From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 13:02:53 MST
I have a resisted patents for a long time, as I find many of them
to be somewhat assinine. I find software patents as currently handled by
the USPTO to be particularly distasteful.
Nonetheless, I am talking to patent attorneys at this very time to file
for my first patents. Why? Because despite my best intentions, I am
finding myself being dragged into the patent arms race. Competitors with
far more resources than I are filing patent claims that directly affect me
and my business at an alarming rate.
I have to agree with Robert on this; if you stay out of the patent game,
you will get run over by the competition in many industries. Of course, by
filing for patents, I find myself becoming part of the problem. While I
would like to avoid patents altogether, the business reality is that they
are becoming an unwelcome necessity for businesses like mine.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
On Tue, 21 Dec 1999, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> Patent protection is critical to enabling visionary people to get
> financial backing to test innovative ideas. You can't build
> a company fast enough to keep the wolves away from your markets
> unless you have legal means of protecting those innovations.
>
> If you could develop "physical" innovations and build markets
> and customer loyalty as fast as you can write software, then
> I'd probably take a dimmer view of patents, but I don't see
> an easy way to do that with the world as it stands today
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