On 2010-11-19 12:17 PM, [email protected] wrote:
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 06:05:56PM -0600, Marsh Ray wrote:
Note that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with "promoting the
progress of science and the useful arts".
But what's really sad is that this baloney has affected my ability to
sit down and write a computer program that basically does pure math and
give the resulting system away or use it to produce value.
1) I don't want to have to become a patent lawyer to be a programmer.
(IANAPL)
2) Since IANAPL, reading a patent can only hurt me, since by reading
it I could be found to willfully infringe, and none of my opinions
about whether I'm not infringing count. Or so I've heard.
3) This vaguely reminds me of a private sector implementation of key
escrow and export control laws.
"If cryptography is outlawed, on5dfjd($T#+$J$IURI#QUXuif;rEr3n#"
4) I wonder if the system could somehow be used against itself.
The GPL has an interesting "viral" property; you play by its rules,
you get to take advantage of the ecosystem. Otherwise you can't.
(legally, anyway - in practice nobody seems to sue over it)
I wonder if you could do something similar with patents.
Something similar *is* done with patents: GPLv3
esr however argues that this does not work.
Of course, the reason it does not work is that patents do not work. It
is impossible to draw a line around an idea. One can easily argue that
any patent covers anything, and that one can patent anything, including
what other people have been doing for years, and with equal facility,
one can argue that no patent covers anything, that some minute change
escapes from patent coverage, or some detail of implementation requires
an additional patent. The patent system has never worked. People have
always patented trivial and well known techniques, and have had
considerably more success in enforcing blatantly invalid patents then
clearly valid patents - because judges, juries and the patent office are
unlikely to comprehend valid patents.
_______________________________________________
cryptography mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
