Re: Patents to be Auctioned

On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 10:49:48AM +1100, Dudley Mills wrote:
> The problem with ideas in the public domain is that they are
> difficult to exploit in a competitive commercial environment with
> the result, generally, that they are slow to be adopted
> commercially. The purpose of patents is to encourage commercial
> investment.

Wrong. The purpose of the patent system is to provide a small
incentive for people to invent new and original THINGS by offering
them a small amount of protection in exchange for sharing the details
of the invention with the public for the greater good.

The type of patent that you hold completely works against every aspect
of that description and damages our community.

As has already been pointed out, the fact that one day semantic data
would be extracted from the worlds largest dataset, namely the WWW, is
a complete no-brainer. I doubt that you needed the assurances of the
patent system to have the motivation to spend, what, 5 minutes, coming
up with that idea.

Secondly, and more importantly, your sharing of the idea does not
benefit the general public for the greater good because you, and many
others like you, are abusing the system to get protection for ideas,
equations, algorithms and processes (Amazon OneClick for example),
which were not originally anticipated to be covered by the patent
system, and then preventing anyone else, from small startups to free
software developers like my self, from using your "original ideas"
without hefty licencing fees.

Lastly, your hand-wavy claim about patents being used to encourage
commercial development is totally bogus, and you know it. Any investor
worth his salt knows that good ideas are two a penny, it's the
execution that matters.

It seems that the only use for software patents is in the arms-race
between the big boys like IBM, Apple and Microsoft. Scrap them and
there magically becomes no need for them any more. Wonderful.

Please, do the world a favour and let your patent expire.

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater <http://bytesexual.org/>

"Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as
society is free to use the results." - R. Stallman

Received on Saturday, 19 January 2008 07:25:21 UTC