On 10/14/05, Dustin Puryear <dpuryear at usa.net> wrote: > > This is semi-political, so when I have the new list up it will go there. > > Eric, you are right. Patents are used as weapons. I don't doubt that for a > second. (Do note that I'm not limiting myself to software patents here.) > The > quesiton though is this: Is there a better way? Without patents, many, if > not most, innovative ideas will remain inside a company as a trade secret. > We will have to rely entirely on people reverse engineering > implementations > to get to the original idea. Every idea! Even if at the time there was no > solid commercial interest to reverse engineer. Otherwise, when an inventor > or company disappears then society loses that new idea.
I don't see that as a problem as long as we don't persecute those who reverse engineer the secret solutions. The magnitude of the problem will dictate how important a solution is. With any great solution open or closed it will stick around until there is not a problem to be solved or there is a better solution. That's very risky to me. The whole basis for a patent is that we, as a society, would rather grant an > inventor a temporary monopoly than risk losing a lot of innovative ideas > because they were retained as trade secrets and not properly documented > for > public use after a patent expired. I think we are solving today's problems with yesterdays solutions. The same goes for copyright. These were laws based on what we had back in the 1800's. There isn't any good reason every single student should pay so much for texts. A patent is just an incentive for a company to release a trade secret to the > public. Its hard for me to denounce anything that looks like it promotes disclosing knowledge but maybe companies shouldn't be allowed to have secrets when there is a chance that it negatively affects the well being of society . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://brlug.net/pipermail/general_brlug.net/attachments/20051017/b373d135/attachment-0001.htm
