🚀 go-pugleaf

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.
[...]
> The royalty would be by default something like 3-5%

3% per patent?  Doesn't work.  My program uses 1000 trivial patented ideas. 
Whoops, there goes all my profit.

3% total shared amongst the patent-owners?  Doesn't work.  My program uses
1000 trivial patented ideas, 999 of which belong to me and were filed in
order to reduce the amount I'll have to pay to other people.

3% total shared amongst the patent owners, me excluded?  Doesn't work.  My
program uses 1000 trivial patented ideas, 999 of which belong to my friend
Richard.  Richard's programs use 1000 trivial patented ideas, 999 of which
belong to me.

Any possibility I've missed?

> I would be very happy about copyright law being revised in the same way;

Now, that's more sensible.  I think you probably could make copyright work
that way.  Take a look at the proposals for the Xanadu system.

> separating the right to reproduce (unrestricted, at a price) from the
> right to derive a royalty seems to me a good idea, that probably the FSF
> could live with, as they are about free dissemination, not gratis
> dissemination, mostly.

I asked RMS about his opinion concerning the Xanadu proposals; he didn't seem
to like it very much, but I got the impression he wasn't as vehemently
decided about it as he is about the patent issue.


mathew