Re: don't think so

We can't afford to let the lawyers scrape profit from the planetary net.  We
already pay to access it, and ALL businesses can make ample income from
selling legitimate products.  Tying the public's hands by putting all of a
particular service under the control of a single patentor's format will
hinder the development of fair competition (sounds like someone called MS,
without me having read all the details of who is lobbying for this) for
decades, and stunt an industry who's product development cycle is heading
down to 6..12 months.

We need the flexibility of being able to create ANY idea that is better than
the previous one.  Patents are already a hinderence in the mass-production
market, but a necessary evil to help pay off the research investment.  But
not when there is no real innovation, such as a data record format used to
communicate some information.  Data formats are the sillyest thing to
receive a patent that I have ever heard of, this idea coming from lawyers
looking to make themselves useful.  Algorithms should be patentable, given a
bit of common sense.  If this was a thread to the patent office, I would
ramble on some more.

Look at the consumer benefit of Napster and others, unfortunately not
legitimate businesses, but these ideas have forced a limit to the gouging by
music publishing companies, who for decades never paid reasonable revenues
to the artists, and have collected way more than the ROI that the original
risk that they took, all the while hampering the financial growth of tens of
millions of artists who were not signed up with those giants.  I do not
condone the legality of Napster, but evolution in that segment needed a
corrective lurch, at the cost of getting the legal system involved and
shutting down a number of companies.

The creativity of mankind cannot be dispensed from an ATM at the cost of a
transaction charge.

Received on Saturday, 13 October 2001 15:45:30 UTC