By similar logic, copyright should be abolished because someone plagiarised their final English paper?
People will always abuse any system, but that doesn't mean the system should be taken away from everyone else. I don't like software patents, but this is not a software patent issue. It's an "intellectual dishonesty" issue -- taking credit for someone else's work.
The problem is that it was worth Tandberg's effort to put together and submit this fraudulent patent application. Enough applications like this get granted, and later go unchallenged or get upheld, that Tandberg had a reasonable expectation that they would get a patent to extort money out of somebody or scare competitors out of competing with them.
Software patents need to be harder to get, easier to overturn, and there need to be steep incentives to not submit invalid applications.
We need USPTO to somehow bear consequences for the harm they're doing to the industry. Reviewed applications are counted towards the "production" of an examiner but approvals later overturned by a court are not counted against them. As long as they only have incentive to rubber-stamp basically anything or risk dismissal, that's what they'll do.
USPTO seems overwhelmed. I would rather see penalties for patent owners where their ability to create new patents is slowed or revoked if any of the patents they own are invalidated.
Eventually, copyright will die off completely. It's just a matter of when.
When we have sci-fi nanoreplicators that can copy luxury (flying) cars, food, etc., all scarcity will be artificial.
Alternatively, when we have very convincing VR, everyone will be able to experience what he or she wants to as much as he or she wants to. There won't be anything to trade because you can't give someone something they can't already get. Strong general AI will fill in for everything.
Our puny mammalian brains with their limited sensory inputs will be entertained by not-very-advanced technology that eventually becomes effectively free. It doesn't even take that much fidelity to fool us -- think of how unconvincing dreams are after you wake up. There's seemingly some credulity switch that gets flipped which makes us believe something to be reality without really questioning it. Switch that on while awake and World of Warcraft is probably more than good enough.
Incidentally, I noticed that asking yourself the question, "how did I get here?" ala Inception is really annoying when you're awake. It's difficult to question your reality when you subjectively feel it to be true.
My awake existence is mostly in one place staring at a monitor. I almost never do that when I dream, I'm "physically" doing something completely unrelated.
Intellectual property will become even more of a problem in a post scarcity society. Those that hold the IP will not want to give it up just because it's value is no longer in the physical creation.
The music recording industry is effectively already becoming a post scarcity industry, and look how unwilling they are to give up their copyrights. Industries will cling on to things like rights to reproduce, rights to distribute etc. Don't expect these problems to go away because of some sci-fi future tech.
I don't think an AI Justin Bieber is that far off.
AIs can create pop music in your virtual world if you like that sort of thing. All the other AIs will be talking about it, so you won't need some central source of anything in order to have common ground with people in your reality.
It will be fine if random permutations lead to people in your virtual reality listening to "Yeah, Girl" instead of "Girl, Yeah" or "All Right Girl".
Movies won't be very important when you can interactively experience anything you want. Climb K2 but without the risk of permanent death. Movies will just be a Machinima subset of the interactive simulation if you still want them.
Even if copyright was hypothetically abolished, it doesn't make this "intellectual dishonesty" any less intellectually dishonest. In that case, it would be up to the school to penalize that - which is exactly what happens most of the time anyway.
The existence of the patent system encourages people to commit such "intellectual dishonesty" by providing a monopolistic and monetary incentive for doing it. There's a difference between a system that is abused, and a system that's fundamentally asking for such abuse.
The difference is that once your plagiarized paper is accepted, you can't go around threatening the other students with F's on their papers if they don't pay you off.
