to get us there:"Should be a decent book, given what I've seen from the authors so far. Of course the problem is not really judges, bureaucrats, and lawyers--it's the law itself, which is a creature of the legislature. Given a patent scheme, judges, bureaucrats, and lawyers are bound to screw it up or game the system--which is one reason the law is a bad idea in the first place.
