[Patents] Re: Patents and corporate power

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> > > Read Howard Zinn.  Read Noam Chomsky.  Cancel your NY Times
> > > subscription, turn off your TV, and look elsewhere if you want the
> > > facts.
> >
> > While this may be so, it has relatively little to do with our discussion.
> > In the case of the patent mess, the responsible people are sitting in
> > Brussels and Munich.
> >
>
> I think the following interview with Noam Chomsky will be of great
> interest to just about everyone reading this discussion. Its not
> directly about patents, but should help focus anyones opinion if they
> are not already convinced that giving large corporations more power is
> a bad idea :
>
>  http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/feature/microsoft/chomsky.html

Indeed patent inflation is a means of further securing the rights of what
Chomsky calls "private tyrannies".  And it may be even more effective than
MAI at achieving that goal.  Thus the patent movement contributions would
perhaps not have had a chance to gain a foothold as a trusted mouthpiece
of those "tyrannies" (and thereby feed the EU consultation with dozens of
monotonous contributions in wooden language well known from the
phenomenology of more overt tyrannies) if it did not serve the more hidden
agenda which Chomsky traces back to Madison:  creating havens where the
"elite" can feel secure from the threat of the "rabble".  However with
softare patents even that system of power concentration could get severely
out of balance.  Even from the perspective of the "elite", software
patents are idiotic.  But they probably haven't noticed yet.  The Intel
guys who complained about "patent trolls" may have noticed though.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation        http://swpat.ffii.org/
85000 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/