OSNews

You hear this repulsive buzzword from politicians all the time .. "Innovation" .. and they complain businesses and engineers aren't doing it - at the same time they make the patent system even worse. From what I understand of the latest "first-to-file" system is that corporate espionage, theft, and invasion of personal rights will only get worse - and big corporations will receive even more reward for it. Whoever gets through the patent office first wins, so of course a big well-funded IP venture group with lots of lawyers will fly right past REAL individual developers.

I understand there is a need for profit to be returned for the research, but that's what secrecy is for.. you know, that thing nobody pays attention to. All the big corporations skimped on security, got hacked, and are now relying on patents to protect them from their own negligence. And the worst companies buy patents instead of developing the technology - just to go around suing anyone they can. Design copyrights (ART!) will protect your product, but the research behind it is the part you don't release if money is your concern.

I'm currently working on a programming language I would like to open source, but terrified of all this patent bullsh_t - I just want to write my code, without the threat of some scheming lawyers showing up one day. Kill All Patents - copyright law is enough to address real art. To copyright a concept is to steal the rights of others - whether they learned it from you or not, it is totally different from art.

I have no problem whatsoever with someone expanding on my idea with citation of my work IF they're using it. Of course if their work is identical to mine without citation, that is clearly a copyright infringement - but that's different from something that "seems" similar in concept. I can't BAN everyone from competing with my ideas, that's just retarded. It is the epitome of retarded.

Salvador Dalí did not patent melting clocks - he would just laugh at all this.