Re: [Fwd: United States Patent: 6,862,609]

[Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at>]

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 13:11 -0700, Trever L. Adams wrote:
[...]
> It is Article 1 Section 8. It also says they shall have that power and
> that the intent is to promote the advances of arts and sciences. It

Actually the current (ab)use of the patent system (both in the USA and
by the EPO under pressure of you-know-who) does neither of these things
- it simply promotes the *commercial exploitation* of sciences and art.
Interesting enough that arts are mentioned in this thread - one more
point that it is a question of time until all (other) kinds of arts is
covered by patents (probably because you can do it on a computer).

> doesn't say that patents are the methods to be used. It doesn't say 17
> years (or the whole 70/life+75 crap for copyrights). I think many very

The 17/20 years for patents are also defined in TRIPS - so changing
these to some saner value (given the speed of development in the IT
world) is not an option (as pointed out by all patent-promoters at all
opportunities).

> intelligent people have and will show that allowing patents on ideas
> (software patents are only this) tend to destroy such advances.

ACK. And it is even worse: Currently the whole patent system is abused
and there is no regulation in sight (since neither the patent offices
nor large corporations have anything to loose with
illegal/trivial/priort art/... patents).

> Yeah, yeah, from time to time there is someone who seems to show that
> they help... however, 90% of those seem to be backed by MS or SCO.

They help if you can pay your lawyer. This leaves corporations in the
game and the rest (small and medium companies, private folks) is lost -
sooner or later.
And BTW the bigger problem than software corporations (which can be sued
since they are violating lots of these software patents) are the patent
utilization companies which simply posses patents and (must) make money
of it. And this implies going to the court (or you pay beforehand -
since you/your company probably have no chance anyway to pay all the
costs - to avoid this).
Until this abuse is stopped, the patent system as a whole has a serious
problem.

> Interesting considering many people, including Bill Gates, said quite
> differently in the past.

IIRC he's now promising lawsuits (under certain conditions) with patents
- at least to Asian governments.

	Bernd
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