[Discuss] The America Invents Act

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 12:10:58PM -0700, Hsuan-Yeh Chang wrote:
> I also think you miss my point.? 

No one misses your point... your point is impractical and essentially
useless.   In the video, RMS points out that an independent study was
done on the Linux kernel, and a researcher determined that it contained
approximately 284 patent violations.  This is ONE PROGRAM.  Note that
the overwhelming majority of features in the kernel have existed in
one form or another predating the USPTO's acceptance of patent
applications for software.  Had we filed patents for all of these 284
things, that's nearly $60,000 in patent fees, just for the application
fee for each one, not counting the time to write the application or
the cash to hire a knowledgeable lawyer to do it.  That's for ONE
PROGRAM, written mostly by college students, for which there is NO
REVENUE.  For ideas which mostly are blatantly obvious, to anyone
reasonably educated in the field.

Your suggestion that we do this for everything that we write is
asinine.  The funds for this simply do not exist, even if we wanted to
file them.  And again, practically speaking, we don't have the
resources to defend such patents, so in practice they are worthless.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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