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Re: Lame patent application of the day

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Lame patent application of the day
• From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
• Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 15:04:19 -0800
• In-reply-to: <E0934FFEF848EA46AB416E7B9581457DA6D5E9@c...>
• References: <E0934FFEF848EA46AB416E7B9581457DA6D5E9@c...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

Doug Ransom wrote:

>I don't think determining the originality of the work is a problem, even after a patent grants if prior art is found claims of originality can be repudiated.
>
The problem with this is that it takes massive resources to fight and 
defend patent claims in court. It's very easy for a large corporation to 
use patent litigation as a business strategy against smaller rivals. The 
open source world looks especially vulnerable to this type of ploy, 
since there's no single entity that's likely to step up and bear the 
legal load if companies start making claims against open source 
programs. On the other side, it's very difficult for a small company to 
collect on valid patents being violated by large corporation for the 
same reason.

These days it basically comes down to a trench battle of legal team vs 
legal team, with the side that has the largest budget generally 
prevailing. It's hard to see how this contributes to the supposed goal 
of fostering innovation.

  - Dennis

• References:
  • RE: Lame patent application of the day
    • From: "Doug Ransom" <Doug.Ransom@p...>

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