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Chip Rosenthal Wins Unicom Domain Name Case
Seth Schoen writes "As seen last month,
Chip Rosenthal (whom many people know for
Reply-to
Munging Considered Harmful, among other projects) was threatened
with the loss of his domain
name unicom.com.
He's now won in court and
will get to keep the domain, at least for the time being."
Again, this case was not decided on the merits of the issue, rather just a procedural thing.
Making a expensive luxury car in the $50 000 range costs about $3 000 - $4 000. A $25 000 car costs about two grand to make. The usual costs for making a car is a bit below 10% of the sale price.
Intels top-of-the-line processors costs $20 or so to make but you buy them for $500 or so. Your typical stereo or freezer or whatever costs just a fraction of what you buy them for to make.
Despite that this may seem like a huge overprice those companies sure hasn't profit margins like 99%. Intel has negative cashflow (right? I'm not 100% sure) right now. It DO costs lots and lots of money to develop new products, test them for safety and so on.
Software isn't really any different. Just like everything else the value is mostly in the research&development (and marketing) of the products.
People just don't seem to realize that "intellectual property" is the major costs of ANY product these days. But hey, this isn't bad! Thats whats make the people valuable and if you ask your gandfather I can bet that he will tell you how the workers situation was then the valuable wasn't in the worker but mostly in material and machines. It was a good bit worse than today. The worker has never been to valuable as today.
Believe me, you do not want this kind of case settled sole on the basis of who-filed-first. If we took that approach, we'd all be paying half our income to the holders of submarine patents.