Re: Patents to be Auctioned

Ta Noah,
 
Guess you won't be bidding afterall?
 
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.
 
Right. Disclosure is an essential part of it. Not the whole of it.
 
> 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.
 
I'd be most grateful if you would point out a major application either
planned or in operation.
 
> 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.
 
There is another perspective. Major developments allow smaller developers
to grow in their shade. Sorry to say that I don't think that your free
software development would cut the mustard here. Money needs to be in
prospect, made and to pass through many hands to make possible the
required amount of cooperation by many people with different skills, most
of whom need to make a living.
 
> 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.
 
There are plenty of businesses paying royalties for the use of
a wide variety of Intellectual Property. They do so because they
are the busineses which see the value of an idea. There are also businesses
which don't pay royalties. Commonly they also don't have any novel ideas.
 
> 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.
 
Software is "just" another (patentable) technology. 
 
> Please, do the world a favour and let your patent expire.
 
Please buy my patents and you can have the honour 
(http://www.freewebs.com/dudley-mills/index.htm). I suggest that
that would condemn the idea to being exploited by only the largest,
and not necessarily most interested, developer or to languish in the
two a penny drawer. No benefit to me either.