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aurology ? | 225 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
aurology ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 20 2013 @ 11:18 AM EDT
what you call straw man (2) What do you mean encouraging ? It is figure of speech. It is about the pretention that heavy investment means "it is great, therefore you owe us". You may believe it is a straw man, but it is not.

Um. Right. So are you seriously suggesting that people expect to be rewarded for carting sand into the desert? If not, it's a "straw man" argument - an attack on a position no-one ever took up.

Just because you disagree with someone doesn't make it a figure of speech - this particular figure of speech means offering a reward for something that we think is worthwhile. You know, encouraging it. The straw man is that somehow we should reward investment for the sake of investment (one which you continue). But no-one ever suggested that; we should reward innovation and invention, which sometimes happens to require heavy investment.

what you call strawman (1) lot of money and or time is relative to the company size. "Familiar with state of the art of the field" ? Company A has no way of knowing what their competitor B is going to patent. Otherwise it would be obvious to knowledgables in the field. (non-patentable) Even if company A would have a clue about what company B was going to patent (and or vice versa) their race leads to one winner and one loser. Or should one become the self apointed loser and stop wasting effort ? Don't forget company A does not have to license to B. Extra efforts have been made to work around patents where possible. You may believe it is a strawman, but it is not.

Lamentable, no doubt, but the whole point of the patent system is to encourage innovation. If someone's already done it then it's not very innovative, is it? And if you invest significant amounts (where significant is relative to the size of your company) into research without checking whether someone else has already done that research before then I think your investors will want to have a quiet word about "fiduciary duty".

Maybe you've never been involved in research and don't know that people are actually expected to check the state of a field of research before they leap into it. And they expect to be able to do it, too. Otherwise we'd have millions of doctorate students all "discovering" the same things over and over. Funnily enough, they don't.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • aurology ? - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 20 2013 @ 08:48 PM EDT
  • aurology ? - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 21 2013 @ 12:21 AM EDT
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