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____/ Homer on Wednesday 10 Aug 2011 14:36 : \____
> Verily I say unto thee that Phil Da Lick! spake thusly:
>> On 10/08/2011 09:34, Homer wrote:
>
>>> But if the purpose of patents is profiteering, then shouldn't there be,
>>> you know, some actual, demonstrable /profit/ from those patents? But
>>> from the above table it's clear there isn't actually any correlation
>>> between patents and the financial success of the person or company
>>> holding them.
>>>
>>> So again, purely in practical terms, given that patents are supposed to
>>> be a practical solution to a practical problem, what's the point?
>>
>> Keeps the top 5 as those top 5. Intention is to stop another microsoft
>> appearing out of nowhere.
>
> Well yes, patents are a monopoly by definition, and therefore their
> intention is to prevent other companies doing business, but surely if
> this corrupt system worked the way its supposed to, then those with the
> most patents would prevent the most companies from doing business, and
> thus profit the most from those companies' lost business. We'd see some
> sort of correlation between patents and profits that proved the system
> was working.
>
> Or to put it simply, as the company with the most patents (by a mile),
> IBM should be the only tech. company in the industry, since no other
> company should be able to offer any product that doesn't violate one of
> its forty thousand patents.
>
> And yet a company with only a tiny fraction of that number of patents,
> Apple, is the most successful.
>
> So it seems patents don't do what they're supposed to. Companies have
> been granted these monopolies, and yet for some reason they're not
> actually exercising them. If this were trademarks, for example, they'd
> have to be actively defended in order to remain protected. But in the
> case of patents, it seem they're just "granted" without any real
> justification, then rarely used to do what they were designed to do -
> stop other companies from doing business.
>
> That calls into question the validity of the entire patent system. If
> patent monopolies aren't actually being used for the purpose they were
> intended, then there's no point in having them at all, and they should
> be abolished.
>
> Of course, there's a very good reason why patents are not actively
> defended the same way as trademarks (apart from the fact it's not a
> legal requirement). If they were, then the entire patent system would
> collapse under the weight of its own bullshit. That fact in itself
> should be enough justification to abolish the system, since any system
> that can't implement in practice what it expounds in theory is obviously
> a complete fallacy.
How many patents does HP have? You left them out. They're a massive company,
IIRC with a workforce 5 times bigger than Microsoft's and more than 10 Google's.
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz (Ph.D. Medical Biophysics), Imaging Researcher
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux administration | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Editor @ http://techrights.org & Broadcaster @ http://bytesmedia.co.uk/
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Contact E-mail address (direct): s at schestowitz dot com
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