[Discuss] gaf at blu.org

[Richard Pieri]

On Oct 1, 2011, at 11:05 PM, Hsuan-Yeh Chang wrote:
> 
> are NOT good businessmen.  So, it is really unfair to independent inventors,
> if the law protects only those who BOTH invent and commercialize.  Inventors

I quote from the Constitution of the United States:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

It is entirely within both word and intent of the Constitution for legislation to do exactly that.  The reason is the first part of the clause: "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".  The primary purpose of IP law is to encourage progress, to encourage new inventors and authors/artists to draw upon the inventions and artistic works of their predecessors to create new, better things.  The evil is that greedy MBAs and patent lawyers have turned the system inside out and made it more lucrative to be a patent troll than to invent anything.

The open source community cannot benefit from this.  Nobody can, except for patent trolls.  Your fellows continue to do everything they possibly can to ensure that only patent trolls benefit from patent law.  Even mega-corporations like Google and Samsung with massive fiscal resources and huge teams of lawyers on their payrolls are finding it difficult defending against the patent law extortion hammers.  How can an all-volunteer open source project with no funding and no attorneys hope to compete?  And you call it fair?  Sorry, Charlie, but I don't buy it.

--Rich P.