IP law: undemocratic, totalitarian, and unethical
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 30th Jun 2012 19:34 UTC
Legal Yesterday, we were treated to another preliminary injunction on a product due to patent trolling. Over the past few years, some companies have resorted to patent trolling instead of competing on merit, using frivolous and obvious software and design patents to block competitors - even though this obviously shouldn't be legal. The fact that this is, in fact, legal, is baffling, and up until a few months ago, a regular topic here on OSNews. At some point - I stopped reporting on the matter. The reason for this is simple: I realised that intellectual property law exists outside of regular democratic processes and is, in fact, wholly and utterly totalitarian. What's the point in reporting on something we can't change via legal means?
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Comment by ephracis
by ephracis on Sun 1st Jul 2012 19:25 UTC
ephracis
Member since:
2007-09-23

This isn't the first time, or the last for that matter, that big interests have found a way to go above and beyond our little democratic, national processes.

But I think you're not doing the world a favor by giving up and stop talking about it. Obviously there's a lot of people who still believe they can change the rules by voting. They need to be told how the system works, how their power via the vote has been changed.

I still buy virtually all of my content - TV, video games, music - because I want to reward those that created it.

In the case of music you do know that less than 10% of that money will ever reach the actual artist? Not to tout my own horn but I just recently made a service where you can donate money DIRECTLY to any artist, bypassing the record labels, distributors, managers and lawyers. It's on my website. ;)

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