On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:08 PM, silky <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:03 PM, David Connors <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 20 May 2010 15:49, silky <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > Agreed that Patent law is "not ideal". But I would expect it's not so > > > trivial to replace or remove, and you don't hear about the good > > > things, so your feelings towards it are almost certainly biased. > > > > I think there is an argument that can be made that there is a very big > > difference between a real invention and say, getting a patent for using XOR > > to overlay a cursor on a GUI (years and years after the industry has been > > using it as standard) then going on to take everyone with a pulse to court. > > I'm surprised more of these don't get over-turned trivially by showing prior > > art. > > I've never been to court for a patent infringement, but I'd imagine > the *process* of showing and proving "prior art" is non-trivially > expensive. > > It's my imagination that "the" patent system (obviously it differs > from country to country, but lets assume it's similar in Australia and > America) relies on courts and "the market" to do the determining of > validity, not so much the office itself. But I could be totally wrong; > I do know (or at least assume) that some validation is done on patents > in this country. I don't know how thorough it is.
But I suppose I have no experience in this area therefore my comments are fairly worthless. And I do have an opinion on everything. Nevertheless, I do think that decisions based purely from news articles (and from biased websites) are pretty useless, and in my opinion when you dislike the way people "play the game" you should direct your attention to the rules rather than the players. It's basic economics, isn't it :) Anyway. I will stop talking about that which I do not know. -- silky http://www.programmingbranch.com/
