puzzles of patent policy

Read this article in the New Yorker (from 1993) for a still-relevant essay about the fundamental problems of contemporary patent policy. This article was the inspiration for a movie called "Flash of Genius" (not especially well reviewed). I haven't seen the movie, but from the trailer and reviews, I get the sense that the fimmakers missed some of the point of the above New Yorker article. The film is presented as an underdog story: heroic inventor against big, impersonal corporation which committed outright theft of inventor's efforts. The problem of patent policy, however--and a problem fairly highlighted in the article--is considerably harder to face squarely: how to make appropriate sense of the idea of an "inventor" at all, especially where nearly all inventors and inventions would be practically impossible except in some wider social context? The current American standard judges patentability in relation to what is "obvious to a person reasonably skilled in the art," but this standard, it seems, manages to give less guidance than good legal standards ought. But what to do then? As a recent episode of This American Life makes clear, the stakes are high; bad patent policy means restricting innovation by charging tolls on innovative companies, at the potential cost of driving some of those companies out of business. (And there is Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola for, in large part, its patents. That's billions of dollars spent, essentially, on a litigation strategy to protect itself from patent infringement lawsuits. That's billions not spent developing new products and technologies-- investment that would have fueled real economic growth and jobs.)