Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz published Scrooge and intellectual property rights in the British Medical Journal. In it he attacks the fundamental justification for drug patents, the supposed encouragement of private investment in high risk drugs. It is enough to say that his arguments go double for medical software patents which have all of the drawbacks of drug patents, except that they do not require a significant investment at all, so there is no justification whatsoever. The next time you hear a medical software company talk about an “innovation” they have patented you should cringe at the theft of a simple idea from the FOSS world.

-FT