A victory for the trolls

Posted Apr 25, 2011 21:59 UTC (Mon) by MisterIO (guest, #36192)
In reply to: A victory for the trolls by shapr
Parent article: A victory for the trolls

Yes, stop making software in the USA.
No, but seriously, this is so annoying that I'm tempted to start to make troll posts like this!

to post comments

Why do you think it's "troll post"?

Posted Apr 25, 2011 22:57 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

To me it looks like quite logical and real solution. Compare with "hot new industry of XIX century": chemistry. By the 1862 British firms controlled 50% of the market and and French firms controlled 40%. They had quite good patent protection. It was so good in fact that in 11 years time they lost most of the market (German companies had 50%). Later Germans were convinced to enact limited patent law so process slowed down: by 1913 they only had 80% of the market. More information here.

It'll be interesting to see how fast software development will be moved out of US - and what exactly will be moved first.

Why do you think it's "troll post"?

Posted Apr 26, 2011 0:16 UTC (Tue) by klbrun (subscriber, #45083) [Link] (2 responses)

Youtube is not permitted in China; neither is Facebook. I don't see software development of these products moving to China. Google has had other issues with China as well.

Russia is similarly authoritarian, Africa lacks in infrastructure, Latin America has various nationalisms that are coming to the fore, Canada lacks the population. People have predicted software would leave the US for India for over 30 years; hasn't happened yet.

There is a reason things are the way they are. Changes would be against inertia.

Why do you think it's "troll post"?

Posted Apr 26, 2011 1:04 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Why not Europe? Western and Eastern Europe have fairly sane laws and not many software patents (yet).

Why do you think it's "troll post"?

Posted Apr 26, 2011 4:45 UTC (Tue) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]

You are wrong about the European situation: there are large numbers of software patents in Europe (many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands), the courts uphold them, and there's also some litigation going on, such as Apple suing Nokia in the UK and in Germany over 9 European software patents.

Also, more fundamentally, patents regulate target markets, not countries of origin. If a company is based in a no-software-patents jurisdiction, it is still affected by them once it tries to serve markets that have software patents.

Why do you think it's "troll post"?

Posted Apr 26, 2011 2:50 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

But it doesn't matter where the software is developed -- for patents, what matters most is where the market is. Probably in the long term the US market will be less important, and as that happens we USians will have to accept inferior software (or illegal downloads, cf. mplayer) so long as our patent system remains more broken than that in other places.

A victory for the trolls

Posted Apr 26, 2011 1:13 UTC (Tue) by lakeland (guest, #1157) [Link] (2 responses)

It wouldn't help.

Where the software is made is irrelevant - you would have to go one step further and stop selling software in the US. Given the exceedingly broad definition of selling, I would suspect you would have to - at least on paper - ban distribution in the US entirely.

A victory for the trolls

Posted Apr 26, 2011 7:31 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

>one step further and stop selling software in the US.

That reminds me of the following wording in Microsoft-style EULAs: "The Software is licensed, not sold."

And a license could be bought over Internet, i.e. buying in another country and importing it yourself.

Sure, but this is minor issue

Posted Apr 26, 2011 12:08 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You can sign a deal with someone who'll sell your programs in US. Since only proven-good software will be sold there expenses will be slimmer. Since you still will amass US patents to cripple efforts of US competitors they will feel the full impact.

Basically the threshold is the point where it's pointless to even try to create new startup for it will be destroyed by overseas competitors before it'll reach the stage where it can be IPOd.

This will require few more years and some more high-profile defeats (like the one under discussion today).

P.S. This why I said China and not India: you need strong internal market for the effect to take hold. If the YouTube and/or Facebook are illegal there... well it just means that development in these directions will still be concentrated in US and will lag behind other developments.