[Patents] Re: french views

[Nicolas MONNET nico@monnet.to]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

|>I want to be shown an invention which deserved a patent because
|>it took large amounts of funding to discover it, and would not be
|>profitable without a patent.
|
|The amount of time and resources needed to create an invention has
|never been a criteria for determining a patent, and is idiotic when
|you think about it - it would reserve the patent system to only
|those with lots of time and money.

I thought that the basis for patents in the US constitution was that thing
about allowing monopolies for a limited time to promote arts or something. 

But maybe, after all, a system like the current Internic where anybody can
register anything on first arrived first served basis is really going to
promote the arts and crafts ... eh eh.

|Increasingly these discussions are focussing more and more not on
|getting rid of software patents, but all patents.  If that is the
|intent of this list, we might as well close it down.

(In my previous post, I was referring to medical drugs patent and implying
that they were legit.)