We've gone over this; claiming to be a reformist isn't worth much without a seemingly effective reform.
Your two plans don't work that well; adjusting the duration is a temporary and non-comprehensive hack; software moves ever forward so at some point we'll have to adjust again, and the total lifetime of utility for an invention is not uniform across markets. The bigger problem is with your anti-trolling approach; what if a troll company puts out an unworkably silly product that showcases the patent and nothing else and puts it on the market place for 1 billion dollars? Where do you draw the line? A shorter timespan also does not address the problem of having to pay tens of thousands of dollars to check your new idea against the patents database to see if you might be infringing on something. A world without software patents already exists in europe, more or less, and just like in the US, there is no catastrophical visible effect here either; innovation here is Y, and with software patents it would be X, and there's no way to tell which one is higher or if there's even a big difference. It is true, however, that there's more effective freedom here. I don't have to worry nearly as much about losing it all if a patent troll decides to screw me over when I write and release software here. China is rather productive of late. I don't think that's a good argument for adopting their political system. To summarize: The burden of proof is on the law, not on the ones campaigning to abolish it. You cannot tell X and Y apart (X = software innovation given software pantents, Y = software innovation given no or extremely limited software patents). Even if you could, that is not a complete argument. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
