George Barca wrote:
So let's say I mortgage my house, cash in my bank accounts and
pour all that money into an idea for a motor that runs on water
and gets 400 miles to the gallon.
I finally get the design right after 10 years of work and near
bankruptcy and market it to the automobile manufacturers.
Only they are not interested because they took my prototype
apart, copied it and are now making their own version of the
engine.
You think that is fair?
No it isn't fair.
Now suppose I'm fretting over some problem, and after a week I come up
with a neat algorithm and some code that implements it. That makes me
feel very clever, so I call the lawyers and get them to help me forbid
anybody else from using the same algorithm for the next 17 years.
You think that is fair?
Patents should cover things that are hard to invent---things that
require a lot of education or thought or equipment or experimentation or
a big team of experts.
Patents were devised to encourage useful inventions, not mainly to
provide a way for me to extract money from others for using some puny
idea that I happened to have claimed first.
Only a moral midget fails to recognize that, and the US courts are
finally figuring it out.
Software patents are in the trash can.
Your engine analogy does not fit software patents.
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