🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <PCG.91Aug18210217@aberda.aber.ac.uk> pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
>My favourite solution would be, instead of granting the inventor
>esclusive *manufacturing* rights, granting him exclusive *royalty*
>rights for say 10-20 years on the actual selling price of products
>incorporating that invention, i.e. a kind of sales "tax", going to the
>inventor.
>
>Everybody would be able to manufacture products incorporating any
>invention, as long as they paid the royalty to the inventor.
>
>The royalty would be by default something like 3-5% (which is little for
>a new product, where profit margins can be supposed to be something like
>30-50%, and a lot for mature products, where they can be supposed to be
>around 5-10%), and the inventor could reduce (but not increase) it at
>will.

Huh?!  How is this different from the current state of affairs?
People use patented techniques all the time by paying for them.
Ask most modem manufacturers about "+++"... that they pay a fee for.

The argument is that with the growing numbers of software patents,
giving away 3-5% for each patent, you will soon be making negative
money.

Let's see...
	I am writing a spreadsheet that uses the X window system.
	I owe AT&T for my backing store and someone else for natural
	order recalculation.
	I decide to highlight the fields that need to be entered,
	so I owe IBM for the Data Entry Screen.  I would also like
	to have distributed menus (yet more money to IBM) and
	to give the user the option to use a Lotus 1-2-3 like
	interface (money to yet another company).

Well so far I have to give up 15-25% of my money, and those are just
the patents (and copyrights) off the top of my head!

This is wrong, bogus, hideous, awful, stupid.  (choose your term)

But I would rather not argue from an economic view.  Steel companies,
drug companies, car companies, all have to put up with this, and thanks
to cross-licensing it works.

The problem is that patents should not even be granted for computer
software.  The idea that a mathematical formula can be patented is
IMHO wrong, even if the PTO is doing it currently.

Aydin Edguer