[OLSR-users] Software Patents in Europe and OLSR

[John Clark]

Thomas Lopatic wrote:

>About 90% of European companies are against software patents it seems,
>however the European Commission says that the remaining 10% have greater
>weight in terms of taxes and jobs than the 90% and that, hence, software
>patents are a Good Thing[tm] for Europe. Let's show them that this is
>not the case.
>  
>
Here in the US there have been a number of patents issued on software, 
and it is a major pain
to deal with. What has also happened is that the 'original' developers 
often see absolutely no benefit
from their 'patent'. This happens in cases where the patent was granted 
to a small company, which
eventually could not capitalize on the patent, the company closes, and 
the assets are 'bought' by
some entity. Often a legal firm which then 'searches' companies that are 
touting something similar
to the patent idea, and sends them a letter of pay license or cease and 
dissist (stop now and don't continue, a
US legal requirement for pusuing a patent infringement case...). Often 
companies will pay up with
out a fight because they do not have the financial resources to pay 
lawyers to defend.

Even worse then, is that say such a small company does pay the license, 
usually based on annual sales
of the patent containing item. Time passes, and the 'small' company is 
now big, or is bought by a
big company. The usualy way of dealing with this is to maintain the 
'small company' as a legal entity,
for corporations that means annual board meeting, certain financial 
records, and payment of incorporation
fees to the state, but basically consists of no employees, and no income 
save for the royalty payments for
the patend containing product. So, now the big corporation gains the 
benefit of the patent at a 'low price',
and sells their resulting produce for a high price... and so the 
capitalist dream continues... unless you
are the engineer who 'worked for hire' producing the patentable item...

Anyway, so much for my soapbox anti-patent diatribe...


>Suppose that a node in our mesh misbehaves, e.g. because it is
>accidentally misconfigured or because it is owned by somebody who likes
>to sabotage our network. It would then be nice to be able to broadcast a
>message through the mesh that tells everybody to ignore the misbehaving
>node, i.e. to exclude the node from the mesh. Of course we would use
>digital signatures to enable every recipient of the broadcast message to
>verify that the broadcast message is legitimate. In this way, only
>authorized people, e.g. administrators, could broadcast such exclusion
>messages.
>
>Pretty obvious solution, eh? And Microsoft is trying to patent exactly
>this idea in the above patent application.
>  
>

There are many 'duh/selbstverstaendlich' ideas that have been patented 
in the US, and even worse,
ideas that have well documented 'prior art', but the original 
researchers where not available, or did
not pursue their own rights (or were not even aware that some entity was 
patenting their idea) to
counter the patent applicant.

John Clark