Slashdot Mirror
India Quietly Introduces Software Patents
bain_online writes " The Business-Standard of India reports: The Cabinet is expected to clear the promulgation of an Ordinance for the introduction of a product patents regime, which will also cover embedded software and hardware, next Wednesday.
There are other news sites reporting the same. Unfortunately, the majority of the Indian people are not the least bit concerned, resulting in very low coverage for this important development."
the outsourcing industry of India...
Even if you are not Indian, consider doing that - for the sake of another country with a 3% population of techies.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Having just spent an entire month travelling through India, I am not at all surprised at the low media coverage. The vast majority of the population is extremely poor... the (on average) dozen beggers that approached me daily, don't even ask you for money, they ask you for food my friends! *That's* how you know they are really poor and what's really on their minds.
The vast majority of people don't even know how to turn on a computer, and many haven't even seen one in their lives, so it is not surprising that the media would think their people would not care so much about patents; they have far bigger logistical and core problems than caring about software patents.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
India enacts software patent law... nobody seems to care.
... nobody seems to care.
... nobody seems to care.
/. even by AC's is that we direct our energy away from our respective governments and toward our friends and neighbors.
/.er as anything more than a wanna-be pirate. Legislators look at those who have the knowledge to tinker but are not corporate engineers being paid to testify with suspiciion. They must surely be self-serving software pirates worthy only of scorn.. at least until the timer needs to be set on the VCR. Geeks are not a voting block.
The United States enact
Poland blocks IP law
The common thread here is really a lack of concern by the masses about what the law is in this area. Is this really an issue of law being made only for the big corporations, or is it a question of lack of education & information among the rest?
Perhaps the real solution to the problems of IP law, as almost universally recognized on
That officials enacting IP law will seldom see the
The solution then, is to explain to Grandpa why software patents are bad. Grandpa is no dummy. If we can survive working tech-support over the telephone, we can explain IP to Grandpa in person when we visit for Christmas.
It will be easier than it sounds. People love to have rights, even if they don't fully understand them. Show a man his rights are being violated and the righteous indignation begins to swell. All Grandpa needs to really understand is that, when IP laws are toughened, when copyrights are extended, that takes away something from HIM... then he will speak up. When granpa speaks, the government listens.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
He would have been unable to copy _any_ idea that had been created before. Multitasking? Nah, is patented. Commandline? Same. GUI? Same. Memory protection? Virtual devices? Filing system? All patented. Good luck coming up with alternatives to some of these. And don't tell me a poor finnish student could have afforded licensing fees for hundreds of diverse technologies.
Imagine if Bill Gates had used his genius to code more and clone/buy less.
For Bill Gates very little changes. He just needs to spend some money on patents _and_ software.
But if software patents had been in effect since the early 1980s, the market would've had a lot less simple repetition and much more true innovation or actual improvements on existing products.
I strongly disagree. The first guy to realize that he owned a vital piece of the action (just imagine a patent on "interactive IO") would (or at least, *could*) have leveraged it to own the computer world. Simple software would bear pricetags comparable to cars (to pay off all the patent holders).
For any class of application, only one version would exist, unchanging no matter how bad it is for the first twenty years. Computers would never even have entered the home, since noone could afford them and there would no interesting software anyway.
And the same would be true for the tools we use to work with computers. There would be no Java or Perl or C++ (who could afford to develop a language when the compiler-patent is still valid?). In all likelyhood we would be program in assembler, _maybe_ using a terminal, but possibly still using punchcards. Which is no big deal - computers would only be available in specialized environments such as research institutions. I'll leave the knock-on effect to other technologies (cars, planes, telecommunication, etc.) to your imagination, but it will be huge.
In other words, we would be at the same technological level of development that we were in the sixties. Some people would no doubt consider that a good thing, but frankly I like our current level of development. At least now I can engage in stimulating discussion about various subjects with people from other continents (ok, that was a euphemism ;-) ).
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison