>The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research. I would agree with you if it wasn't for this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent

>The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research. I would agree with you if it wasn't for this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent: >certain subject areas are excluded from patents, such as business methods, treatment of the human body, and mental acts And the fact that we have a culture built on the idea that it's every man for himself. What's short sighted isn't an appeal to emotion but the social structures we currently have. Cooperation is a simple and effective way to combat these issues and an appeal to emotion is the mechanism to encourage it. Now, before you mention it, I understand that there are physical limitations which are hindering this change in paradigm, in particular, Dunbar's number - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number From what I have researched, my current working model is that this has to do with the amount of serotonin in people's brains, hence drugs which raise serotonin levels such as MDMA or stimulate serotonin receptors, such as psychedelics, result in feelings of being connected to humanity and trigger a marked increase in compassion. Meditation also has these effects which suggests that it increases serotonin production. Perhaps when we start to modify our own DNA we can permanently increase the amount of this neurotransmitter for everyone and raise Dunbar's number to something more workable (in the sense of triggering said paradigm shift). Until then, it's up to individuals to do this work. The bottom line is that the way we are doing things is backwards and can be improved by orders of magnitude, so I firmly believe that patents of all types are a transient effect which will disappear as humanity evolves socially.