“Some legal analysts asserted that Mr. Bezos’s suggestion,
disclosed this week in an open letter on the Amazon site, might be
largely a public relations move. And critics of moves to reduce the
duration of patents say the government would be unwise and unlikely
to limit a term that protects not just big players like Amazon, but
also smaller cash-short innovators.”
“But Mr. Bezos said he planned to light a fire underneath the
nascent patent reform movement and, in the process, stimulate
innovation that he says has been hindered by current law, which
grants 20 years of protection from the time an application is
filed….”
“We just took the status quo for books and mousetraps for
copyright and patent respectively and applied it to computer
software,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a lecturer at Harvard Law
School and the executive director of the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, who advocates reducing the term to five
years.”