On 09/13/10 08:22, joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote: > But in any case, patents are anachronistic. Patents have been created to > protect inventions made by single personss against big companies 200 years > ago. > Patents are now perverted by the big companies against the original intention.
Huh? The basic concept dates back to 500 BCE. They have even been called patents since the 1400's. That's longer than 200 years. And it has never been about single people or large corporations. It has been about granting limited monopolies to promote innovation. To put it simply, patents exist to maximize the rate of inventions entering the public domain. When you look at it this way, the rest becomes much simpler. It may not always be easy to measure, but when you adopt that position, you just have to ask, will this change increase the rate of innovations entering the public domain? Should software be patentable? The answer depends on whether the patents promote or stifle innovation. Would the same software have been invented if they were not patentable? Less or more? Is the term long enough or too long? Same answer, stifle or promote? The same applies to copyrights. That's why it was totally absurd when Congress voted to extend copyright terms retroactively; are dead authors likely to write more works because the term is longer? -- blu It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. - Bruce Schneier -----------------------------------------------------------------------| Brian Utterback - Solaris RPE, Oracle Corporation. Ph:603-262-3916, Em:brian.utterb...@oracle.com _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
