[RndTbl] Patents - nothin' new here...

Gilbert E. Detillieux gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca
Wed Apr 13 15:33:10 CDT 2005


Further to last night's discussion of intellectual property and, more
specifically, patent abuse, I found the following web page interesting...

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/patents.html

The information is a few years old, but still relevant.  One link I
particularly enjoyed reading was this one...

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/supreme-court.patents

... which talks about a 1950 US Supreme Court opinion that was rather
critical of the claimant's patent application and subsequent infringement
claim.  The judge's comments cite an earlier opinion, from 1882.

There was something comforting about seeing that abuse of the patent system
is not a recent thing, and that when these frivolous cases are brought to
the attention of judges who understand the constitution and its implications,
sanity usually does prevail.

And in other news, I found this article from The Economist, on the economics
of sharing, to be interesting too...

http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3623762

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail:	<gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Computer Science	Web:	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
University of Manitoba		Phone:	(204)474-8161
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA  R3T 2N2	Fax:	(204)474-7609


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