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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Define the problem! | 364 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Why do you solve a problem.
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 06:46 PM EST
For the same reason that you climb a mountain, because it is there and you can.
Only a fool do it for any monetary reward.
It is a poor World that is only build on money. Curiosity solves most
problems!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

That's what copyright is for
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 06:57 PM EST
Worked for software for years, until the courts got confused and couldn't tell
the difference between an invention and an implementation.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Time? In Patent Law???
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 10:14 PM EST

Please identify where - in patent Law - spending lots of time on something is a factor that makes it patent eligible!

Thanks!

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

I agree and disagree.
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 11:15 PM EST
That worked for many years - think MS Excel vs VisiCalc vs
QuatroPro), (Windows vs Xerox PARC vs Apple), Oracle vs IBM vs
world over SQL.
Patents were not needed to further development of any
software. Unfortunately, underhanded and even illegal business
practices are what got many (unnamed) tech companies where
they are today. Patents would not have hindered those
practices, and only now are brought into play because the old
tactics don't work any more (or they already got slapped.)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Aw, come on now.
Authored by: bprice on Saturday, January 05 2013 @ 03:42 AM EST
It's probably a safe bet that someone, somewhere is developing a killer software program, right now, that will do something completely new and unique. Maybe the programmer has put a lot of time into perfecting it, hoping, someday, to get a reward for their investment if hard work and originality.
Why in world would they do that, if on the first day after their software is put on sale, Microsoft (or some other huge company) would "legally" steal it and shut them out of any profit for all that hard work and dedication?
Copyright would protect against Microsoft. They're known not to be competent in software, so all they could do would be flatout copy. However, they couldn't get it through their management maze in any reasonable time frame: even overnight infringement is impossible for them.

Any company competent to re-engineer and re-implement the software overnight would raise a big red flag about your hypothetical programmer: if the work is so trivial that it could be re-engineered and re-implemented overnight, especially by a "other huge company", why did the original programmer devote so much "hard work and dedication" on it? If his judgement is so weak that he couldn't see the triviality of his work, why should his judgement be trusted on anything?

---
--Bill. NAL: question the answers, especially mine.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Define the problem!
Authored by: Wol on Saturday, January 05 2013 @ 04:15 PM EST
Nearly all the intellectual work in writing a program is defining the problem.

The solution is then just grunt work. And patents aren't there to protect grunt.
That's copyright or "registered design" (yes I know that's *also*
called a patent in America :-(

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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