Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 00:42:02 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: redprince@redprince.net (G. Adam Stanislav) Cc: jhix@mindspring.com (W Gerald Hicks), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? Message-ID: <200005170042.RAA25962@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20000513184603.00896100@mail85.pair.com> from "G. Adam Stanislav" at May 13, 2000 06:46:03 PM
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> But patents do not protect a property, they protect discovery of natural > laws. When someone invents something, he discovers some law of nature, he > discovers how things work. But those laws are not his. They were always > here, we just did not know about them. A patent does not really protect > ownership of a discovery, rather it grants the discoverer a temporary > exclusive use of his own discovery. I think its main purpose is to > encourage the discoverer into publishing of his discovery. Without patent > protection many discoveries would be kept in secret. For example, the Bessemer process was originally a trade secret. The ability to create red art glass which can be tempered through reheating and not lose its color as a result is still a trade secret. Another, AT&T attempted to suppress the publication of a bootable BSD system on the grounds that they claimed it embodied their trade secrets -- "forgetting" that once disclosed, a trade secret is a trade secret no longer, and one may only seek damages, not secrecy, from the discloser (not that I agree that there were any trade secrets involved: neither did DMR when he filed his Amicus Curie brief, and offered to testify as a professional witness). Finally, we have Zirconium smelting and artificial diamond production, both of which have achieved the status of a high art in the former Soviet Union, but which are held as trade secrets because of a lack of enforcement of intellectual property laws. It seems to me that the wealth of nations is pinned to each ones willingness to enact and enforce intellectual property laws on behalf of its citizenry. I personally dislike a great deal the extent to which patents have infected the software industry: algorithms are not supposed to be patentable, and calling an algorithm a process does not make it so; I will note for the record that this all started with cryptography. Stallman is attempting to put control of the means of production in the hands of society, rather than in the hands of individuals; this is a strategy that is doomed to failure, as many failed experiments with similar results show us. I dislike intentional failures more than I dislike what the patent office has done. For the record, the society owned the means of production in the State of Deseret, as the territory which centered on what later became the sate of Utah was once called. This was in the 1800's, predating most modern Marxist docterine. Children "hacked" the system back then as well: it was common for someone who wanted a new pair of pants from the common stores to intentionally "wear out" their pants using a grinding wheel. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200005170042.RAA25962>