Brian Utterback <brian.utterb...@oracle.com> wrote:
> 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
Do you know of a patent office that is much older than 200 years.
> 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?
prohibiting patents would prevent a lot of useless and bad things.
Liniting the patent rights to 2 or 5 years could also help a lot.
let me thing os e.g. the fact that Sony did never pay PAL patents because they
used a PAL demodulator that was not covered by the PAL patent but much worse
and much more affectes by aging effects. The customers did only notice the
problem 6 months after the purchase then warranty at that time was over.
> 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?
The reason for extending Copyright terms in 1992 was to allow the bavarian
government to extent the time when they can prohibit "Mein Kampf" to be
published and in the USA it was Disney...
Jörg
--
EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
j...@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
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