[Opensim-dev] personal plea on patents

[Mark Malewski]

> The best thing that IBM can do is "donate" the patents they hold to
>the Community to that those patents "off the table" unless somebody
>decides to get skunky.

Yeah, I agree.  Donate the patents to a non-profit organization (third party
alliance) and then take the whole "patent game" out of this.

That way the community can continue to develop without being in fear of
"deep pocket" companies coming along and cracking researchers, developers,
or anyone else that wants to develop, that doesn't have the "deep pockets"
(or time and money) to be hanging out in a lawyer's office and spending more
time doing patent paperwork instead of engineering.

Patent paperwork is worse than documentation, and it's hard to even get a
developer to write documentation.  The only people that file patents are
"patent troll" lawyers, and large corporations with deep pockets that use
these silly patents to battle others, and kill off anyone else that tries to
compete.

Patents are a bad thing.  It all boils down to human greed.  We've seen
enough of that on Wall Street, looks like Wall Street is now getting into
screwing with engineering/development in America.

Why even write code, or work on a project if someone else can just come
along and file a patent for what you're working on?  So much for Open Source
communities and open standards.


On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 8:10 PM, Robert Martin <robertltux at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Mark Malewski <mark.malewski at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> ...
> > I'm extremely disappointed that IBM would stoop to such a low level.
>  Large
> > corporations seem to do a good job using teams of lawyers to just create
> > these silly "blanket" patents, and "shot gun" approach to patents.
> > IBM's patent application is NOT for an ORIGINAL or NEW idea or
> "invention".
> >  It's just a weapon to try and stifle innovation and competition in
> science
> > & technology.  It would be similar to Netscape attempting to "patent" a
> web
> > browser, or "patent" the internet.  It might sound absurd, but that is
> what
> > these corporations (like IBM) try to do with these silly blanket patent
> > applications.
> ..
> actually the sad thing is inside the fortune 50 crowd having a
> "DeathStar grade" patent portfolio is part of the rules of the game
>
> If Company A approaches Company B with 5 patents being infringed the
> standard approach is for Company B to go digging and find 5 patents
> that Company A is infringing on so they can do a cross license.
>
> The best thing that IBM can do is "donate" the patents they hold to
> the Community to that those patents "off the table" unless somebody
> decides to get skunky.
>
>
> --
> Robert L Martin
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>
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