[Patents] Re: what rules promote progress?

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> >... Patents, instead of protecting the innovative Apple against the
> >imitator Microsoft, .....
>
> You should do better research.  The legal fight between Apple and Microsoft
> was over copyrights to GUIs, not patents.

Nobody ever said or implied that it was about patents.
While your infos are interesting, your invective is beside the point.
Ramon even said that he does not think Apple should have had the right to
prevent Microsoft from imitating.  The GUI ideas represent no great
investment and certainly not the kind of effort that needs to be financed
by a special monopoly exception to market economics.

> The Apple case, along with the Lotus copyright case, pretty much
> rendered copyright impotent for software protection.  Had Apple had a
> patent on their GUI, they would have been more successful in fighting
> Microsoft (as was a small company, Stac, which with its software
> patent, got over $90,000,000 from Microsoft).

What became of Stac later ?

The Stac case is often quoted as an example of how a small software
company can protect itself by patents,

However it could also be seen as a case of a small patent holdup company
(speculative schemer) squeezing money out of a big company without
contributing anything worthy to the development of the art.

The Stac patents on variants of LZW compression are creating a lot of
problems for free software.  They are preventing the adoption of some
protocols needed for fast transfer in ISDN subsystems of Linux and BSD. At
the same time, at least in the eyes of the ISDN developpers, these patents
don't disclose anything except what any person working on the problems
would inevitably have come across

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/xrani/stac-hifn/

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation        http://swpat.ffii.org/
80000 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/