[Patents] Counterexamples to John, Hartmut, Edward

[Nicolas MONNET nico@monnet.to]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

|John writes:
|>Posters here have cited drug development as an area where the patent
|>system works, and I think that there are plenty such areas.
|
|Don't say that do people in third world countries who can't afford to
|use patented AIDS drugs.  You can't use some patented software, you
|do something else with software.  You can't use some patented AIDS
|drug, you die.  So when it comes to suffering because of software patents,
|that is nothing compared to the suffering of lack of access to drugs,
|which has become so controversial that it is an issue in the current
|US presidential campaign.

Please stop with that nitpicking on 'suffering'; the person who originally
used this word is obviously not a native english speaker, and I know that,
at least in French, the verb 'souffrir' covers a wide range of meanings
from 'to experience horrible pain' to 'to be affected by'. Example: 'ce
logiciel souffre d'une bogue' = 'this software has a bug'. 'Bob souffre
d'un horrible cancer' = 'Bob suffers from a horrible cancer'.