[Gllug] Software patents, Microsoft & free software

[Janet Reid]

newbie question

Would it be possible to suggest that a public patent
should be developed?

I was wondering if it would be worth suggesting that
if a company purchases another company and takes on
its patents, where the technologies are discontinued/
no longer supported/no longer integrated with current
technologies, the patent should revert to a public
patent,or open sourced, this would mean that all that
IP which people have developed would not be lost. It
would reduce the attraction of buying a company
specifically to quash their ideas.

I am not sure how you would determine what
discontinued involved, but it would certainly 
mean that there was a framework for debate 
on whether a company was simply steamrolling the
innovations of others?

Ideas which might not have been useful at one point in
time might be a trigger for new approaches later
on..that sort of thing.

Perhaps something like this exists or it is just
silly, but would at least give the patent offices a
role which meant that they were not always facing in
the same direction?




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