[Patents] Romanian Patent Problem..

[Luuk van Dijk Luuk.van.Dijk@xs4all.nl]

"Nick F." wrote:
> 
> Luuk,
> 
> > If patent protection were not available to the farmaceutical
> > industry, these life saving drugs would not even be there.
> > The competition can make cheaper drugs because they didn't have
> > to pay for the development.
> 

Please quote me with a little more context so that it is clear
that this is not neccesarily my opinion.

> 
> > The 30.000 european software patents are all so absolutely trivial
> > that there is no development cost worth mentioning involved.
> 
> Having worked at a number of companies now, and from reading
> many company reports while researching possible investment
> opportunites Im not so sure that development costs are as trivial
> as some would like to believe, as salaries for computer programmers
> tend to be high, and with frequent schedule overruns of six months
> or more, large scale software (police systems, air traffic control,
> bank systems etc..) is definately not cheap to produce. So if you

I didn't say software was cheap.  Heck, I make it professionally and
I know I am not cheap, at least I try not to be.

But the patented ideas are not software, but cheap ideas: 'you click
on something and then you go there' or 'you run more than 1 program
seemingly simultaneous by alloccating timeslices of the CPU to them.'
etc.

The expensive thing is the implementation, the lines of code.  That's
what I make a living off, and that's what I protect with copyright (or
copyleft).

The incredible unjustness of all this patenting is that my (copy)rights to
my own hard & expensive work, become near worthless, because someone
got a monopoly on the idea of doing something my code implements at all.

Luuk
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Mind over Matter         Mind.over.Matter@xs4all.nl
The Netherlands                tel +31 6 224 97 227
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