[11126] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: patent pending -- is this a bad precedent
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Lye)
Fri Feb 20 17:31:09 1998
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 98 17:29:51 -0500
From: Matthew Lye <mlye@trentu.ca>
To: "Tony Sanders" <sanders@earth.com>, <www-talk@w3.org>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
On 2/20/1998 12:04 PM, Tony Sanders wrote:
>Maybe we need to start an organizational fund to fight patent abuses
>such as trying to patent an HTML tag.
Or trying to patent PostScript!
Seriously, though, large organizations have much, much more to gain
selling applications that use a 'public' protocol than they have to lose
by investing in the development of that protocol in the first place,
especially if they can influence the direction of development.
Smaller organizations can't always absorb such development costs. Even
if original-poster-dude's ideas are ultimately not marketable, in the
general case labour's been invested... and he doesn't have the same
choice between trying to sell portions of 'water' (one kind of many) or
specifying the nature of all water...
I'm not sure you could even try to obtain a patent for something if you
walked in calling it an 'HTML tag'. You'd be laughed out of the office,
no? Wouldn't the use of the name somewhat undermine the case that the
...whatever... was not derivative?
Somewhat not very articulately today,
Matt.
