Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 13th May 2007 22:24 UTC, submitted by Havin_it
"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."
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RE: U.S. Patent system is a monopoly preservation tool
by bnolsen on Mon 14th May 2007 14:36
in reply to "U.S. Patent system is a monopoly preservation tool"
Member since:2006-01-06
I very seriously doubt anyone in the government was intelligent enough to figure this out.
I do believe that certain corporations who don't like to have to compete stumbled into a scam allowing them to "freeze" the market and own it all for themselves, thinking they could guarantee their own profits that way.
Of course all this does is speed up the US losing it's technical edge in the world.
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Member since:
2006-01-17
Main 'benefit' of it (along DMCA) is actually legal "protection" of tech giants from competition, e.g. emerging tech companies from eastern Asia. No doubt, people running the USA foresaw this decades ago and gave a green light to expand patent system on anything (business methods, software, sequenced genome etc.) this hasn't been about small inventors anymore since at least middle 20th century, it is all about preservation of economical power and state-sponsored market protection.
Current situation is that few of the biggest U.S. corporations already formed a licensing cartel agreement not to sue each other, but if anyone'd naiveliy try to step in the market, will get sued to death ( doesn't matter that DDR cartel few years ago paid a big price for price fixing, but maybe it was important that US company was a victim of predominantly foreign ones.) Of course, market is still too dependent on U.S. income and companies are more likely to play nice than to abandon this huge market (same as Microsoft is in the EU case), so they effectively must obey U.S. patent law even outside of it's borders.