[Patents] For patents...

[Baum baum@skynet.be]

Found in some literature:

"The only thing that keeps us alive is our brilliance.  The only thing that
protects our brilliance is our patents." Edwin Land, 1967.

This is still widely distributed.
I must precise, however, that it comes out of the pharmaceutical world,
where patents are really what protects discoveries after long and costly
research years.

The point that should be made as clear as possible, and often repeated,
concerns the differences encountered in the IT fields (i.e. the 
fundamental difference between the patenting of a product, obtained
after long and costly processes, and that of a computer algorithm, or
even more simply of a technique already used by everybody everyday -like
the ludicrous patent on the mouse focus reversing the screen bit color).

Cheers,   H.-P.

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     H.-P. Baum                   Medius Lynx Consultants
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