Towards Computer-Related Industries Essay, Research Paper
The following sites are discussing the pros and cons of the issue of software patents. The U.S. intellectual-property law is now being criticized by the new coming industry, software industry. As nowadays most of the companies are moving with the technological business trend, more and more IP problems between companies comes up.
However, our IP law system is not ready for the rapid growth of these problems.
Although we can still apply the patent law in these industries just like the others, it is suitable to it without any modification?
In the web sites, they discuss about how the widely-used patent law harm the technological industries by giving recent legal issue. There are 30,000 patents software filled every year (it may grow up tragically in the coming year)
However, Are these patents really protect the inventor? Are they misusing them?
The three websites argue about this issue by returning to the original intent of patents.
Patents are introduced to protect the inventors, but not the chief executive officers, legal departments or the shareholders. Patents used in computer-related field must protect the engineers from their employers. Recently, there are so many big IT firm uses this technique to sue the engineer and other companies. They use patents as their weapons to fight against competitors. The big companies take advantage on it and make the real inventor and competitor worse off.
The software patent system is clearly out of control and if not caught soon will change the face of the software industry forever. Tons of new software patents are granted each year. The patents that are being granted are so diverse which related to file server and word processors. From the engineers point of view, it is dangerous to create products containing data compression or public key encryption, and recently major field of multimedia. It is posing a critical threat to all software developers. As the problem goes on, it may shut down a product line. A strong patent portfolio is devastating.
The websites are mostly against the software patents. They think that software industry is different from all the others. Since software is a very complicate thing. It makes a typical computer program dependent on and supported by many different software technologies. Software s abstraction makes it difficult to partition these technologies.
While software’s complexity makes a typical computer program dependent on many different software technologies, software’s abstraction makes it difficult to partition these technologies. It make patents hard to perform in this industries and can t give out a solid results.
Besides again the patents, the websites suggested some solution for the problems.
For example, they suggest the government should revise the application and approval process, which make patents more meaningful when it comes to legal conflict. The websites also provides different links to some legal cases, which are on the some issue which helps viewer understand the topic in depth.
Resources:
WORLD WIDE WEBS
www.freepatents.org/
www.bustpatents.com/
www.bc.edu/bc-org/avp/law/st-org/iptf/
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