The Silencing of Maya

The problem is that putting patents and similar legal steps exclusive ownership of ideas in place doesn't guarantee that they'll be used in the best ways.

Personally I think that patents and similar should be treated as property, and licensing should be required. The patent owner sets the price and it's taxed yearly based upon that price, whether products are made or not. This is similar to how real estate taxes are done in many places.

Also, at some large multiple of the price, it's possible to buy out the patent, putting it in the public domain. This way truly useful things deliver a windfall to their creators, or are licensed (possibly for much longer than patent protection allows today) creating recurring revenue.

rant/

Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money.

I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent allegations! Screw the people that rely on the products we're suing about, they won't mind". How dare they take away a person's ability to communicate? Tell me, is there any reasonable situation where it's acceptable to deny a child's ability to speak?

The humanity of it all :/

/rant

clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy? It's a perfect parallel to ASL. And there's enough social utility that we should help companies gouge parents $8k a pop [1] instead of $400 ipad + $unknown for software?

[1] http://store.prentrom.com/

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution Section 8

At the time of the writing of the Constitution something was needed to help spur innovation. It was written in the time of inventions like the cotton gin (easily copied 100x over by anyone who bought 1). But make no mistake, patents and copyrights have been implemented solely to help improve society as a whole since day 1. Enriching inventors is a by product of the desire to push science and art forward, not the raison d'être.

Now it seems that patents, taken as a whole, inhibit innovation. Most entrepreneurs view patents as an obstacle to be overcome, not a reward for their efforts.

I think it's time we either abolish them or vastly raise the bar on what it requires to get a patent. We have several orders of magnitude too many patents on the books today.

Software Patents Are Human Evil At Its Best.