🚀 go-pugleaf

 karsh@trifolium.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh) writes:
|In article <970025@gore.com> jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore) writes:
|
|>Do I believe that anybody will invest into software products that can only
|>be patented for 5 years?  Of course I do.  Look at all the investment that
|>has been going on, without any patent protection at all.
|
|Nearly every software product that's for sale is protected by patents or
|copyrights covering look & feel, or both.
|
|Before this protection, there was no significant software industry.  If
|intellectual property protection for software is abolished, there'll be
|very little new investment in the software industry.

jeez, do you ever speak in other than terms of grandiose generality?  i
don't ever get the feeling your just offering your opinion so how about
some specifics.  i don't believe "Nearly every software product that's
for sale is protected by patents or copyrights covering look & feel, or
both."

in any case your monomania about patents is annoying.  it was annoying
in comp.arch and it's more annoying here.  if you can patent look and
feel then you should be able to patent look and feel.  as in the way
the controls are arranged in a car (accelerator on the right, steering
wheel on the left and the windscreen is transparent) or perhaps the
fact that moving a light switch up turns the light on rather than off.

intellectual property laws are intended to benefit society (like all
laws one hopes) not punish it for the benefit of monopolists.