These are the minutes of the discussion that occured between the members of ILUGD and Peter Jaszi. The discussion centered around patents and how they have affected the software companies in USA.
- Most patents have not been tested in the court of law. The defendent usually does not have enough resources to contest patents. Most small companies do not contest the patents cases. - The problem is not patents but bad patents - Copyright is not a big hindrace to innovation. Most companies are using copyrght laws to fight piracy - Even a well funded, large patent office will not be able to screen out bad patents What one can do or what people are trying to do fight patents ------------------------------------------------------------- - Develop prior art database, which is queryable. This will provide a low cost solution which companies can search when they are threatened by patent-cases from larger companies. This effort should be a global effort. Peter has suggested that he will put the concerned persons from this side to the people in who are working in ths area. - Many patent systems have a review process where they allow the public to review the patents have been issued. EFF has identified patents http://eff.org/patent/ which they are trying to challenge in the court. Ths method also publicizes about the issue of bad patents and how the common man is affected by these issues - India can have a watchdog organization which keeps an eye on the software patents that have been issued and then try to review them or challenge them. - However these steps are defensive methods of fighting patents. Next Steps for fighting patents --------------------------------- - Peter will put the EFF people in touch with the people here who are working in this field. - Start a Prior art database in software - Make a popular movement around these topics and get people involved in these topics. They were not able to prevent DMCA being passed in USA. The main reason they failed was that they could not get the ordinary people involved in this. Most of those opposing DMCA were lawyers/programmers and the intellectual crowd. - Show that patents are a method to capture power by a small number of big american companies. - Patents are a method to potray scracity in the "commons". However the tragedy of commons (http://members.aol.com/trajcom/private/trajcom.htm) do not apply to the field of ideas and information . This has been confirmed by the experience of the FLOSS community. - A argument has to be devised against "Software Patents are needed for robust software industry" Regards Raj Shekhar ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
