by
diiz » Fri Feb 28, 2014 6:35 am
andrewsullivan wrote:I meant that you can't say software patent is crime.Number of patent application is there on the basis of which the big companies are moving on.All they are passed by USPTO only.How could you say that It is crime?
Even I know some of the attorneys and very much pleased with them.
What is legal and what is moral are not necessarily the same thing.
If you go back to 1950s, there was racial segregation in the USA (and other places as well but this is just an example). Back then, it was all perfectly legal, written in law, but that doesn't stop us from saying now, that we know better, that it was an atrocity and a human rights violation.
It's easy for us to know better now in hindsight, and things like that seem obvious to us. At the time, most people didn't think there was anything wrong with it, but some brave people also knew, at the time, that it was wrong, no matter what the law said about it. Thanks to the struggles of those people, the law was changed, and we can now say segregation is a crime.
So yes, I can definitely say that software patents are a crime. They cause a huge waste of money, time, and everyone's resources, and are almost without exception used for either a) patent warfare between big corporations (burderning the legal system and thus costing taxpayer money), b) as a method creating market barriers, benefiting large, established corporations against new startups, and c) as a method for parasitical companies (known aptly as "patent trolls") to legally blackmail and prey on the hard work of others. Like abstract mathematical concepts in general, software should not be patentable material.
But I'm not going to go on in detail about the harmfulness of software patents, because the web is full of reading about the subject if you're interested. And also because this is quite off-topic, this thread is meant for discussion about the new version of LMMS.
