Zooiblog

Search the Zooiblog

Follow the discussion below and participate.

Support this site.

Cake

4

And then the dumb take the cake you’ve so carefully baked and kept safe. All your love went into it, and your innovation and that smart recipe your mother taught you and now it’s gone, to be eaten by someone you don’t know. Awww. I so liked my cake.

If you’re too lazy to read Jeffrey’s post, see the news: an indeed rather obscure web shop has the patents to most rich media on the internet. No matter how little they have to do with any of the media the patent refers to, they do. Is that a flaw in the laws or really a sensible application? I hope People With The Knowledge can tell me more about it.

(Pardon the cake analogy that didn’t work out too well. I just really like cake.)

Posted on 2006-02-23 during the good parts of the evening.

4 comments

  1. Gabriel Mihalache 2006-02-24 #1

    I’m a liberal economist (in the European sense), actually a die-hard libertarian, and even I agree that the US patenting system is totally messed-up.

    Several good alternatives are available and many people have been working on this for decades now. Unfortunately, many businesses have a vested interest in keeping things “business as usual” and to keep milking their bizarre, State-imposed monopolies on ideas.

  2. Mark Wubben 2006-02-24 #2

    More power to non-US parts of the world!

  3. Dylan 2006-02-24 #3

    I don’t even perfectly understand what’s happening here. The news article doesn’t explain it very well, and I just can’t see how someone can randomly and out of nowhere patent things that have existed for years, and in some cases are owned by other companies. What?

    What exactly does this “patent” mean anyway? What is “Balthaser Online Inc.” entitled to? Call me ignorant, but I guess I just don’t know enough about patents.

  4. Olly 2006-02-24 #4

    And more to the point, does it apply to companies based outside the US that aren’t selling to US customers?

    My guess would be that it doesn’t.

Participate, yes!

(Rock out with Textile; it's what the cool people use!)