Hello to all, I'm a bit concerned and I thought this as good a place as any to open the conversation.
I'm getting a little concerned about patents that cover a process of doing something. Recently, universities have been making advancements in all kinds of things that can benefit medicine (growing many kinds of drugs in mushrooms, for instance). It dawned on me, what is to stop Redmond from patenting studying social networks based on link relationships, or so many methods therein that they can hold coin over anyone that makes products based on this research? In other words, if you research, you pay Microsoft if you plan to publish your work because your method was 'similar' to theirs. Lets say I came up with a new way to map social networks quickly into some kind of tree that shows how each member is likely to monetize (would not be hard). Can someone please assure me that this could not be patented if I did it? Many universities are getting money to study complex networks. Is this a non concern or should someone be making a stink now before it happens? Kindly --Tim _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general
