"The government can't just take property from someone, and if they do, they have to pay for it," said Dowell. "Just because an entity is funded with taxpayer dollars doesn't give them the right to steal property. My client now owns 34 patents that are being infringed, and what else is he to do?"
You cannot support patents and at the same time tell us, with a straight face, that somehow it is still for the common good.
Pirates are accused of stealing for the way they handle IP--what mental gymnastics are folks willing to go through to condemn this while condoning that?
In the specific case of pirates... the difference is that the patents cover generic process, while the copyright infringement uses a specific instance. So a given song, aka a sequence of notes and lyric, or a character, or a book, can all be infringed, but if someone makes a similar song, character or book, it is not copyright infringement. Think of all the pop songs that sound basically the same, or the hundreds of books that are basically reworkings of Tolkien or The DaVinci Code - they don't infringe. The patent version would be "using strings (e.g. guitars, bass guitars, banjos, violins, etc) to convey sequences of notes to auditory receptors" and anyone who made music would be sued for patent violations. Note the vagueness - any stringed instrument qualifies, and sequence of notes qualifies, live and recorded music qualifies. This is not mental gymnastics, it is simply a question of what scope makes sense.
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"The government can't just take property from someone, and if they do, they have to pay for it," said Dowell. "Just because an entity is funded with taxpayer dollars doesn't give them the right to steal property. My client now owns 34 patents that are being infringed, and what else is he to do?"
You cannot support patents and at the same time tell us, with a straight face, that somehow it is still for the common good.
Pirates are accused of stealing for the way they handle IP--what mental gymnastics are folks willing to go through to condemn this while condoning that?
In the specific case of pirates... the difference is that the patents cover generic process, while the copyright infringement uses a specific instance. So a given song, aka a sequence of notes and lyric, or a character, or a book, can all be infringed, but if someone makes a similar song, character or book, it is not copyright infringement. Think of all the pop songs that sound basically the same, or the hundreds of books that are basically reworkings of Tolkien or The DaVinci Code - they don't infringe. The patent version would be "using strings (e.g. guitars, bass guitars, banjos, violins, etc) to convey sequences of notes to auditory receptors" and anyone who made music would be sued for patent violations. Note the vagueness - any stringed instrument qualifies, and sequence of notes qualifies, live and recorded music qualifies. This is not mental gymnastics, it is simply a question of what scope makes sense.