🚀 go-pugleaf

Someone wrote:
|> |> Very briefly, the software patent situation as it presently exists is
|> |> on the verge of preventing the creation of small software companies.
|> |> It also threatens the existence of many existing such companies.

In article <11002@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>, davidsen@antarctica.crd.GE.COM
(william E Davidsen) writes:
>   I just can't buy that. If there were no protection a small company
> would come out with an innovative product, and a large company would
> quickly copy the functionality and bury the small company by heavy
> advertising, and by selling cheap (no research cost for the interface).

Nonsense.  Law favors the company with the biggest legal budget, except
in rare cases where even a nontechnical person can see that a small company
is in the right.  Under current law, if a small company comes out with an
innovative product, a big company can do just as you describe, and they
sometimes do.  But it's rare: big companies are stodgy and conservative,
and suffer from Not Invented Here syndrome.  


>   I think the laws right now are the only thing keeping the fish in the
> water with the sharks. Otherwise every new idea would be stolen before
> it built a following.

An idea cannot be "stolen".  If I come up with a brilliant idea, and you
use it, I still have the idea.  Most of the good ideas in Apple user
interfaces were developed at Xerox PARC.  Apple deserves credit for doing
a great engineering job on the Macintosh (flamers go somewhere else) but
they clearly didn't invent the ideas they claim to own.  Does that mean
Xerox owns them?  Of course not.  With better management, Xerox could
have brought innovative products to market with a two-year lead on everyone
else; they chose not to and deserved to lose.

Software is sufficiently protected by traditional copyright (applied in the
same sense as it is applied to, say, a textbook) and trade secret.  Other
types of protection (look-and-feel copyright or algorithm patents) are
harmful and should be abolished.  By the way, I differ with FSF on this:
they'd like to eventually eliminate traditional copyright as well; I think
that a programmer is entitled to earn a living the same way a novel writer
is.

> Bill Davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com, uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
> GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY

A small company, I see.  Ever worked for a startup, Bill?  Do you know what
happens when a large company sues a startup for infringement?  I'll tell
you -- the startup caves in to the large company, regardless of the rightness
or wrongness of the suit, because it can't afford to contest it.  Startups
are too busy trying to get their first product out the door to waste vast
amounts of time and money doing all the extra legal work the New Regime
Bruce Karsh and others would require.  Small software companies will
wither and die.

--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck