Mold on Rotten Meat
Recent goings on in the U.S. patent circus makes me nauseated. I think that software patents are evil. Does anyone here disagree? I'm interested in your opinions.
From the page:
What would happen if a rogue actor managed to get hold of a powerful patent and threatened to detonate it and destroy e-mail as we know it? You'd have the BlackBerry NTP v. RIM case--the tech world's very own Dr. Strangelove. NTP, a one-man Virginia firm, armed with nothing but patents, currently threatens to bring down BlackBerry and with it the sanity of millions of e-mail addicts. A textbook "patent troll," he wants a billion dollars to stand down. What to do?
It is telling that the dilemmas created by software patents today are routinely compared to those created by nuclear arms, with patent trolls playing the role of the nuclear madman. But while it's easy to bash trolls as evil extortionists, to do so may be to miss an important lesson: Patent trolls aren't evil, but rational and predictable, akin to the mold that eventually grows on rotten meat. They're useful for understanding how the world of software patent got to where it is and what might be done to fix it.
posted by Unknown @ 10:01 PM
1 Comments:
At 4:37 PM,
R said…
I agree with the metaphor. IP is a perversion of capitalism, but whether this is "good" or "bad" is not so much the issue here. What people often forget is that the value supposedly inherent in IP is created by disclosure of the idea. If something is obvious, then there is no value in someone's disclosing it. A big part of the problem that the NTP case exemplifies is that USPTO seems to take a very broad view of what is not obvious. All you apparently have to demonstrate to them is that you were the first person who bothered to write it down and pay the filing fee.
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