[Patents] Intershop attacked

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

>The guys from TechSearch who are attacking you don't have much more
>either. Still I'd say that their company specializes in hoarding patents.
>"Hoarding" was not meant as an accusation but as a description of what
>the company focuses on.

Actually, TechSearch doesn't hoard patents.  They are mostly a subsidiary
of a law firm that seeks out specific patents that can be exploited, and
then exploits them.  While that causes a lot of grief (such as for me),
you can't describe it as hoarding (here in the US we would say that they
are cherry-picking patents to assert).

Most patent hoarding (again in all areas of technology, not just software)
are done by the larger companies.  For software, some of the companies
pretending to be against software patents also hoard patents as well.
I say "pretend" because despite their public complaints about software
patents (which is mostly public posturing), they use none of their
resources to do anything to help fix the system, and there is much that
they can do with the resources to help the PTO issue many less stupid
software patents.

With regards to Open Market, they have had their patents for a few years,
and really havne't done much with them.  I suspect they have approached
a few companies, and then cut cheap licensing deals when these companies
responded back with a fair amount of prior art that could be used to
invalidate the patents.  Would these companies preferred not to have to
spend any monies on such matters?  Sure, just like I don't enjoy
spending tens of thousands of dollars defending myself from a totally
stupid patent.  But the monies being spent are probably no more than the
monies other companies in other industries have to spend to deal with
crappy patents.

Getting back to stifling innovation, I suggest all of you check the
open source site, www.freshmeat.net.   Lots of great codes available.
And the number of programs available grows daily, as does the list
of new programs amd updates you can get in a daily email.  Hard to
see much evidence of stifling innovation here (in fact, I see the
occasional "the latest of update of this program was rewritten to
avoid infringing some stupid patent X".  Sure, a bit of extra work, but
at least based on www.freshmeat.net, things seem healthy and growing.

Greg Aharonian