Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 17:11:32 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball <Anthony.Kimball@East.Sun.COM> To: dan@math.berkeley.edu Cc: freebsd-chat@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: supermicro p6sns/p6sas Message-ID: <199709302211.RAA00363@compound.east.sun.com> References: <199709302148.OAA12717@math.berkeley.edu>
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Quoth Dan Strick on Tue, 30 September: : > The fault for that would lie squarely on the shoulders of the patent : > office. Obviousness is *supposed* to be a prima facie criterion for : > denial of patent. : : The patent office has a very high tolerance for obviousness and lack : of innovation. It often functions more to suppress competition in the : marketplace than it does to foster innovation. I think there are two possibilities: Incompetence or conspiracy, where conspiracy is taken not in the sense of organized planned intent of manipulation, but rather in the sense of an ad hoc cabal of agents in positions of public trust who exploit that trust on behalf of a constituency or a personal interest. The problem this represents to the free development community is quite serious, in either case, at least for software. I don't have any solutions, either. The best I can propose is that free developers should invent as much as possible, establishing prior art. Unfortunately, there is so much infrastructure to build that the potential for invention is largely redirected... The problem this represents to society as a whole, in terms of its effect in retarding technological advance, isn't really a freebsd topic at all, but I can easily imagine that many of the readers would support an effort to correct it by enforcing more stringent requirements on patent grants. It seems there is hardly a day that goes by without my reading something in an industry rag or usenet regarding new legal controls being placed in order to protect the interests of creators of intellectual property (an oxymoron in itself, by my ethical standards) against the interests of information freedom activists (which I believe to be approximately coequal to the interest of the species!) International trade and copyright agreements, industrial intellectual property trusts, expansions of the patent domain, reductions in the public domain... I get mad/ill thinking about it.
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