Zitat des Tages über Patente / Patents:
Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.
The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
If you patent a discovery which is unique, say a human gene or even just one particular function of a human gene, then you are actually creating a monopoly, and that's not the purpose of the world of patents.
If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.
Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.
It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.
Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.
In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.
I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.
We have more patents on pigmented inks than anybody else.
At Mint, we developed five pending patents on our technology, ranging from categorization to the Ways to Save system that calculates how much a new financial product would save a user given their present financial situation.
There are no patents in finance.
The licensing business is about licensing the full portfolio of Qualcomm's patents. Some of them involve the chip. Some of them don't involve the chip. In fact, the vast majority of them don't involve the chip.
Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.
Like patents - which also seek to protect the little guy - unions were started for all the right reasons. But like patents, they can be twisted into something that hurts innovation, competition, and ultimately consumers and the country as a whole.
