I can't seem to make these two statements match: > By the way, patent protection is **by far** more beneficial > to the little inventor than the big company.
> Companies with lots of money have ***all*** the power. I agree that patents in some form is beneficial to small companies, but the current system that allows so many bogus patents, defended by an armada of expensive lawyers, is heavily slanted in favour of the big and rich IMO. BTW, are patent lawsuits dealt with in court with a grand jury (randomly selected citizens)? Or is it just the lawyers fighting it out? Maybe normal people could see through the veil of lawyer lingo - when decoded to "natural" language and process flow diagrams, I'm sure many patents would appear in all their "emperor's new clothes" glory... > So the point is that many great new > ideas have the hallmark of "seeming obvious". Very true, but with the current state of affairs it's very expensive to even start investigating whether it was a natural course of events or not. > No > company is ever not funded over fear of patent infringement. Actually, I'm involved in patent issues that are likely to keep the US market out of reach for us. It's costing a lot of money to just investigate the matter, and it's not improbable we'll drop it altogether for the US. Your statement has just been proven wrong - if we didn't fear it, we'd already have a US subsidiary. > It is rare that a little guy will be put out of business over > a patent. Isn't that partly because it doesn't generate a lot of press when they are? And because generally the little guy doesn't pose a thread worth dealing with? > So the > bottom line is all of you guys that hate patents are really > doing the bidding of the huge multinational companies that > hate them way more than you do. You should all get checks > from Microsoft. Sure, it's costing them top lawyer dollar, but the big companies can always counter-sue (because they all have these obscure, imprecise patents) so I don't think it's that big an issue for them. Maybe I'm making lots of incorrect assumptions because I don't fully understand how the claims in a patent work. It would be interesting to dissect a dubious patent, say 5,467,443 (generating pixels from a set of parameters), and see if it does seem valid - and get MM's lawyers' views on it. A very important exercise for the whole open source community, I'd say. Anyone up for it? /Jonas -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.371 / Virus Database: 267.14.9/216 - Release Date: 2005-12-29
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