____/ Rex Ballard on Wednesday 27 June 2007 21:59 : \____
> Patent law and related issues is a big issue on COLA. The examples
> given in COLA are a dramatic example of how wierd, creepy, selfish,
> unethical, and fraudulent people can be when you make a sudden change
> to patent law - and don't catalog all existing prior art.
http://www.theworld.com/obi/Bill.Gates/Challenges.and.Strategy
Gates:
PATENTS: If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of
today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be
at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will
patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm,
application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company
has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as
much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges
with large companies and patenting as much as we can. Amazingly we havn’t done
any patent exchanges tha I am aware of. Amazingly we havn’t found a way to use
our licensing position to avoid having our own customers cause patent problems
for us. I know these aren’t simply problems but they deserve more effort by
both Legal and other groups. For example we need to do a patent exchange with
HP as part of our new relationship. In many application categories
straighforward thinking ahead allows you to come up with patentable ideas. A
recent paper from the League for Programming Freedom (available from the Legal
department) explains some problems with the way patents are applied to
software.
of our profits as they want.”
Also here:
http://news.com.com/Bill+Gates+and+other+communists/2010-1071_3-5576230.html?part=rss&tag=5575731&subj=news.1071.20
"[Richard Stallman:] …Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open
Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism…
…Mr. Gates’ secret is out now–he too was a “communist;” he, too, recognized
that software patents were harmful-until Microsoft became one of these
giants…"
And more recently here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09lee.html
"Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior
executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be
granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents,
the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried
that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent
to “take as much of our profits as they want.”"
--
~~ Best of wishes
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