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Marie Antoinette + Scrooge | 134 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Marie Antoinette + Scrooge
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 14 2012 @ 09:44 PM EDT
1. United States Patent Office, Patent number: 3380029 was
arguably, at the time, a reasonable software patent.* It
was apparently used to block IBM from giving away free
duplicates of another company's application.

I would be unable to argue that the median 3rd percentile of
software patents has any merit at all.*

2. That particular software patent, again, arguably helped
create the market for software independent of hardware.
Copyright, unfortunately, would not have helped prevent IBM
from duplicating functionality. This is still true. So far
as a new startup may patent aspects of innovative software
and use those patents to convince investors that M$ won't
immediately copy them...there is some social merit.

3. I disagree with this point.

That said, at the moment, software patents are almost
definitely a bad thing. I still believe that we'd probably
be better off reforming the system than completely chucking
it. I could easily be wrong. I am reasonably certain that
it is possible to hold the above opinions for reasons other
than malice.

(http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2011/08/case-for-
software-patents.html is a reasonable reference. Or, at
least, doesn't sound much like FM.)

--Erwin

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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