Re:Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
by waterlesscloud on Thursday December 11, 2014 @09:44AM
(#8734932)
What's being said here is that if you want to keep the rights to something, you must keep it to yourself. If you publish it, you must lose control.
That's exactly the opposite of what patents say.
Patents say if you want to publish something, you can still have protection for it.
Re:Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
by sp332 on Thursday December 11, 2014 @10:10AM
(#8735105)
Yes, that's correct. A patent is a legal construct that temporarily gives the creator more protections than they would "naturally" have. This is specifically done to encourage people to publish their ideas. After a time, this protection goes away and things are back to normal.
Strange, because that's exactly how the patent/business secrets laws work; a company is free to decide what they want to do with their new invention; they can keep it secret and risk someone else reinventing it, or they can publish it (submit a patent) and receive a temporary monopoly on that technology.