MailBlocks sues Earthlink over Anti-Spam Tech 336
goombah99 writes "Mailblocks is suing Earthlink , claiming patents on Challenge-Response as a means of blocking spam. Slashdot recently discussed Earthlink's plans to implement a challenge-response email system. The next day mailblocks filed suit to defend their turf in the $118 million dollar anti-spam solutions market. MSNBC has a complete discussion."
I did that (Score:5, Funny)
Mailblocks has no right on that patent.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I did that (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I did that (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, I posted it to Usenet [google.com] later in '96. I'm pretty sure that you can find lots of similar prior art in the google usenet archive.
Re:I did that (Score:4, Informative)
John Mallery at the MIT AI Lab used the mechanism in 1992 for the political participation project.
There are probably even earlier uses. Lots of mailing lists were using the idea simply to validate addresses.
Insanity BBS system had (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I did that (Score:5, Insightful)
C/R technology is inconvenient and obsolete. I'm not even sure why Earthlink decided to implement such an obsolete approach that has the side effect of doubling the amount of emails related to spam.
Cutting edge anti-spam tech stuck in the courts (Score:4, Funny)
Protection racket (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cutting edge anti-spam tech stuck in the courts (Score:2)
What?! (Score:3, Funny)
No... It's obvious that the spammers are winning because... they have big penisses. We can't do anything because of our tiny little penisses. Spammers have huge, gargantuan penisses. That's why they're winning (Apologies to South Park...)
So, can Earthlink respond? (Score:5, Funny)
If Earthlink responds to this legal challenge, they'd be in violation of this Mailblocks patent? A nice merry-go-round.
I think I'll patent these as well, just in case:
1. Pleading guilty.
2. Pleading innocent.
and so on...
Re:So, can Earthlink respond? (Score:2)
Re:So, can Earthlink respond? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't understand this (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious.
If you patent A, then I come up with A on my own time, for use in my own company, you can still tell me to stop using it?
I mean, I guess Earthlink is advertising that they're going to be using a challenge/response system, but they're not selling it, are they? I don't understand how the patent system even applies here.
Someone help, my head hurts.
Yes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't understand this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't understand this (Score:2)
Yes, during the life of the patent. Independent creation is a good defense against suits predicated on trade secret and copyright claims, however.
Patent pleading innocent (Score:3, Funny)
I'll bet the patent office wouldn't allow you to patent just plain pleading innocent or guilty.
However I'll bet that they would allow "method for pleading innocent to an internet lawsuit"
And I am suing Mailblocks! (Score:3, Funny)
I could be a mile long by now! You'll pay Mailblocks, YOU WILL PAY!
Re:And I am suing Mailblocks! (Score:4, Funny)
Try a kitchen knife. It'll take your shrunken member right off. Quite why you want to do this I'm not sure, however.
And so the Alan Ralksky's Win... (Score:5, Funny)
I say we need to send the One (a large man with a nail bat) to the Source (the companies that PAY the spammers) and let him Disseminate the Code (splatter their heads against the wall).
Yeah, I saw Reloaded three times since last Wednesday... so sue me. =P
$118 Million (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$118 Million (Score:2)
Software patents. (Score:5, Informative)
Europeans, contact your MEP now or else we will have this stupidity as well. The vote is next month and it looks most likely to give the go ahead on allowing software patents in Europe.
I have contacted my MEP and am trying to set up a personal meeting with him. Please do the same. There aren't many of us doing this kind of thing.
EU Software patents. (Score:5, Informative)
Brits can find out who your MEP is by entering your postcode here [upmystreet.com]. Set aside any personal feeling you may have on the EU, ranting against it is more like to do harm than good.
Some ideas point to raise.
Point out you are a IT professional and you are writing in that capacity as well as a voter.
US companies have been allowed to accumulate large number of software patents for 30 years by a poorly managed US patent system.
European Companies will be forced to pay royalties to US corporations, even ideas they invented, but patented in the US.
European Companies can be prevented from competing in some areas by patents, either by cost or denial of access to certain technology.
Patents prevents fair competition and promote monopolies.
An expansion of the patents system in the EU to cover computer software is extremely damaging to the European IT sector.
Point out that software is about maths and numbers, if you cannot patent algebra B or numbers so why software.
If possible point out a simple example of a patent in your particular field, even better if you can rightly claim it was invented in Europe but patented in the US.
Re:EU Software patents. (Score:2)
Can't I take out copyright against my postcode? Maybe send all those junk-mailers invoices for royalties?
OK, only kidding... :-)
Re:EU Software patents. (Score:3, Informative)
Alternatively if you're in UK, you can register with the Mail [Fax|Phone) Preference Services, I have and it works.
Mail Preference Service [mpsonline.org.uk]
Phone Preference Service [tpsonline.org.uk]
Fax Preference Service [fpsonline.org.uk]
Whilst these are private sector they are subject to oversite [dataprotection.gov.uk] by the UK Data Protection Commissioner [dataprotection.gov.uk].
Hey, wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey, wait a minute... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hey, wait a minute... (Score:2, Funny)
omg ! I will go to jail (Score:5, Funny)
They will sue me as soon as they find out that I dial in to my ISP using the CHAP protocol.
RedShirt
Is this paranoid enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the very real uses of patents is to prevent people from using the technology.
So am I paranoid enough yet?
Re:Is this paranoid enough? (Score:2)
(You may be paranoid, but not android.)
Mailblocks been around since 2002? (Score:5, Insightful)
And challenging Earthlink is a bit foolish. All Earthlink needs to do is come up with the hundreds of thousands of examples of Challenge-Response systems in use as early as 1995 in order to verify an actual person was on the other side.
mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Majordomo, Mailman, elzlm...almost all mailing list software sends you a confirmation email, requiring your reply(nowadays via a URL with an embedded authentication string, or via email simply by replying.) Kinda seems like prior art, since I'm guessing "Mailblocks" hasn't even been around as long as majordomo, which dates back into the Dark Ages.
However, in all honesty, this is probably one of the few cases where everyone wins- for many of the reasons folks cited in the comments on the last article that mentioned Earthlink's move... challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea, and anything that supresses the market for that software(ie, patent) is a darn good thing in my book.
I'm a mailing list manager, and if Earthlink does manage to get out of this one and fire up the challenge-response business, I'm damn tempted to simply block every earthlink user, possibly at the mailer level, because the users simply aren't smart enough to handle whitelisting the mailing list(s). Hell, most of the hotmail/yahoo mail users can't even keep their mailboxes under quota. We're talking rocket science compared to keeping your mail folder clean...
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:5, Insightful)
How so?
It seems like a great solution to me (coupled with a whitelist).
I'd put all my friends on the whitelist. When anyone not on that list emails me for the first time, they get an automated message back telling them how to respond. If they do this, the message gets through and they go on my whitelist. If not, they have already been informed that their message will not reach me.
How is this half-baked!?
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:5, Insightful)
How so?
Well, try reading the top rated comments in the last Earthlink-does-challenge-reply business slashdot story. A few of the ideas that occured to me(with varying degrees of seriousness/risk/whatever):
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:5, Insightful)
DDOS against whoever's name happens to be in the From line of a spam
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:4, Insightful)
- increased load on mail servers
The load increase is manageable. Challenge response would only need to happen a small percentage of the time for valid email. For spam, yes up to 1 email would be sent per spam recieved. I think the internet can handle that. It's not like there are going to be large attachments or anything.- everyone's challenge-response system will be different and incompatible
That's the whole point of the challenge response system. The idea is that the message can only get though if an actual person is willing to sit there and read how to make it get through. If if isn't worth this unknown sender's time to figure out how to make the email get through, they're probably just wasting my time anyways.The other idea would be to make the response be the results of a computationally expensive task. With a new RFC, the format for this could be standardized, and it could all be made totally invisible to the user. Since CPU power costs money, it would still be effective at reducing spam.
- businesses won't be able to send legitimate automated email(shipping notifications, confirmations, etc.) because everyone will be using different challenge-response systems. You think the average earthlink user is going to be smart enough to even REALIZE they need to whitelist a business, much less what address?
First off, they can just whitelist the whole domain of the business. Hey, the could even tell it to auto-whitelist any email addresses in that domain from which they recieve email in the next 2 hours. Second, yes I do think people will be able to maintain a whitelist. Using a whitelist would be voluntary, so if you can't use it, you don't have to. Once they get fed up with the amount of spam they're getting, it will provide them with enough incetive to learn. Most people can learn how to do simple things with their computer, they typically just don't see it as worth their time to do so. Beside you could make the whole "it's hard to use" argument about the WWW itself. People just eventually decided if was worth learning to use.- Loops when dealing with any of the dozens upon dozens of mailing list software, autoresponders, and legitimate automated email systems.
Other that implementing some basic sanity checking, these would be flaws on their end of the system. The should be no message I can send an automated mail system to make it go apeshit. All the challenge response software would need to do is ignore replies the weren't even attempting to respond correctly. This could be done for N hours after recieving the first message from a source.The only really big problem I can see is what happens if someone sends out spam with your email address. It seems like a potential DOS-style attack. It seems that there's an obvious solution to this: Add a standard string to be include in all response requests.
This way your mail software can check to see if you've sent mail to that address, and ignore it if you haven't.
I looked at the comments in that story, but it still don't see why this idea is half baked. One of us must be missing something.
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:2, Interesting)
the internet might NOT be able to handle that. (but i do think the challenge/response system has potential...)
from http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030520.asp: The basic facts are staggering. Internet service provider Earthlink estimates that 40% of the e-mail that comes through its system is spam. Brightmail, a spam prevention company, says that 45% of e-mail sent is spam. AOL claims that 70% to
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:mailing lists prior art? Patents = good this ti (Score:2, Insightful)
And I thought the people who have vacation responders on their email accounts were bad. Talk about a vicious circle.
This should not be patentable (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to write a filter that would do a
lookup on the incoming emailaddress, If I don't
find them I refuse the email. That's not patentable. And it should not be.
Just Great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just Great (Score:5, Funny)
Ask yo momma if you dont believe me.
Re:Just Great (Score:2)
'coz they're smart.
Would TMDA be prior art? (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, TMDA works, while Mailblocks doesn't. I grabbed a Mailblocks account while I could get a good username, and found that Mailblocks doesn't send out the challenge: it just discards my test messages as spam after 14 (?) days.
Re:Would TMDA be prior art? (Score:2)
I'm sure there's other prior art though.
Re:Would TMDA be prior art? (Score:2)
marvels of modern technology (Score:5, Funny)
"hello?"
"Hi is this Joe Smith of 104 spammark rd.?"
"May i ask who is calling?"
"No, you may not, we've patented the process where you ask who your talking to then decide wethere you want to continue communication, we can license that technology to you though for the special low price of $1 per use."
Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks to this article, I know about Mailblocks. I will go dig up their MXes now. Thanks, goombah99.
Re:Excellent (Score:2, Informative)
ASK software (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ASK software (Score:2, Informative)
Well, according to MailBlocks: "...founded in July 2002 by Phil Goldman, a former Microsoft vice president and a founder of WebTV. "
And according to ASK (Active Spam Killer): "© 2001-2003 by Marco Paganini"
In other words, Earthlink is not infringing on any "ideas"
Obvious Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)
At least, that's the thinking. Perfect security this ain't, but please -- the spec for TCP came out in 1981. TCP's security technique entirely encapsulates challenge-response systems for SMTP -- the same mitigation of false addresses through an inability to respond, the same caching of credentials once a response is received (you can think of a "trusted address" as a permanently open socket, with all the management headaches that implies!), etc.
In short, this is nothing new. But of course, we already knew that
Yours Truly,
Dan "I Do Way Too Much Stuff With TCP" Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Re:Obvious Prior Art (Score:2)
"The smelly donkey walks a funny walk," a voice whispers from the shadows.
"My rat has a scaly tail," replies the shadowy figure.
"Okay," the first speaker announces, leaving the protective shadows. "I have this package for you.."
Challenge - response, no? Everything else, encryption etc, is just add on. So, sounds to me like the patent fits the "obvious" crit
Re:Obvious Prior Art (Score:2)
It's like claiming a patent on, well, raising the steering wheel because people keep knocking their knees on it. I
I wonder if they will start employing spammers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when there was a similar growth in companies delivering anti-virus solutions? Remember when several of them were caught propogating viruses?
Given how little it costs to Spam - especially if you're willing to accept a response rate of ZERO - I wonder how long it will be before some of these companies start hiring people to send out spam; spam tailored so that the anti-spam company has patented the most feasible defense!
Help make virtual black mail legal.
Discouraging Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Discouraging Progress (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything you think up, be it a physical device or piece of code or whatever, can be produced cheaper and marketted more effectively by a large corporation.
It's a good sign that it's little upstart nobodies running around suing each other. It's flawed, but it's better than one big company owning everything.
Re:Discouraging Progress (Score:2)
Preportionally, where would the legal system be without large corps? Would Napster still exist if there was no RIAA to shoot it down? Would Napster even be created if music wasn't protected and procured by major corporations?
Re:Discouraging Progress (Score:3, Insightful)
Inventor take widget A to factory to be mass produced.
Factory owner say "Hey, this is a neat invention. screw you, I'll make it at sell it myself"
Factory owner makes another million, on its way to mega-corpdum.
Inventor decides never to invent anything, or never tell anyone about an invention. Society suffers.
Get it?
Re:Discouraging Progress (Score:2)
This is why we have to get rid of money.
Don't you see the real problem? Its human nature plain and simple to act stupidly. Get rid of the carrot and they won't have any incentive to act stupidly. Plus it will give us scientists and people who really do use our brains the ability to educate the rest of you when you stop worrying about so much about money and jobs and thinks that really don't matter.
We could use civilization and society to give everyone everyth
How do competing CR programs handle each other? (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens if I have one of theses CR set up and a friend has another one we are not on each others lists. I send him mail, which gets me a piece of mail asking for a responce, since my system does not know the address it then replys, and so on......
I presume with the same product they watch thier know thier own responces so they can put a stop to this.
Re:How do competing CR programs handle each other? (Score:3, Informative)
Someone should patent the "click here to remove" (Score:5, Interesting)
Chilling (Score:3, Interesting)
"complete discussion"? (Score:2, Funny)
Patenting a concept?! (Score:3, Interesting)
The CONCEPT here is that of requiring a human response from a sender of an email before the recipient receives that email.
There are thousands of ways it can be implemented, I would imagine, be it with something written proprietary for a company, or through something open source (procmail recipes like I use?). Am I the next target because I run Procmail with a recipe set that requires a response before I receive an email from someone? Could the person who wrote this recipe set and gives it away free be a target?
The only way I can see Mailblocks even stands a chance to win anything is if it's proven that Earthlink is using something written by Mailblocks without the authority to use it. But that's licensing violation, not patent infringement. I would hope that a patent revocation would arise from this case.
Re:Patenting a concept?! (Score:3, Insightful)
US patent system is going to screw whole US economy more and more. Soon, any software development will be outsourced offshore not b/c of the price of american human resource (americans
This is like "can't defend yourself against crime" (Score:5, Interesting)
But they have not been effective in stopping it.
Now, normally, when I am victimized by a crime, I am justified in defending myself. Mailblocks, however, is saying "You can't defend yourself against this crime, because we own the intellectual property for the methods of defense"?!?!
Okay, so whenever a new technology comes out, the mafia just needs to figure out (1) a way to victimize people (2) the best ways to defend against it. Then patent the defenses, and subsequently hit people from both sides.
Our government is coming to a real decision. Either defend IP at let criminals roam free, victimizing all and destroying the economy, or give up IP, and maintain order.
Meanwhile, Ralsky and his friends are going to be down at the patent office in a flash.
Something is rotten in the state of our legal system.
Let the hunt for the first prior art begin.... (Score:3, Informative)
Possible prior art:
Patent Filed December 1998....
US6546416: Method and system for selectively blocking delivery of bulk electronic mail.
Owned by Infoseek.
TMDA on Sourceforge, April 2001
Prior Art (Score:2, Interesting)
And lastly I'll never let a 3rd party process my email other than my ISP holding it on the servers there.
It isn't just earthlink they are suing (Score:5, Informative)
Recent articles haven't mentions Digiportal or Mail Frontier, so it is possible that they have come to an agreement with Mailblocks.
Full article (dated 4/05/03) from the San Jose Mercury News [siliconvalley.com].
More prior art.... (Score:3, Funny)
See? Challenge-response. Worked perfectly.
patents (Score:2, Funny)
It's starting to make sense now . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
This looks like it's becoming another "unholy alliance" like the virus / anti-virus market. It's as if the net had no native problems, so people have had to think up some so they could sell solutions for them. I wouldn't care if there wasn't so much collateral damamge to the net's reputation and so much extra effort on my part for "trash removal" in my corner of the net.
I'm a proud capitalist, but this is sickening. It's like embedding nails in the road to increase sales of tires and towing services. Surely if there were ever a "solutions market" that deserved to be trashed by OSS, this is it.
Go SpamAssasin and Mozilla!!
The implications of this patent (Score:5, Insightful)
The evils brought on society by software patents far outweigh the good brought by the 1% of useful software patents.
Re:The implications of this patent (Score:2)
bottom line.... (Score:2)
That being said, it is every ISP's job to do whatever they can to block whatever spam that might hit their users. I certainly don't pay my isp to let spam pass through. To put it another way, I don't pay my DSL provider for crappy service, outages, and ping fluctuations. Same thing here only theres a company that sees a big name like Sprint but only sees $$$.
Example of prior art (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing that it doesn't address is the potential for a spammer to bulk-mail accept-list confirmations prior to or as part of their mass-mailings.
So maybe use a digest of the headers to ID the original message, recover the e-mail address from it, and add it to the whitelist?
Easily thwarted (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone remember the guy who wrote a program to let his computer play Tetris by taking screen grabs?
Enforceability (Score:2, Insightful)
Governments should, if they don't already, have the power to annul any patent, and that power should be exercised against abusers of the system.
Meanwhile, if your ISP offers virtual hosting, you can always use disp
There is only one way to end this stupidity. (Score:5, Funny)
Broadcast immediate, ALL channels, satellite, cable, OTA, AM/FM. ALL channels.
We interrupt this broadcast for another public execution of a spammer and as a bonus execution, three patent lawyers. Please stand by, after the executions you will be returned to your regularly scheduled programming.
Thank you."
I have possible prior art from 1993/1994 (Score:5, Informative)
I never finished implementing the system (I wrote my dissertation instead) but still have a midsized collection of emails about it.
Challenge/response has got to be "obvious to one versed in the art" -- I can think of at least three other people at Stanford who had the same idea at about the same time.
Wow... my first patent infringement (Score:2)
I hacked together a challenge-response system in Perl without too much trouble about a year ago. Hardly rocket science.
I don't use it any more, though, since I neglected to whitelist a mailing list and got an angry response... it's not worth the hassle. I just use a whitelist, and every so often I manually check if anything has slipped through... works nicely.
spam patent situation is depressing (Score:4, Informative)
For example, patent no 6,167,435, applied for in 1998, patents E-mail verification for mailing list subscriptions. I couldn't find the Mailblocks, which would at least have to reference 6,167,435 as prior art, which leads me to believe that it hasn't been published yet. Patent attorneys may be stupid or brazen enough to ignore decades of actual practice, but they wouldn't ignore another patent.
Mailblocks itself is an anachronism--a bubble-era startup with no realistic business proposition, financed, in this case, by the winnings from the founder's previous dotcom. Most likely, Microsoft will buy them out to own the technology for Hotmail. If not, they will keep suing people until somebody does buy them.
Please send me prior art (Score:4, Interesting)
If anyone has anything they think is relevant, please email a copy to prior-art@spamwolf.com
The relevant stuff (what I consider relevant) is being posted at http://www.spamwolf.com/patents/ [spamwolf.com]
The best candidate so far (IMO) is this post [google.ca] to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet on 1996-11-17.
I'd really like something prior to 1996-08-26 though.
I'm looking for anything prior to 1997-08-26 that;
compares the sender's address to a list of accepted senders; (friends list)
-and-
sends a challenge if the sender's address is not contained in the list
-and-
the challenge is designed to be answered by a person and not a machine.
-- this is not a
MailBlocks: Patent Info & Corporate Shenanigan (Score:5, Informative)
- Phil Goldman is skilled in the art of computing, and so he _obvious_ly thought of using a Challenge/Response system for stopping Spam.
- He's a
- Found patent 6,199,102 (Granted March 2001), and bought it from Christopher Alan Cobb
- Found patent 6,112,227 (Granted August 2000), and bought the owner, Jeffrey Nelson Heiner, who signed over all rights
- Patents are "one of the largest expenses that we (at Mailblocks) have."
- MailBlocks has also sued Spam Arrest (case pending in WA), DigiPortal, and MailFrontier (resolutions unknown)
- MailBlocks actually started suing before releasing a product of their own.
- Goldman regularly responds to penis enlargement spams with his credit card number and a request to have them delivered in a plain brown paper wrapper
- So far, none of them have worked (somebody should tell him creation != enlargement)
Here is an interesting article: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/55
Re:Text of first link (Score:4, Informative)
Am I the only one to notice that...? Somehow I doubt that's in the original. Clever and amusing, however
Re:Text of first link (Score:2, Funny)
Looks like they were right, with two exceptions :-)
Re:Text of first link (Score:2)
How long before that "special email address" which you're giving out to online retailers shows up on the spammer's list? We all know that online retailers and mailing lists never sell their email databases to spammers, right?
Re:Text of first link (Score:2, Informative)
The addresses that it talks about are disposable. Mailblocks.com calls them "trackers". For example - my email address at mailblocks.com is draino@mailblocks.com , but I can add and delete as many trackers as I want. For example a tracker would look like - draino+something1234@mailblocks.com . The only problem with this is that some places are unable to validate a "+" as a valid character for an email address. A great example is Ebay.. I have now lost access to my ebay account because it let me change my
Re:Bloody Patent Office (Score:2)
Re:Bloody Patent Office (Score:2)
Re:Seeking Intelligent Discussion (Score:5, Insightful)
"All patents related to software are evil"
The fear is that (and rightly so), the patent office doesn't have the tech knowhow to decide a valid patent or not. Mailblock wants to patent "challenge and response" email. To me that is plain silly. The concept of a challenge and response has existed long before email in regards to communications. Applying such a broad concept to email is nothing new and is only a matter of who got there first.
What SHOULD happen is that a company is granted a valid patent on METHOD. At least in regards to software. Let's take Adobe. What if they were tto be granted a patent on ALL graphics designs programs? It would kill competition in it's tracks. Gimp? nope. PSP? nope. MSPAINT? probably but only because MS would pay the license fee.
You see, in terms of software, the traditional patent model does not work. There aren't enough new ideas out there. The concept of a drawing is as old as caves and berry juice. You can patent YOUR style of pen but not the concept of a pen. What happens is that companies patent more than just THIER way of doing something. Software patents in the current form are diametrically opposed to competition and freemarket operation.
The rules need to be rewritten to take into account this new model. Things like lifetime of a patent on software needs to be rethought as well as the whole process of granting the patent. In the software world, things move too fast. Patent lifetimes are NECCESARY to ensure non-stagnation.
Take the drug market. The patent on the drug (chemical makeup not concept) is the motivation for R&D. Patents encourage companies to develop something to make a profit by guaranteeing those companies the ability to have exclusive profit from that R&D. But this only goes so far. You've got only a few years before the patent expires and anyone else can make a generic version. They can't call it the same thing you do, but the can sure as hell color the pill the same as you.
What now for a company? They must reinvest the money earned from the short term exclusive right of patent and develop a better version. Or something new all together. The company that trys to live on one product dies a quick death. Ever wonder why there are so many versions of sudaphedrine? Patents FORCE innovation. The rules are simple. You come up with something new (such as a drug to inhibit HIV) and you get exclusive right to it. But only for a while. After so many years, anyone can produce it. It's now up to you (the company) to make a bigger and better HIV blocker. You know the rules. Everyone has to play by the same ones. Because a patent is public (has to be or else how would anyone know if they might infringe), you get that exclusivity= bonus for making it public. Don't like that rule? Keep it as a trade secret. The rules are different there. Much more difficult to enforce.
Almost done.
People also link patents to copyrights which have become a bastardized version of what they were. The current Micky Mouse is much better (to some) than the Steamboat Willy '46 version. Copyright terms forced Disney to make a better Mickey Mouse. The problem now (as we all know) is that Disney and the other large lobbies have decided that they don't want to play by the same rules that put them where they are. They are most undoubtedly an enemy of the freemarket and capitalism.
Sorry for such a long rant. Copyrights and patents aren't a bad thing unless misused. This is the case with the Sonny Bono Act and most software patents.
Re:Seeking Intelligent Discussion (Score:3, Insightful)
As a whole, we might be able to progress faster.\
I have written a lot of different typs of tracking software for use in logistics to hospitals. they all basically do the same thing, and the core of most of them could be used for another tracking. Instead, I get to re-write the same thing over and over again. I'm just one guy, and I can