Posner is a legal genius, I just finished law school and we probably read at least 30-50 of his opinions.
He truly understands the field of law and even more, he understands the ramifications that laws and regulations have and how they will affect us in the future. If there was any hope of changing Patent law, this is where its going to start, through Posner.
I totally agree -- Posner's contribution to the law in general is incredible, and this article is a great example.
Tangent, re: Posner and his place in the law:
The thing to keep an eye on is where his approach is helpful and where it isn't. His hammer is the field of law and economics -- he predicts and explains the ramifications of laws and regulations by casting them in economic terms and applying economic theories to them. That's really useful because economics is all about predicting how people will behave and how much value they'll create in various systems, and those are things the law should worry about.
It breaks down, however, in cases where the debate is about how to assign value to behavior. For example, his 2005 discussion of same-sex marriage vs. civil unions weighs the "outrage cost" of the passionate opponents of same-sex marriage against the interests of people who want to get married, coming down in favor of the first group.[1] That might make sense if you assume that one person's outrage at another person's marriage is something that should be valued, like float(10-pissed-off-Tea-partiers) > float(1-happily-married-couple) -- but the whole point of the debate is whether that outrage deserves a voice in our law.[2] His argument added basically nothing to the debate (other than, in my case, a tickling sense of annoyance) because he encoded his answers to the important issues in hidden assumptions about what was valuable and what wasn't.
This is not to drag the man down at all, who I think is amazing. Just to say that when you see a law and economics argument -- "we should do X, because if you view condition Y in economic terms it should lead to condition Z" -- you have to decide not only whether you agree with the internal reasoning, but also whether you agree with the implicit translation between economic terms and reality. Patents, of course, are the embodiment of an economic theory -- so they're the perfect nail to Posner's hammer, and I'm happy to see him out there swinging.
/Tangent
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=IRMgP6-EjDMC&pg=PA14...
[2] In legal terms, whether it constitutes a rational basis or compelling interest for a discriminatory law. In social terms, whether it's something we want to care about and cater to.
He truly understands the field of law and even more, he understands the ramifications that laws and regulations have and how they will affect us in the future. If there was any hope of changing Patent law, this is where its going to start, through Posner.