On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Eric Walker <eric.wal...@gmail.com> wrote:
I am not against hardworking, innovative (and sometimes paranoid) people > being rewarded handsomely for their efforts. I'm against trillions going > to some while others who can barely afford a meal must pay more for > electricity as a result of patent enforcement, even if the license fees are > amortized over a large population. > I am barely familiar with patent law, and there are no doubt a number of mistaken assumptions in the analysis I just provided. But to give people a sense of the precariousness of the situation, consider that right now LENR research right now is driven by a handful of capable people, but people who are woefully underfunded, or amateurs, or both. Petroleum companies, by contrast, have lots of funding, and at any point they could decide to direct substantial resources towards figuring out what's going on with LENR. Suppose they do and successfully file a series of patents in all countries but the US, and eventually the US, relating for a number of critical steps in a fuel refinement process which, upon later reflection, turns out to be the cheapest way to do things by far. They could then control the spigot, so to speak -- they would have a significant degree of control over the rate at which LENR was adopted. If it suited their interests (and it surely would), they could influence things towards a very high point for LENR's use. The petroleum companies are not the only concern to be considered. Even the concentration of wealth likely to arise from a successful patent defense would be bad. If we in the US have been smarting over the influence of Rupert Murdoch and the Citizens United decision, consider the mischief that someone with 750 billion to 1.5 trillion could wreak. I do not know what the actual numbers would look like, but I can imagine that the income would be on the high side as far as patent revenue streams go. Other industries whose international development has already been warped by patent enforcement: - Pharmaceuticals - Agriculture - Software There's not the slightest reason to think that LENR would be different upon a successful defense of a patent relating to a crucial process. Eric
