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US Patent Regime Is Absurd

Posted by Unknown on from the self-inflicted-wound dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece in the Economist about the the effects of patent trolling on the US economy. The author argues that the U.S. patent regime is causing the U.S. essentially to harm itself. Things have gotten so bad that paying for protection is par for the course.

1 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Quit whining by Animats · · Score: -1, Troll

    The people I read whining about this aren't the ones coming up with original ideas. They seem to be people who want to clone someone else's successful idea. Or are just whining.

    Look who's getting hit with patent problems - Spotify, which is yet another streaming music service. Hulu, which is yet another streaming video service. Rovio, whose Angry Birds is a clone of an old "attack the castle" game. These are not innovative companies.

    Even Linux isn't very original. It's basically a UNIX clone. It's not an original OS, like PenPoint or QNX or BeOS. OpenOffice is as much like Microsoft Office as it can be made to be. Apache started as a clone of the NCSA web server.

    Come up with something new, and you have far fewer patent problems. I have four issued software patents myself, all in areas where the existing technology didn't work but mine did.