Protecting your intellectual property is so passe to Socialists and Communists and Progressives of all stripes.
Don’t you know we all need equal outcomes!
I think you need to look into some of the patents that have been granted before you dismiss the concerns.
Software patents are pretty much a racket, used to keep small players out of the market. I say this as a developer whose company was threatened by a patent troll, who did not realize his supposed “invention” came years after our product was already developed.
I agree with B Knotts.
Real innovation is something to protect. But MANY patents are absurd.
For example...in Linux/Unix, when you work at a terminal and want to run a program as administrator, you put the “sudo” command before the command. That elevates your rights to “super user”. For example, if you wanted to run Firefox as root (administrator), you type “sudo firefox”. It will then prompt you for an administrator password and run the program.
As far as I know, this type of command is not used anywhere in Windows. When I worked with DOS many years ago, there was no need for it because any user could execute any command at any time.
Nevertheless, Microsoft decided to patent a command that functioned as a “rights elevator”. And the patent was granted!
Now, is this innovation? Is it right that someone decides that something that has been in use for decades is now their property, and exploits a computer-illiterate patent office to punish their competitors? I know that Unix variants have been around since 1969. Bill Gates was 14 at the time.
I have no problem protecting real innovation...in fact, if you don’t protect innovators, innovation goes away. Software patents aren’t the way to go on this, though. Many software patents are used to try to cut the legs out from under competitors, many of which have already used the same tools for years because they were considered commonplace. That’s the OPPOSITE of encouraging innovation.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/68652.html