Re: Patents to be Auctioned

Dudley Mills wrote:
> Ta Noah,
[...]
>> 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.
>  

Any (semi)automatic tool for annotation does the same, some of them 
actually produce RDF data, some others predate RDF and store the 
semantically rich stuff in other formats. One buzzword you can use to 
find many of these is Named Entity Recognition. Google for it, you'll 
get tons of results.

Patents used this way are just a huge waste of money/resource/time for 
most of the world. Part of it gets rechanneled to the pockets of the 
shareholders. I don't see why I should consider that useful for 
humankind at large.

Oh, also a nice quote from a famous capitalist, who would be Henry Ford:
“Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. 
It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.”

A patent over some very simple and/or very old idea is not a useful service.

That's my 2c (let's collect them together, we can buy a lot of patents 
that way to have the honor of letting them expire)
I.

Received on Sunday, 20 January 2008 04:02:36 UTC