Against RAND, patents and lawyers

I'm against RAND because any standards with associated fees/royalties 
will be replaced by a free version.
Also because it is against open source and free software.

The companies should stop making war at each other by using these 
submarine patents and other lawyers warfare.
At first these patents are now absurd and no longer serve their purpose, 
and if companies work together, they may
arrive to a solution that costs less in term of all this law and patents 
stuff. But I doubt that Microsoft will buy that!

I can site the CEBus standard for home automation as an example: the 
CEBus standard is based on a patent owned
by Intellon, and any company that makes CEBus chips must pay royalties 
to Intellon. For this reason, and other
technical reasons, the CEBus standard may not be widely adopted. There 
is already competing standards against CEBus.

There's already too much jokes about lawyers depicted as sharks to add 
another occasion to make lawyer jokes!

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2001 20:29:56 UTC