Re: [tlug] Nice reply by Torvalds

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> You *can't* get rid of the FUD factor, with patent law as it currently
> exists.  And if you could, patents would be a shoo-in, and we'd never
> get rid of them.

I don't quite understand that. Why would patents be a 'sho-in' if there
were far more clarity about whether any particular thing one implemented
violated a patent or not (if that's what you're saying here)?

> The point is that the only hope for getting Congress (and other
> legislatures; eg, I don't think Europe is anywhere near as safe as
> Godwin seems to) to do something about them is to show that the
> transactions costs (mostly search costs) way outweigh the benefits to
> the innnovations.

If I understand what you're saying here, I don't think I buy this. The
search costs are minimal; there are plenty of patent holders out there
who are happy to tell you if you're violating their patent. And this of
course produces defendents who are quite happy to do a fair amount of
work to find prior art and so on.

> Curt Sampson writes:
>
> > (The first reason would be the hope that they actually could kill
> > free software on patent issues, which I think is probably not
> > likely, but would be a true disaster if they managed it.)
>
> Now that might be enough to get Congress to do something about it.

I quite disagree. If free software died, I very much doubt that anybody
with any political power would care, at least in the current social
climate. I could go into the details about this, but I don't feel quite
up to it right now, and it might get a bit boring, anyway.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

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