● 10.11.12
●● Patent Storms Motivate a Rethink
Posted in America, Patents at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Time for a rewrite…
Summary: Ugly new stories about the US patent system and where it all comes from, where it should go
Companies which are obscure try finding fame with patents [1, 2] and some go as far as suing.
Even Microsoft’s friends at Amdocs [1, 2] do this, but they cannot win in Europe with their software patents. To quote Silicon Republic, “Dublin-headquartered telecoms software company Openet has won a summary judgment in a US court in a lawsuit filed by software and services giant Amdocs. The court found that Openet’s software does not infringe Amdoc’s patents.”
One parasite got over a quarter of a billion dollars (260M) from Verizon, passing the cost to customers in the US. With a rather deceiving or ambiguous headline one writer tells us that “Oracle sues to ‘free’ users from patent claims,” but to clarify, it is an apparent troll (or similar). “Oracle has filed suit against Texas company Advanced Dynamic Interfaces, seeking to have an intellectual-property action it filed against 20 users of Oracle software tossed out of court.”
One has to wonder who really benefits from all that? Surely just a parasitical minority. Speaking of parasites, a new article about patents names the Rothschild dynasty. To quote: “Thanks in part to the borderline-esoteric nature of modern software patents, most Americans don’t know the strange and fascinating historym n of U.S. patent law and the lengths inventors once had to go to gain government protection for their creations. According to the Smithsonian Institution, which once housed the U.S. Patent Office, “American patent law in the 19th century required the submission and public display of a model with each patent application.” That meant that no matter how large or intricate the patented device would be when produced for sale, it needed to be rendered in miniature. (In the spirit of job creation, most of the models were made by craftsmen who set up shop just outside the Patent Office.) At one point, the Smithsonian was home to 200,000 such models. The largest collection now numbers just 4,000 and is owned privately by collector Alan Rothschild, who has lent his pieces to the Smithsonian.”
Companies still use patents for protectionism. The ruling class needs that. It is like the sewing suing machines all over again, this time in software form as we have general-purpose programmable computers. Some companies just sell patents as though they are merchandise.
Time to abolish patenting altogether, say some people. One type of patents at a time perhaps? Starting with software? Genetics? Business methods? █
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