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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Another Microsoft XML patent
 Since the original post went straight to Alan's personal inbox, I repost it here...should have watched the reply-address... Hi Alan, > The U.S. patent system is going to be geared toward protecting > U.S. interests in international trade. It probably does fit well > with U.S. interests in the short term, but in the longer term, > such protectionism is going to reduce our productivity. > > I am sure it will, as it is going to be happening all around the global market. > Would the holder of a patent on some arbitrary combination of > algorithms be able to detect their application in a Tamil > language word processor? Can anyone in the U.S. inspect the > business processes of a firm in Cambodia? > > We're going to run into some strange enforcement issues with all > these frivolous patents, in international markets, who have > little incentive to see it our way. We may come to regret making > a mockery of our patent office with all these business process > and software patents. > Well, not exactly as it is happening right now. Seen in the long term, the globally acting industry is constantly pushing legislation and therefore the states to adopt to their consent of what industrial culture is, part of it is becoming or already is a part of our lead culture in both western and eastern and of the so-called developing countries societies. The consequence is that they, instead of having to fight over any patent infringements, will make sure and then rest assured, that no one is ever able to or is going to try to breech any one of their patents as no one ever again will have the resources and time needed to a) do research over a given topic and b) find somebody to develop it with in the first place (the ego principle, and part of it also the social fud principle) and c) find the funding necessary to enable a product to go unto the local or global market and d) remain independent as a newly emerged company without having to either fear to be sued to death upon any so-called patent infringements or be starved to death by some or multiple companies ruining your customer base spreading fud about your products or be destroyed by a small or large scale business buyout. Currently, the industry is still continuing to set out their plans, pushing legislation to follow suit and stay put and the rest is little more than logical consequence to my eyes. Especially when we look at the rate in which we find companies to either be bought out when it comes to small new emerging companies or, we find increasing rates where the larger of the existing players unite in so-called joint-ventures, the latter being mostly the softer form of a corporate buyout and subsequently both technology and knowledge transfer. What this does to existing markets we can already see here in the European Union, where we have small to middle sized companies sort of dying out due to the concentration of the ever so larger companies. And, I also believe that in the advent of proprietary intellectual property and protectionism thereof we will one day find that patents held in the U.S. are going to be valid across all the other states, sort of a patent inter-change system that enables patent holders to more quickly install their claims in other countries as well. Currently, patent-holders will have to endure a long period of patent review and such, in the future, and if all goes well as has been definately planned by the persons in charge, patents granted in one country being part of the inter-change will be more easily granted in all the other part-taking countries as well, perhaps with only one or few central review and approval boards. As such, developing software or anything that results from research will not be possible for the individual or small to middle sized companies anymore without the approval of any of the patent holders, I fear, even resulting in the scenario I presented above, not as long as there is still a quantifyable growth in that area. But this all is rather the consequence of a long development and evolution, especially here in Germany and around where we had a long term decline in funding of public education, I personally call it the return to a state of innocence like what we had before the epoch of social and philosophical and religious enlightenment. At that time, religious and therefore political leaders installed and maintained the innocence of their people so that they be kept afixed in their positions, right now we have a new religion in town called economy that does just the same. I could go on about this for hours, but to cut things short, to really change things, we must have another reformation of our systems of state and societies at the global scale, and not just what the industry is trying to make out of it - we eventually would have to divide economies and the political systems like we did before when we separated church and state. Remember that church or any religious intent can also always be seen as one of the very first economies we find in human societies, not to mention the fascistic part about religion or religious believes. Not to mention the corruption that currently takes place everywhere around the world in every legal and policital system resulting from interactions between polititians and managers or companies when being seen as a social body or, as it is here, a legal person. And, looking at the current decision process of the European Union legislation, we find lobbying and accompanying that corruption of politicians that are not really true politicians but rather economists taking part in the shaping of a future society of their liking, but not one of that of the people they are trying to govern or should I rather say try to install a new social order in an attempt to make it more feudalistic, preserving and feeding the 10% above whilst maintaining a growing fluid base of cheap unemployed, semi-employed, near-constantly-employeds and all of them being innocent and held in constant fear, further driving onward the ego-principle that makes and drives our economies? > We'll then have to pick our battles. Are we going to squander > our influence to inforce a patent age old business process, now > > with XML, or are we going to push to defend big pharma and > Hollywood? The latter two industries have a body of law that is > far more mature. They are two industries that the U.S. will > dominate for a long time to come. Bang for the buck. > > Yes, and this makes me think back to times when the only reasonable thing to do was, prior to enlightenment, to revolt and put power back into the hands of the people. And, I fear, that would be the only true consequence that we might face in the future, worldwide and on global scale. By revolting I surely mean, that on the political scale we should really care and do something about it, as long as we can, for them have not yet enforced their positions, but eventually will and become untouchable. As for the software industry, I don't believe that XML is going to be the solution to the problems that we face. We currently have, as I call it, a big pile of mud (see also laputan.org for more of these not-anti-patterns) and we, web- developers constantly dig in that mud to find some pearl or at least something that we can take to shape something from, cheap and functioning but there is no beauty in it, except for the craftsmanship that went into it or the structure that it then consists of (architecture), yet all below that layer is simply integrated as we don't find the time to burn down that big pile of mud in order to make the soil below it again more fruitful so that it can grow new and more beautiful things, not just more piles of mud. As such, XML is only to be seen as a means of transition between the old generation (legacy services, legacy languages and so on, and consequently legacy-software, aka pile of mud). In this transitional phase in which we currently are, we find XML to be the great harmonizer, assimilating old technologies to a new way of hiearchically structured thinking and acting, proper translation of the economic or corporate system, but not necessarily that of any naturally evolved social body. And this is what it will boild down to, XML is currently pushed to the edge, with ever so many standards to be forcedly evolving and appearing and disappearing from sight, that one cannot really keep up with new architecture, new software, so that we will re-use the prototypes of the beginnings of XML evolution, eventually building up again piles of mud so that we may restart from the beginning, in fear of any patent infringement or attack against the monopolies installed by the patenting system. And, industry is trying to also shape that future of ours in the transitional era of computing and to preserve what they call is their rightful property. In my believe there is no intellectual property and as such there should be no legal system preserving the global monopolies that they try to install. In my eyes the latter leads also to planned economy at the inter-corporate level (b2b) with shared global markets that can only be shared by a few players in the future, as everyone else will have to leave the scene. I currently don't see any attempt in the industry to finally take a real leap forward and solve our problems for all. Personally I believe that this can be done, even in language but not in XML, for the industry is also self-preservation and might not at all be interested, so we have a), b), c) and d) again, those of which I currently face myself - actually having no perspective whatever, ideas yes, but I see technologies emerging now, that I thought about 4 to 5 years ago, that could have been developed back then, given enough personell and enough time and money and total disrespect for any of the available technologies that constantly put us back whenever we could be moving forward. The circles in which we exist are running even tighter these days. Just my two cents, and admittedly two desperate looking ones by the way... Carsten ___________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de 
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