[openip] Re: "rights" and "freedoms"

[Robert M. Muench]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Stallman [mailto:rms at gnu.org]
> Sent: Monday, October 18, 1999 8:44 PM
> To: jread at semiotek.com
> Cc: anicolao at mud.cgl.uwaterloo.ca; ghost at aladdin.com;
> jread at semiotek.com; weigel+ at pitt.edu; cowan at locke.ccil.org;
> Ken.Coar at Golux.Com; jamil.khatib at pemail.net;
openip at egroups.com;
> gnu at gnu.org; graham at collector.hscs.wmin.ac.uk; fsb at crynwr.com;
> pleb at cse.unsw.edu.au; license-discuss at opensource.org;
khatib at ieee.org
> Subject: [openip] Re: "rights" and "freedoms"

> The US Patent Office is incompetent in all fields, and issues
> trivial patents habitually.
>
> If the Patent Office did a good job, perhaps patents would
> be beneficial overall in many fields.  But I am convinced
> that patents in software are inherently harmful, and would
> be harmful even if the Patent Office handled them "well".

As I have some knowledge with all these patent stuff, the only
possible way to go for us 'free fighters' is to beat them with
their own weapons. Each patent has a 3 month public period were
everyone can file an objection to a published patent. It should
be trivial to show prior art to the PTO and argue about the
triviality of the filed patent.

So why not make a patent-tracking-and-objection group, which just
does this job? I'm sure it would help a lot of people and do much
more for the community than any other project. Richard, may be
the FSF is the right place for such a watch-dog group.

Robert M. Muench, Karlsruhe, Germany
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