Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Google: Kill all the patent trolls
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Google's head of patents believes the U.S. patent system is "in crisis".
> `----
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/02/google_calls_for_us_patent_reform/
>
> RealNetworks Case Highlights Sea-Change In Patent Law
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | "I can tell you that as a result of the KSR decision, we are receiving
> | new training to determine how we process patent applications," Locker
> | said. "Right now it's an open question as to how it will impact us. But
> | it very well may mean that it will be a lot tougher for people to get
> | patents."
> `----
>
It isn't a question of making it tough to get a patent, if a patent is right
then it shouldn't be tough, it's a question of whether ownership of patents
should go to those who do not have a right to them.
People picking up patents for no other reason than no one else has picked it
up. They play no part in the item that the patents corresponds to.
Then the other part are those patents that simply can not be attributed to
anyone because far too many people and companies were involved in the
development over many years.
As I have said here before, much of the software we use today was built over
many years by many people and companies. How can someone claim ownership of
the Button tool, when we all know that even the earliest UNIX had buttons.
Also everyone who ever programmed has done some version of a button
It's a bleeding picture, a jpeg, the button is nothing more than a mouse
click in a region which is where the picture of the button happens to be.
We now wrap that in a class, it is still just a picture, jpeg/gif/png maybe
you actually draw your button in OnPaint, then a mouse click in the region
where the picture is is all that a button is.
How does the system know which button is pressed? It knows where your
application window is because it put it there, it has a list of the
relative locations of each tool/button/bitmap etc on your client, it has
the marker to the code it is meant to run associated with the region
underneath the mouse when it is clicked.
There is no great rocket science there, all that has changed from the
orriginal buttons, is that the regions of the button is now inside other
regions. Nothing has changed in principle.
You can go through everything, comms, each item of a GUI, every bell and
whistle on a PC and you can find nothing that can be said to be exclusively
developed by anyone. Everything there has to be associated with many
programmers over many years, variations in the code, but the same end
results.
But then if it proved a usefull function or set of functions, you published
them where your fellow programmers could pick it up too. While there you
pick up something someone else has written, maybe add a change of some kind
and put it back for others to use.
When I talk about this I don't mean some small geek club, I mean a global
network, some times you shared through mags, mostly through buletin boards
or occasionally someone would have an open space to deposite and share. It
was international, or rather it was almost international, they were people
in this from all over europe, india, occasional Aussies, Japan.
It may be my memory but when I thought about this the last time I said
simmilar in here, I really can not remember communicating with Americans in
those BBs. But who is getting the benefit of all the work the rest of us
freely put into it, the Americans.
Those items that are being patented do not belong to you, that is what is
wrong with your patent system. Some of your developers no doubt came up
with mathods as the rest of us did, but I bet both socks they shared on BBs
just in the same way we all did. So no one can claim ownership of them.
By the way, the Celts had the first TextBox. It was a wooden board with some
numeric figures in a list, then at the bottom was a cut out oblong box, it
is thought that the user was meant to put items to the sum of the numbers
into the box, maybe jewels or gold, it's still an input box, just because
they had set the GoldJewels property to true doesn't mean it wasn't capable
of other input types.
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