Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by tesco samoa:
geo you can patient the idea for a train.... There are companies that just patient ideas and only ideas. Major corp's push this all the time.

You no longer have to beat someone to producing a product people like and purchase. You just have to beat the company who builds it by only coming up with a concept and prooving it in court.... That is it.

And the copy would fall under non commerical use. Commerical use would be for another company / person to use the code and sell it for profit...

This is another facet of the 'intellectual property' fiasco. Yes there are corporate 'entities' out there whose sole purpose for existance is to litigate over copyrights and patents. And yes you can patent 'general ideas' like Amazon.com's 'one click purchase' obscenity. This is not so much a function of legal stupidity as incompetent patent officers. The process of getting a patent hasn't been legally changed in generations. The people staffing the office have just gotten stupid. There undoubtedly will have to be some reform of the US Patent office as well as strictly legal reform.

The current hassles that SCO/Caldera is causing with Linux are in this same Category. They had complete turnover of management and the new staff decided that they couldn't make money the legit way and their best chance to get some money out of the corpse of the business was to start suing people. The plan seems to be that either they extort money from IBM by lawsuit or they scare IBM into buying them out before they completely crash and get sued by the shareholders.

[ July 16, 2003, 21:31: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]