[geeks] Can't decide on an OS

[Mouse]

>> Yeah, the US has made that bed and is having to lie in it.  That
>> wouldn't be a problem, really, except that so much of the rest of
>> the world seems to consider the US indispensable.
> To be fair the patent problem is a world-wide problem;

To an extent.  The existence of patents is world-wide, or almost; the
details - which often matter a lot - vary from country to country, and
the mechanisms which enforce the relevant legislation vary probably
even more.

> the patent system seems to have evolved out of the old practice of
> monarchs granting monopolies to their favourites,

Indeed, as some now-archaic uses of the word "patent" indicate.

> Perhaps if patent holders were required to license their patents for
> a reasonable proportion of the final product's purchase price, it
> would greatly decrease the amount of damage that patents cause.

Possibly.  Another thing which would help greatly would be to
drastically reduce patent lifetime.  Most patent systems grant
exclusivity for a relatively long period, usually somewhere between 10
and 25 years.  I've seen it said that one patent-system review (fuzzy
memory says Australia) recommended reducing it to 2 years; if so, its
advice was, of course, ignored.

Personally, I think patents are something that sounds reasonable at
first but turns out to not work, and should be entirely scrapped, like
the rest of the various attempts to twist and bend the legal notion of
ownership to apply to information.  (That legal notion evolved over
millennia based on physical objects.  Information is so fundamentally
different that it's small surprise that it's a bad fit.  It will shake
itself down, of course, over the next millennium or two, assuming of
course that we (FWVO "we") last that long, but, while a better-working
notion is evolving, we could at least stop misapplying notions of
ownership that don't fit in the meantime.  I have little hope we will.)

In the case of the USA, I'd actually settle for the relevant government
office enforcing the legislative criteria on patents, perhaps most
notably the one of obviousness.  They seem to be leaving that up to the
courts, thus favouring whoever can afford the better lawyer, rather
than whoever the _legislation_ favours.

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