DISQUS

I have two questions:

Who will gets th technology that extends life indefinitely?

Who will control the technology?

It's gotta be new and innovative because it involves a computer! Sheesh. There's something about a lot of your average suits that the moment you say "it uses a computer!!" they just fall over one another talking about how cool and innovative it is. Then they'll be the ones saying that IT moves too fast to be regulated, but also the ones arguing that 17+ years for a patent isn't too long...

Daniel,

Your concerns about the little guy are valid, but there is the problem of what happens if you are the little guy being sued? Sure, you might win a phyrric victory over your richer opponent, but what happens if you have to lay off most of your employees to cover legal fees and lose critical R&D; time?

Every software patent I have looked at has been a blatant attempt to patent an idea itself, such as the Hibernate example. I too have yet to see a single one that isn't obvious on its face or would be the practical solution that would first come to mind to any developer needing to create that solution. It's not a matter of hindsight is 20-20, it's a matter of it being so obvious that if someone said "how would you do this," that a typical developer with a few years of experience could rattle off essentially the text of the patent without even knowing the patent exists or having heard of the product(s) it's based on.

So the blackberry is an innovative idea because it combines two mundane technologies into a glorified gameboy? Daniel, we wouldn't be so cynical were it not for the fact that there is so much abuse of the system. RedHat is being sued now by a company that claims it invented the idea of mapping relational databases to OOP code. Their patent is basically like this, from the parts I read. "Write a mapping that defines a relationship between a table and an object." It's absurd. They're all but claiming ownership of Hibernate over this.

And that point would fly right over the heads of anti-OSS groups like IPCentral...