That is simply because UI has a major role in the game to play. It is the interaction point for all and having less control of it will mean you loose the battle.
@Mitch - I agree -- big companies using patent aresenals as a weapon are the real problem. Every week or so I come across a new story about how a large company is trying to get away with stealing a small inventor's patent rights. My story de jour is Dan Brown and his bionic wrench.
@Jason -"patent trolls" is a catchy phrase, and often is used to describe anyone who is trying to assert their patent rights against you.
Most of these companies labeled as "patent trolls" do not develop the IP themselves, but they acquire it from small inventors who don't have the means to effectively defend their patent rights against a large corporation. Small entities will transfer their patent rights to one of these "shell companies,"an entity who has the resources to go up against a large corporation's legal staff.
Imagine a world without "patent trolls." A small company makes a breakthrough invention and a large corporation steals it. Can the small inventor stop the large company from stealing their invention and their market share? How can the small inventor stay in business when the large company floods them with litigation, or undercuts their price? Without these "patent trolls,", the small inventor would be forced to give up his invention at whatever price the large corporation wants to pay.
Selling their patent rights to a large corporation is a way for small inventors to defend themselves against large corporations. If you know of another, better way for small inventors to assert their patent rights against large corporations, please share it
Ultimately, software patents stifle entrepreneurship. Big companies have arsenals of patents that they use to protect their innovation. Small companies lack these kinds of patents, and can't afford legal bills to defend against inevitable lawsuits.
not just Colt patents, a very short time ago the History Channel had a story about how Tomas Edison used thhe patent office to drive his competition out og existence.
Well SOMEONE is doing something novel -- Microsoft. Say what you will about the Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 UI, but it is substantially different in looks and animations than the model Android and iOS appear to believe is set in stone. Now if people start to take note of Windows phone, maybe there will be REAL progress... :)
Of course, the issues discussed in this piece still apply. A small firm is suing Microsoft for its Live Tiles, despite the fact that it's a rather abstract (and by common sense nonpatentable) software concept. That company never looked to productize the technology, but is now hoping for a rich payday by trolling Microsoft. (Despite the fact that its patented technology doesn't even look that much like Microsoft's Tiles in the patent images.)
I definitely agree with you... it's absolute travesty what has been allowed to happen with the BRCA patents. I guess it's fair to say that the patent field in general is being increasingly used and abused (though to be fair abuse existed throughout our nation's history to some extent: see the story of the Colt firearm patents).
But I agree with your premise that when patents are possibly leading to a loss of life (by stifling cancer research or other life-saving progress), it's even worse that when patents are leading to a loss of choice in the free market.
One good thing about these patent restrictions...they might encourage innovation beyond what everyone is doing right now!
For example, the icon/app/touch screen model of smart phones and tablets seems set in stone. But is it the right way to do things?
For me, I sometimes find it incredibly cumbersome to find the "app" I want, get it to load, and then stick my blunt fingertip onto all those little tweaky app buttons and fields.
So maybe Apple is doing Samsung a favor by saying, hey, go invent something completely different, something better.
This ego-contest in the digital world is small potatoes compared to what is happening in the medical field, where similar universal patents are getting through -- patents for a certain gene for example.
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It was about 10 years ago when a new generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives started to gain acceptance and adoption among organizations of all sizes. And it has only been about five years since Amazon Web Services captured the marketplace's attention with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, which opened the door to a vast array of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. Now, the third piece of the cloud computing puzzle is beginning to win over organizations seeking to build their own apps: platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
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So here we are, the last day of the 2013 US Open Golf Championship at Merion, and Phil Mickelson -- who has been a US Open runner-up five times now but never taken the trophy -- is right up there at the top of the leaderboard.
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