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A comment on The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple. Parent comment

Re:The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple by koonsolo on Saturday April 10, 2021 @05:12AM (#26760117)
> "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years"

In this case you are right, it stiffles progress instead of helping it.

But what about the case where "Hey, it took us 20 manyears of research to discover this, and when we release it, it's up for grabs for anyone"

In that case, you want to have a patent system so the research can have a ROI.

But the latter case never happens in software, and so I'm very happy Europe doesn't have any software patents.

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Re:The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple by ant6n on Saturday April 10, 2021 @05:20AM (#26760156)
Didn’t mpeg work with patents and licenses?

... I guess it’s not really necessary to have patents in order to sell licenses, and I guess in most cases for software, patents are used as a moat for a business rather than getting a direct ROI on research.

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