On Thu, 27 Dec 2001 11:02:18 +0900, Doug Lerner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thursday, December 27, 2001): > >Well the analogy of the clay pot may not be good at all. Consider this-- > > > >I make a clay pot, and I fire it and I go to a lawyer and show him the > >product and get him to draft a patent so that no one else can glaze clay > >pots or decorate them in any way without paying me royalties. I file > >the patent and use the proceeds from my clay pots to threaten to keep > >anyone else who fires clay pots in court for years of ruinous spending > >battling my army of lawyers unless they pay me ransom for protection > >against lawsuit. > > I believe that patent law requires more than just something new. It has > to be something that is not obvious too.
In theory this is true. In practice, however, the US Patent Office gives patents for just about anything. As Civileme noted, BT has patents on hyperlinking, and Apple has patents on desktop theming. Unisys has a patent on LZW compression (which is used in the GIF image format), which is a _very_ simple algorithm indeed. Such patents only serve to harm the industry, since the patent owners will sue anyone that breaches them. BT now has the power to sue anyone who's ever made or accessed a web page, and Unisys can sue anybody who makes GIF images (which is why you should use PNG instead). Even colour palettes can be patented: The GIMP cannot do CYMK colours (which are necessary for print) because of patents held by printing companies. > Let me ask the opposite question. Suppose a drug company takes hundreds > of millions of dollars from thousands of investors and uses the money for > research and creates a drug that improves the daily lives of millions of > people. Do the people who invested in the enterprise deserve to profit > from this? Or should anybody be allowed to come along and make generic > copies of the drug without bothering to invest in time and effort to do > the research? Okay, then let me ask you this. Suppose a pharmaceutical company holds the rights to a drug that can help the lives of millions of people in lesser developed countries. The only catch is that the cost of the drug is exhorbitant -- far above cost price and far more than those in need can afford. The drug may only get to a tiny percentage of sufferers, but the pharmaceutical company makes billions. In this case, would it be wrong for someone to break the patent so that the drug could be manufactured to help millions? Now, replace "pharmaceutical company" with Roche (a massive Swiss-based firm) and "someone to break the patent" with the Brazilian government. The drug is nelfinavir, designed to treat AIDS sufferers. The decision was made after Roche refused to lower the cost of nelfinavir, which was taking up 28 percent (US$82 million) of the health ministry's annual budget. Producing it locally slashed costs by 40 percent. The United Nations has praised the move. The software industry is not much different. Both industries are dominated by a few huge transnational corporations, which charge far more than their products are actually worth. I am not against the idea of intellectual property, but there needs to be some strict limits. > >The problem does not rest with Intellectual property but with > >application which has definitely become a reductio ad absurdem. > > Non-productive drones feast off the efforts of the workers, the > >software writers, and squelch creativity. This is the reality and it is > >why anything I write is GPL. > > > >Civileme -- Sridhar Dhanapalan "And do you not realize that features never get dropped: they just end up increasing the binary size and icache pressure forever?" -- Linus Torvalds
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
