Tech Firms and Regulators Meet At UN About Patents

another random user writes "Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung and others tech firms met with regulators and patent officials in Geneva to discuss changes to intellectual property laws. The event follows a flurry of lawsuits involving smartphone makers. It is set to focus on how to ensure license rights to critical technologies are offered on 'reasonable' terms. Companies are split over whether they should be allowed to ban rivals' devices if they do not agree a fee. The talks have been organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency responsible for ensuring phone-makers agree standards so that their devices can interact with each other."

Comments

Reasonable?

[roman_mir]

The only reasonable thing to do is to deny all future patents and cut the current existing patent terms to 5 years, and so anybody with a patent older than that loses the gov't racket protection and nobody else can ever apply for another patent again.

You want to invent something and build a business around it? Fine, do it, but nobody should be given special privileges by the governments, to give them monopoly on whatever it is, even if they invented it. You don't like it? Don't show your invention to anybody, let others re-invent it and make a business out of it. Was that easy?

Another point is: there are still trade secrets and non-disclosure agreements, which are just contracts between private parties and they have nothing to do with governments.

Oh, and by the way, same thing about copyright, only their terms should be cut right now to 3 years in total and no new copyrights should be granted.

You have your moral rights of-course, but those have nothing to do with government protection racket and artificial monopoly status.

--

Now that is a sensible solution and it doesn't require anything to be done by anybody, on the contrary, it requires less government and allows for a nice way to cut on various government spending as well.