Comments on: ☞ Standing Up To The Man

By: Simon Phipps: “MPEG-LA is a Parasite Using Standards Bodies as Its Host, Whether They Want it or Not.” (and a Rant About Banshee/Mono) | Techrights

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:17:35 +0000

[...] Phipps (OSI) has tagged one of the following news items “troll” and commented as follows: To be clear, MPEG-LA is a parasite using standards [...]

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:22:31 +0000

Mark,
Is it time we made a fuss about WebM and Ogg with regards to ODF?
There’s pretty much an equally awful situation on desktops relating to media files as there is (was, now we have VP8+Vorbis?) on the Web.

By: Þór

Þór — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:13:26 +0000

Hi, sorry for barging in – I’ve been following you through planet.opensolaris.org, and like very much what I read.

Regarding the state of patents in the US (as well as in many other places of the world), it strikes me as strange time upon time that people actually take the patent trolls lying down most of the time.

As much as patents stifle innovation, they should have been abolished a long time ago.

When Australia altered their patent system to be more like the US one (albeit with an automatic grant), an Australian patent lawyer actually was granted a patent on “a circular device for transportation”. Now, it’s up to the Australian population to waste resources to have that patent invalidated (it may be trivial to invalidate a patent for a wheel, but thing back to A.G.Bell and A.Meucci and E.Gray. Bell patents the phone, but Meucci/Gray were undoubtedly before him inventing it).

It would do the United States of America a whole lot of good to shut down the patent system, shut the court doors on patent (and other more recent of other kinds) trolling and get on with life without these endless fights that are only a waste of energy and resources.