'Justifiably' Proud
'Justifiably' Proud
Posted Aug 12, 2009 22:38 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)In reply to: 'Justifiably' Proud by martinfick
Parent article: Patent fun: Microsoft Word sales banned in the US
This sort of situation is why I am a big fan of limited government.
If you put the government in charge of businesses and whatnot then that leads to corruption. Just because people are inherently corruptable, and government is nothing but a bunch of people. You give businesses a _reason_ to send lobbyists and try to spend money, time, and effort to manipulate the government... then that is just what they'll do. It's human nature.
Take away the task of government to control busines they you eliminate the corrupting influence of business on goverment. It's a very simple mechanism.
Of course you can't eliminate the controls. So you have to keep them as minimal as possible. Keep the controls as minimal as possible and you minimize the risk and negative effects.
That then hopefully puts the risk into the 'managable risk' catagory. That is it's small enough that people can do stuff about it before it gets out of hand.
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In this case it's a problem of inactivity and inflexibility of government.
The patent laws existed prior to software, yet somehow they were able to apply to software. The Courts say this is legal, mostly, and it's up to Congress to actually do something about it.
Which they haven't done anything.
*shrug*
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It's a tough situation and certainly Microsoft has a portion of the blame.
They should be petitioning the government to help reform software patent law, but instead they are protecting it for their own gain, even though it's literally costing them multi-million dollars every single year.
Yes, they are MORONS and probably deserve it. But it doesn't mean I like seeing patent trolling or companies being victomized by the system.
As a 'collective' (or whatever) we should be pointing at them and saying "For f*k sakes, why are you not helping us help you?" rather then pointing fingers and laughing.