Revolving Doors and Intellectual Property

This Hacker News article points to this article regarding the rather unsurprising revolving door between patent examiners and organizations which patent lots of inventions. I have to say that I'm not a fan of the patent system, nor am I a fan of the copyright system. I feel that both of these systems need a bit of balancing out for the public good. My general feeling is that you should gain copyright protection and patent protection for about the same limited amount of time to reap the benefit of the new thing that you create and in an effort to best enable the next generation to remix and explore the space. My general feeling is that this should be up to Congress to decide, but given how corruption runs in our system, I'm willing to put down my thoughts in a round number: 15 years. Can you remember today fifteen years ago? Why should movies, television programs, software programs, books, audio recordings, etc, etc be restricted from being reproduced and rebroadcast that were published before 2003? What public value are we saving for "the lifetime of the author" when the authors are long dead and gone. Copyrights are a way of preserving monopoly power - they are a way of concentrating wealth among those who already have too much over those new artists and creatives that deserve their time on the stage. Instead of having new remixes and a renaissance - a rebirth - of art, we have lawyers arguing over ownership and money. This may not be the most popular logical vein among my kind - professional software engineers - but the very notion that my work won't be unlocked until well past my death so someone else can extort the maximum value from it means that my impact on our shared future is lessened to a degree. My name is currently on 2 patents. In both cases I was the employee of the many other employees listed on the filing who initially pushed for that *limited* protection to cover work that I contributed to large and complicated systems (though others listed did much of the patent-related documentation). These are team efforts. I bring this up because I have skin in this game as an inventor. I want others to be free to use my inventions early, so that my work is not just re-implemented but rather re-imagined.

[edit on 6/5 to add]: The system itself is vastly more complicated, and a newer article referred by HN is worth reading. It can be found here. These are complicated works.