On Wednesday, March 9, 2011 3:52:40 AM UTC+1, Cédric Beust ♔ wrote:
>
>
> Thanks, Ralph, I was getting a bit desperate.
>
>
Read back. He was calling _YOU_ hand-wavy, not the abolish/severely restrict
software patents crowd.
> (in Reinier's message alone: "patents are a drag", "they amount to thought
> crime", etc...).
>
Of course they amount to thought crime. I thought that was self-evident:
You're just minding your own business, thinking of something interesting,
and sell it or even just give it away to one person - and you're on the hook
for millions if youre unlucky. At the very least you either (A) have to
spend a boatload of your own time and resources on a courtcase, or (B) you
have to pay off the troll. (this give away/sell bit is why it isn't 100%
equivalent to thought crime, but in this day and age, you share lots of
things, and for the younger generations, if you don't share it, it didn't
happen).
That's the point, really: Without pulling any statistics into this
discussion, I strongly feel the burden of proof is on those who want
software patents, not on those who want to abolish them. The point of a few
others in this thread is that you haven't given us any numbers either, only
the notion that the U.S. has them and appears to be relatively innovative.
As I've been saying, this isn't any proof at all (software patents could be
depressing US innovation rates from an even higher natural level), and as
others have been trying to tell you, there are other markets, and other
times, when there was little to no patent protection and the exact same
argument (innovation sure _seemed_ pretty high) applies to those just as
well as the U.S. of today.
"They are a drag" is also self-evident: All those lawyers cost money, and
that money is not being used for productive enterprise. The theory by
software patent defenders is that this loss of money is offset by the value
creation inherent in innovation, and that software patents increase
innovation by more than enough to make up for it. Still, it seems fair that
the burden of proof is for the software patent defenders to show that they
do actually increase innovation.
I even tried to steer the debate with concrete questions ("When was last
> time you heard about an obscene amount of money awarded to a ridiculous
> patent?") but these were promptly ignored.
>
The hypothesis is that most patent trolls offer a cheapish license (still
very expensive but calibrated to be just barely payable), which combined
with the potential in damages (compounded by the fact that in the US you are
liable for all damages, not just damages accrued since being notified of
infringement) and the vagaries of civil court cases which can always swing
against you if the opposition throws enough money at the lawyers, means they
virtually always pay it. These license deals include gag orders which means
the information you are asking for simply doesn't exist.
Nevertheless, some examples do exist:
This case destroyed massive amount of economic advantage and caused lots of
headaches:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft
There's Eolas v. Microsoft, where a troll ended up with a cool half a
billion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas
There's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobsen_v._Katzer where
fortunately Jacobsen prevailed (Katzer opened fire by claiming Jacobsen, a
developer of model train software, owed Katzer $200,000 in license fees for
use of patents. Jacobsen ended up winning because Katzer was not a patent
troll in the literal sense of the term: He was effectively selling
jacobsen's software with his own brand, and thus got countersued on
copyright claims). While Jacobsen won, how many hours of his own time were
wasted by this case? The wikipedia timeline spans YEARS. Also, this is why
I'm calling patent cases thoughtcrime: If I write and publish some open
source software to control model trains, I need to first consult a lawyer
and hand over tens of thousands of dollars to check if my idea might
infringe on some patent? That's effectively thought crime, as its just not
feasible for me to do that every time I have an idea or write a line of
software.
This is a good case study for another reason: Katzer's claim was as
ridiculous as they come. There was prior art, he was ripping off jacobsen's
own software, and crapping all over Jacobsen's trademarks. There were other
inconsistencies, and _STILL_ this case took rather long. If this clear-cut
case took this long, why the heck would you advocate leaving the judgement
of (software) patents to the court even more than today?
>
> And Reinier, Ralph is right about your quoting: for some reason, no parts
> of the message you are responding to ever appear in your messages, so we can
> never tell who you're responding to, much less what to.
>
>
Thanks for letting me know. Turns out the new google groups interface
doesn't quote at all unless you explicitly click a link to do so. I'll keep
that in mind from now on.
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