An opportunity to End Software Patents: ESP briefs Court in its historic rehearing of the Bilski case

An opportunity to End Software Patents: ESP briefs Court in its historic rehearing of the Bilski case

Posted Apr 10, 2008 13:02 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: An opportunity to End Software Patents: ESP briefs Court in its historic rehearing of the Bilski case by jgjf
Parent article: An opportunity to End Software Patents: ESP briefs Court in Bilski case rehearing

The assumption is that if there are no patents, people will keep their ideas as trade secrets, and if there are patents, the public will be restricted for 20 years, but at least then they get access to the idea.

(In addition to your arguments ..) This idea really belongs to the age of alchemy. For many years now it has been possible, in fact easy, to reverse engineer any product. Be it using a mass spectrometer to accurately determine the content of a new drug, or using a disassembler to find out how software really works, or using X-ray techniques to look inside supposedly "secure" processors.

There is no need to use patents to protect us from trade secrets any more.

If you want a more legal argument, then consider this: our governments grant incorporation rights to companies, and if we want we can stop a company from hiding secrets by removing those incorporation rights (which, amongst other things, would mean you could imprison the directors).

Rich.

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