How would you stop a company from having trade secrets? I don't understand that logic. And the fact is that a company will either keep trade secrets or use patents. I don't think there has been any other solution available in a capitalistic society, at least not one that has been shown to work.
I guess what I'm saying here is I'd like to see a realistic alternative offered. Something that would actually work in a capitalistic (e.g., US) setting. And as far as reverse engineering, you are assuming that "the magnitude of the problem" is immediately apparent. In my mind, for reverse engineering to supplant patents you would have to reverse engineer all innovations, regardless of the economics at the time. Otherwise, you lose knowledge. You never lose knowledge with patents. It's a trade-off. Do I think we need patent reform? Sure! But I still believe that patents solve an important problem: How do we ensure we don't lose knowledge? I don't think that reverse engineering can solve that problem. --- Puryear Information Technology, LLC Baton Rouge, LA * 225-706-8414 http://www.puryear-it.com Author of "Best Practices for Managing Linux and UNIX Servers" Download your free copy: http://www.puryear-it.com/bestpractices.htm ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric G Ortego To: General at brlug.net Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 5:55 AM Subject: Re: [brlug-general] to release or not to release,intellectual retentiveness. 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 . _______________________________________________ General mailing list General at brlug.net http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
