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There is one thing wrong with your premise. To give something away, you have to own it first. Where do you think the good idea came from? Where I have an issue with software and abstract patents is that no one idea is unique. Statistically, if you get a ping of inspiration, it has been shown to occur to approximately 4000+ other people. Of those, several hundred may act on it, but only a few will ever achieve the culmination of the idea (or seed) that was planted. Giving away a patent, only gives up the opportunity for a limited financial monopoly within a jurisdiction and for a limited amount of time to realize a profit from the effort, before you have competition. Back in the days when patents where established in the US, it took a very long time to mature a business based on a tangible asset. Today, one can realize viability within a number of months. The time factor that was reasonable back then, is far too long today in many cases. Entire industries can rise and fall within the lifetime of the patent, bringing a choke hold to innovation. IMO, the patent system has been broken for a long time. The advent of "defensive" patent positions are a recent occurance, due in large part from the self dealing by the legal establishment to make more business from the USPTO at the expense of legitimate wealth generating enterprises. The appearance of "business concept" patents, software patents, and abstract patents are a very recent invention and are onerous on two fronts: A) They allow for, or at least the rationalization of, practices and common sense approaches to problem solving that for all intents and purposes can be shown to have existed in one form or another for some time (prior art). B) They allows for legal extortion, based on the fact that circumvention of said practices is both costly and in some cases financial suicide. For example: if I patented 2+2=4, then someone could reason that all they would have to do is use another method, such as 3+1, or 4+0, etc. However, if I patent "2+2=4 and all related addition problems yielding the same result" I have just blown a hole in mathematics to my economic advantage. This is typically referred to as a pioneer patent, and is the most common form of legal extortion within the software community, because, the wording is written such that a lawyer can rationalize not only all addition problems, but all subtraction (5 + -1 for example), and certain Multiplication and Division problems. With some real fancy legal footwork, I could then extend the reach to CPU's and any other binary device that depend on 1's and 2's complement addition. Now do you get the picture of how bad it can get, and does? Jay Askren wrote:
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