[wellylug] Mini-ITX Motherboard

[David Antliff]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Jamie Dobbs wrote:
> I still fail to see peoples issue with patents and the protection of 
> intellectual property. I certainly would patent anything (that was 
> patentable) I created that was unique to protect my own "invention" and 
> potential income stream from use of said creation.

Just quickly, because I'm about to go and get married, I think the main 
problem we associate with patents today is with Software Patents. The 
problem isn't "because protecting IP is bad" but because the traditional 
method of patents does not work with software. This is compounded by the 
ineptitude of many patent offices when performing software patent 
searches. It's not a simple issue but there's plenty of resources 
explaining both sides of the argument. One of the things that really 
bothers me about them is that patentable inventions are not meant to be 
"obvious" to someone in the same field, but many recent software patents 
are not only obvious, but prior art exists and is being ignored.

It's not about patents being 'evil' - it's about a broken system. 
Inventions are meant to be patented, not ideas and abstract concepts. The 
worst case involves 'small' developers completely avoiding writing any 
code at all because of the risk of hitting on some patented software 
concept like a 'linked list' or something stupid like that.

I read a really good article about this that explained very clearly why 
software patents don't work in their current form. I just don't have time 
now to look for it. Bells are ringing...

-- 
David.