If someone's had 50 or 75 years of royalties from something, that really should be enough. Quite right!
Although slightly off topic, patents give me cause for concern, and I would be very unhappy if the term of patents were to be extended. Already companies with large teams of lawyers are patenting obvious things that people have been doing for years, and nobody (other than another large company) can afford to fight them.
At least this abuse of the patent system, worse in the USA than the UK (so far) has a time limit, and as yet nobody believes that they can patent the exact same thing that has already been patented before. I mean, can you imagine the lack of development of technology if a substantial royalty had to be paid to a firm of lawyers for every use of the wheel? OTOH maybe we would have had antigravity now because of the problems that introduced!
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-05-17 02:37 pm (UTC)Although slightly off topic, patents give me cause for concern, and I would be very unhappy if the term of patents were to be extended. Already companies with large teams of lawyers are patenting obvious things that people have been doing for years, and nobody (other than another large company) can afford to fight them.
At least this abuse of the patent system, worse in the USA than the UK (so far) has a time limit, and as yet nobody believes that they can patent the exact same thing that has already been patented before. I mean, can you imagine the lack of development of technology if a substantial royalty had to be paid to a firm of lawyers for every use of the wheel? OTOH maybe we would have had antigravity now because of the problems that introduced!