* On 12-Jun-2007 at 5:38PM PDT, Neil Havermale said: > There are a large heap of patents in this area of technology; you had > better ruminate before you encourage others to invade that IP.
Attention Conservation Notice: You pushed one of my buttons. Rant follows. Patents were meant, insofar as I can make sense of it, to encourage innovation by affording inventors the opportunity to mitigate the economic risk of experimentation with a subsequent time-limited market monopoly on commercially successful inventions. In today's economic environment, the only legitimate purpose this serves in practice is to protect small enterprises from being undercut by the economies of scale in production available to much larger businesses. In *every* other use case, patents serve to hinder innovation, not support it. If you are a large business and you want to squash small businesses with patents, you get no sympathy from me. If you are in commerce and you want to succeed, try providing a better product or service at a cost your customers are glad to pay, rather than using legal muscle to lay waste to the free market. If you are a small business and you want to squash individuals who are acting on a non-commercial basis, because your business model is based on protractors and compasses, or anything else any idiot could devise in fifteen minutes' contemplation, then you are an idiot too, and you deserve to fail economically. Customers are not stupid and, when all other considerations are equal, they will *always* choose the option that affords them more freedom. If you are not comfortable with this fact, get out of the way so that the rest of us can get on with making a better world. SDE _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
