> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 01:56:03PM -0500, David Boyes wrote: > > > > > Some patents are to important to let a patent troll or potentially > > > malicious company scoop it up, so Red Hat will acquire those patents > > > and allow the open source community to use them without worrying > > > about licensing that piece of technology. > > > > I think I'll just go patent everything I've ever done now. 8-( > > So what's your alternative?
Individual ownership of said techniques or ownership of common-practice patents by out-of-field owners. The patent system was set up to protect the value of investing in innovation by individuals, not to mass-transfer basic practices into assets that can be bought and sold. Ignore the broken state of IP law, do stuff > anyway? You might want to ask Google and friends how that's working out > for them vis-a-vis Oracle and Apple. Well, my response (and what I actually did, BTW): 1) Volunteer for the IEEE effort to lobby the parliament of whores we are pleased to call the US Congress on this and other technology-related issues. 2) Donate time to educate our specific local political whores on the issue (which will get you lovely phone calls begging for money at campaign times) 3) Do what one can to block efforts to mass-transfer common practice to corporate interests by having INDIVIDUALS patent those items, and join efforts to demonstrate clear prior art for most of these stupid item patents. The EFF and others have done a good job in organizing efforts in many parts of the world. 4) Volunteer to provide patent review to the US PTO to throw out most of these stupid patents before they even get this far. 5) Establish out-of-field ownership organizations for technology related patents -- e.g. if you can profit from the technology involved, you can't own it directly-- someone out-of-field who can't ever profit from it gets to hold the rights for common practices. If this is really about holding the line on who/what can use a patented technology, that little innovation makes a lot of sense to me. > > I, for one, would prefer companies with a good track record of commitment > to the open source world hoover up dumb patents and leave them sitting > idle rather than Apple getting hold of them and launching another one of > their efforts to stop anyone else making GUIs, smartphones, or whatever. Except at that point, we're already discussing the lesser of N evils, and the camel is already inside the tent. See above. > Rodger Donaldson [email protected] I envy you. You live in a semi-sane part of the world. I'll take this offlist. My counter-culture roots are showing. 8-) -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
