It's no secret that I'm opposed to software patents. I believe that the system by which they are registered is not capable of determinining what is truely a novel "invention", and what is derivative in the way that patent protection was designed to operate. As a result this is sometimes determined much later my a court, at great expense, and great profit to the lawyers. In other cases it is used by industry heavyweights with lawyers on their side to bully or bankrupt smaller players who are often responsible for true innovations. More likely, however, a patent is used as insurance so that when someone sues you for a patent infringement, you check your register of patents to see which of them the other party is infringing, and then everyone backs off. Stupid!
So you can imagine my annoyance when I found this patent over the "invention" of Distributed service aggregation and composition which is in my area of research. As usual, it is vague and general enough to apply to a whole host of possible inventions that could arise independently. I suspect that it will be easy enough to find some published prior art... maybe even by my DSTC colleagues, but I'm not sure.
Humph!
|<
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment