[Patents] Re: patent pools enforcing per-copy-licensing mode ofsoftware development

[Francois PELLEGRINI pelegrin@labri.u-bordeaux.fr]

Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> >Hartmut writes:
> >Why universities in the first place, if they are not to foster free
> >diffusion of information that benefits all of society?
> 
> So I assume Hartmut, that you don't want universities patenting
> anything - no biotech patents, no software patents, no hardware patents?

        This is indeed sound.
       The goal of patents is individual profit, since the profit can be
much higher than the exact compensation for the effective cost to
produce
the patented idea.
       The goal of universities is to create and disseminate knowledge.
Patents are a form of limitation of the dissemination of knowledge.
Hence,
they are a problem for universities, because of potential infringements
when
disseminating knowledge in the public, outside of the research labs.
So yes, universities should not bother with patents unless they are
compelled to, which is hopefully not yet the case in Europe.
 
> > Why not instead let IBM and Microsoft do the work of universities?

> Increasingly they might control everything, as people with new software
> and hardware ideas see all the profits and commercialization captured
> by IBM and Microsoft, whose entrenched clout makes it difficult to
> compete for startups and individuals.  Unless they have some effective
> protection, like a patent.  But if preserving the power and clout of
> large companies like IBM and Microsoft has been your goal all along, I
> withdraw this observation.

        Bullshit and perversion. You, Mr Aharonian, always write
insinuations that tend to infer that people that disagree with you
are scum. I do not like this fake superior behavior. But if you like
being considered like this, I withdraw my observation, as you might
have said (and you have indeed said just above...).

       Once this set, I would like you to read the following piece
of text: magazine "Think", number 5, 1990 :
---------------------------------------------------------
> "You get value from patents in two ways," says Roger Smith, IBM
> Assistant General Counsel, intellectual property law.  "Through
> fees, and through licensing negotiations that give IBM access to
> other patents". "The IBM patent portfolio gains us the freedom
> to do what we need to do through cross-licensing---it gives us
> access to the inventions of others that are the key to rapid
> innovation. Access is far more valuable to IBM than the fees it
> receives from its 9,000 active patents. There's no direct
> calculation of this value, but it's many times larger than the
> fee income, perhaps an order of magnitude larger".
---------------------------------------------------------
What is says is that, with patents, IBM can threaten any Small
or Medium Company to give it its innovant technologies (with
source codes that would otherwise have remained closed). That is,
the point of view of IBM itself is that software patents help them
in getting all that they want...

       What do you object to that, Mr Aharonian ?

       I want cartesian logical facts, not personal insinuations.


                                        f.p.