🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9209@cactus.org> ritter@cactus.org (Terry Ritter) writes:
| >In case it isn't clear how this is the case, I'll offer an analogy.  You
| >decide to build a house, sit down and design it, order the materials, and
| >build it.  It is your property, of course.  Then one day, a year or so after
| >you've lived in it, somebody comes along and says you have to pay them
| >$50,000 per year to continue living in the house or else destroy it and build
| >another, different house (or at least change it significantly), and even
| >then you still owe them $50K for the first year you lived in it.
| 
| >The reasoning?  They happened to have designed and built a similar house
| >one month before you did, and filed the design with the "Bureau of
| >Housing Property".
| 
| Not quite.  They must have designed a built a house with TOTALLY NEW
| features.  They described the features formally, so that anyone in the
| building field could reproduce them.  They formally argued that each
| feature was new, never before formally described.  A skeptical examiner
| finally allowed some of the claims, after eliminating some, and
| downgrading others.  The full, open description of the inventions became
| available to anyone with $1.50 at the time the patent took effect.
| 
| Lets have another analogy:  As a home builder, you decide to benefit
| society by building a totally new kind of house, unlike any ever built
| before.  (We know beforehand that the house will not sell unless SOMEONE
| considers it a specific benefit.)  You invest time, effort, and money
| creating and testing new features, wholly new systems unlike any seen
| before.  Some of these work out, some don't, and some require more
| development.  Eventually, you work them out, and so build a house and
| sell it.  Then you find that any turkey that has access to that house can
| compete with you, even though they spent neither time nor effort in
| development.  Question:  Will you continue to do development?
| 
| Do we, as a society, wish to discourage new development?  Would we, as
| a society, prefer that every truly innovative house be sold under a
| non-disclosure agreement?
| 

Actually, Mr. Ritter, you might benefit from doing a little bit of
research in this specific area.  I don't know what your background is,
but I was just talking to an Architect, and he said that architectural
plans are not patentable, and even though they are copyrightable,
almost no one ever copyrights them.  If you would like, you could go
and build a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  There is absolutely nothing to
impede you.

As you have probably noticed, this lack of patent protection, and the
lack of bothering to use copyrights has not stunted, injured, or
harmed either the architectural or building professions.  Many new
houses are built every year, and society seems to be very happy with
the present state of things in the building industry.

By the way, I grew up in a family that designed, renovated, and built
distinctive houses, and I'm a software engineer.

--Haydn




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;;  *****************************************************
;;  *  Haydn Huntley    huntley@copper.ucs.indiana.edu  *
;;  *****************************************************