Thanks for your post. You and the Kiwi barrister make a lot of sense.
The real problem is that a lot of people keep going over the same ground. I
know that I can make message rules to intercept these messages, but why
should I? This list is for all of us. I would respectfully suggest that we
should confine our comments about the law suit to those which add something
to the debate. My sympathies are entirely with GWMicro on this one, but I
really don't see the point in banging on about the same old thing ad
nauseam. And noe, that doesn't make me Rush Limbaugh, Bill Gates or Adolph
Hitler. Just because we are all angry, I do not think that we should turn
this list into our own personal venting machine.
Respectfully yours,
Robert Grimwood
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rays Home" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2008 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: pending lawsuit
With all that's been said on this what can I posibly add?
Well, here in the UK Window-Eyes does offer one of the more affordable
alternatives to JFW and if anything that's even more the case here seeing
how the main distributer here makes a markup on the US dollar price. We
have just the same cosy relationship too between the business sector and
the large charities who ensure that ordinary trusting blind people here
are fobbed off with smoothly modulated tones about the supposed supiority
of JFw, all prnounced in a very authoritative tone.
I'd hate to think that GW's very existence is put at risk by this action
which seems to me so calculatingly predatory and - dare I say it -
imoral? Still, when it comes to Corporate business practice what's
morality got to do with it? -as Tina Turner didn't quite say. It is
chilling indeed to get the line some have taken that its a big bad grown
up world you must live in and those of us who don't belive that power and
financial might should win out better get a life.
Seems to me that what's being attempted as an arguement here is the very
idea of web page place markers - or whatever you want to call them - more
than the actual method of achieving this obviously useful facility to VI
people. I think it is so much sophistry on FS's and lawyers part.
Clearly SF didn't do a very good job implementing this idea, and seemingly
GW have, in line with their well known pride in well designed craftedcode
done the job as it should have been done from the start - and now get a
suit thrown at them for doing it propperly!
Will they - or GW for that matter - take on the olks behind Webvisum if
they were to implement such an on-line feature? I doubt that GW would,
and I leave it to your imagination as to what the other would do.
Why not indeed go one step further? Just get the idea, don't write a line
of code, just patent the idea and sue someone else if they dare to
actually code it! How's that for a business proposition - or has someone
beaten me to it?
If someone were to set up a fund to defend any independent developper from
such obviously malign and ill-intentioned litigation, then I would
subscribe to that. Just hope GW wouldn't be too proud to accept the
financial assistance - and anyone else who dares tread on the hobnailed
boots of these corporate gangsters.
Wish I knew more about the legal system in the US, but from this distance
all I know i=s what John Grisham and the like write. Is it like that?
Maybe someone somewhere will tell me also about how the subsidising of
Access tech is organised in the states as from what's been said in other
posts there's quite a lot of restrictive practice being fostered by large
non profits in the US, and it is not so different here in the UK either.
Well, if you've stayed with me, thanks, and sorry for a long post, and
that's all from me.
Cheers,
Ray.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2008 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: pending lawsuit
bjcolt wrote:
As a musician I have to deal with the copyright law fairly extensively
and when it comes to place markers as in this case the area is so grey
it is unbelievable. A place marker has been used for decades in
determining where a person sits at a table, and of course I remember it
being used in school to keep our places in a book, long before FS took
on the name.
Generally, "place marker" would be a trademark not a copyright. However,
what's at issue in this case is not the phrase "place marker", and indeed
not trademarking or copyright at all, but an entirely different type of
intellectual property: patents of inventions, namely Freedom Scientific's
patent for a method for adding place markers to web page.
Here's some general background on what patents are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
You can read the full details of the patent in question at:
http://tinyurl.com/6zjt5t
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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