-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 http://www.cbn.co.za/dailynews.php?id=1152 > A common problem experienced by capital seekers is that many funds > will only consider a business that has intellectual property such as > patents. "This is especially frustrating," says de Waal, "because a > great business concept based on existing technology could be rejected > in favour of a shakier proposition having proprietary intellectual > property. In any event, a patent is only ever worth anything if you > also have the means to defend it."
I thought the SA government liked free software (they seem to prefer to talk about "open source" which IMHO is an ideological oversight), so the patent "requirement" alone should concern it. As far as I understand it, the government's social mandate is to improve the wellfare of *all* the country's citizens, not just that of individual companies. This mandate would be better served by seeking to maximize *consumer* surplus, not *producer* surplus. Especially in a developing economy with only a small stockpile of its own patents, it seems to me that having a strong patent culture can only be disruptive to the innovation that's required to develop a country. I don't have any links handy (volunteers, anyone?) but I heard the Indian government specifically excluded software (algorithms?) from patentability precisely so that India's burgeoning software industry can go crazy and take over the world. - -- You can't truly consider yourself a mad scientist until you have seriously considered transmutation of base metals into gold. (By neutron bombardment, of course.) - me -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Please fetch my new key 804177F8 from hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net/ iD8DBQFD0MLEwyMv24BBd/gRAhtOAJ9uVwG5thD8Q8/07oDWwH7Mtl2bYACfSb1b VmZj2iRnaZMbhlaUpkVUnQ0= =pVQ2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
