GregNews: swpat solve MS monopoly problems

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

GregNews writes:

<<
Intertrust is a small Silicon Valley company which for some time has been
suing Microsoft over a group of Digital Rights Management patents.  In
what has to be an interesting twist to all of this, Intertrust has been
bought by Sony and Philips, which with their deep pockets, should make
the patent infringement lawsuit much more interesting.  Combine this with
the Eolas lawsuit against Microsoft, and I will be boring by repeatedly
pointing out that none of these challenges against Microsoft would be
possible with copyrighted software such as anything open source.
>>

And indeed, as you can imagine, this is being "repeatedly pointed out",
almost as repetitively as the statement that "not opensource but Microsoft
is harmed by patents" and the mantra "software, like any other field of
technology, ...".

I would expect that companies like Sony and Philips are happy to act as
marketing arms of Microsoft and will happily settle for a better share of
a strengthened monopoly/oligopoly.  In any case, not everything that
harms Microsoft is worth cheering.

GregNews also quotes an article from the Danish Presidency's patent hype,
namely

http://www.eu2002.dk/news/news_read.asp?iInformationID=24038

which pretends to solve the patent system's problem of unpopularity with
SMEs by means of a state-subsidised insurance system.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
125,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/