Very nice slashdot comment

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@ugent.be>]

Hello,

From <http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=103576&cid=8827118> (in 
response to someone asking what the world is coming to with companies 
like IBM owning patents on so many intangible things that they can take 
down pretty much anyone in the world financially):


Re:What happens to the world.. (Score:4, Interesting)
 by MrIrwin (761231) on Saturday April 10, @06:32PM (#8827118)

 Not all countries are falling for it. Some countries are extrodinarily 
void of civil litigation lawyers, and these are often countries that 
are doing increasingly more of the worlds work.

 True, a country cannot export a product to eg. the USA if the product 
infinges IP, but what about all the tools, equipment and everything 
else that went into its manufacture?

 The western roman empire destroyed itself. True, germanic barbarians 
overtook rome, but not by some mighty battle, they just strolled into a 
city that had forgotton the basics, such as how to defend itself. The 
rest of the empire had even forgotton how to administrate itself.

 Nowdays the western economic empire has given up on making wealth by 
producing things, and likes to make a living by owning the rights to 
produce things. The western empire will slowly but surely forget how to 
produce things, and then find that new things are being produced 
elsewhere using technology they don't own.

 In the long term who is going to innovate, the people who are 
producing today or the people spinning as much money as possible out of 
what they produced yesterday?


Jonas