Shachar Read Patent Failure by Besson and Meuer - software patents are a net economic negative - ie the cost to write, issue and enforce is greater than the economic benefit.
This is in comparison with pharma and chemical industries where patents have a net economic positive balance - ie profit from patents outweighs cost danny On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Shachar Shemesh <shac...@shemesh.biz>wrote: > Danny Lieberman wrote: > > > the judge wants to forbid MSFT from selling Word in the US on grounds of a > patent-infringement that cannot be proved to protect a company that relies > on Word to sell it's product. > > I think the injunction is really ludicrous. The rule of late was that > preventing a software house from selling its software because of a yet > unproved claim does not satisfy the balance of damages. For example, it is > quite clear that i4i cannot afford to compensate Microsoft for its true > damages if should MS comply with this injunction, but then prevail in the > actual case. The damages to Microsoft would be in the billions, and I doubt > i4i has that much. On the other hand, if the injunction were not given, and > i4i prevails, it is hard to imagine a situation in which MS will not have > the money to compensate it. > > The whole setup seems utterly ridiculous. > > And yet, we cannot seem to draft Microsoft to the anti-software patents > camp. Despite the fact that their loses to silly patents over the years far > outweight their gains from them. > > Amazing > > Shachar > > -- > Shachar Shemesh > Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.http://www.lingnu.com > > -- Danny Lieberman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect your data: http://www.software.co.il Twitter: http://twitter.com/onlyjazz Skype: dannyl50 Warsaw:+48-79-609-5964 Israel: +972 8 9701485 Mobile: +972 - 54 447 1114
_______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
