From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Wed, 29 May 2002 04:57:11 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Wed, 29 May 2002 04:57:10 -0400 Received: from mail.loewe-komp.de ([62.156.155.230]:41734 "EHLO mail.loewe-komp.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Wed, 29 May 2002 04:57:10 -0400 Message-ID: <3CF4983D.2080207@loewe-komp.de> Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 10:58:37 +0200 From: Peter =?ISO-8859-1?Q?W=E4chtler?= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204 X-Accept-Language: de, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Jeff V. Merkey" CC: James Bottomley , Roman Zippel , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: A reply on the RTLinux discussion. In-Reply-To: <200205281803.g4SI3vx05013@localhost.localdomain> <20020528142147.A7353@vger.timpanogas.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jeff V. Merkey wrote: > > I've been reading all this discussion, and I think the solution > is pretty simple. Patents are fairly easy to invalidate if you > can show prior art. Novell and these big software companies > do it all the time. When they implement something that infringes > someone's patent, they wait until litigation is filed, then seek to > invalidate specific claims in the patent. There are administrative > procedures in place wih the USPTO that take this into account. It's > expensive and you have to be willing to risk litigation. > Yes, exactly. Look at http://www.bountyquest.com A patent gives the owner of the patent the right to _deny_ anybody to use this "invention" (17 years when granted). History has proved that inventions where done independantly in different countries at almost the same time. With software patents the chance that two programmers code something up almost exactly the same way grows _rapidly_. I don't like the fact, that somebody can deny me the use of my own ideas. The whole idea of helping innovations with patents is outdated.