Tech Firms and Regulators Meet At UN About Patents 65
another random user writes "Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung and others tech firms met with regulators and patent officials in Geneva to discuss changes to intellectual property laws. The event follows a flurry of lawsuits involving smartphone makers. It is set to focus on how to ensure license rights to critical technologies are offered on 'reasonable' terms. Companies are split over whether they should be allowed to ban rivals' devices if they do not agree a fee. The talks have been organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency responsible for ensuring phone-makers agree standards so that their devices can interact with each other."
The goal is imprecise and subjective (Score:4, Interesting)
It can never happen right. They want "reasonable" terms? That's not exactly something you can lock down. The problems are not because of something no one can completely agree with everyone else means. Apple is "unreasonable" and yet a judge has recently ruled that Apple's notion of reasonable is unreasonable.
If they can't fight nicely, it's time to take away their weapons. It's as simple as that.
Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks (Score:4, Interesting)
To my knowledge, Computer software is the only industry that has both copyright (source code, graphics, music, etc.) and patents (design concept) applicable to it, and therein lies the problem. Trademarks are independent of these two as they apply to brand identity.
You don't have patents in the fiction world, you have copyright law on the published text. You are free to have tree men in your story as long as you don't call them "ents". Likewise having a story about wizards in school, or vampires, or other story elements. Otherwise, if story elements/concepts were patentable we would not have as many varied stories we do have.
The same applies to paintings/drawings, TV shows, films, music and other creative arts. You don't have the makers of Armageddon and Deep Impact sueing each other over who has rights to the asteroid impact disaster movie, instead you have two different interpretations of that concept.
With the creative arts, you can take themes and ideas from other works and use them in a different way in your own work. So you have many paintings in the impressionist style, each artist giving their own interpretation on what that means.
Re:How many small businesses were invited? (Score:5, Interesting)
The root problem isn't patents.
It never was, that is a mere symptom of the same corruption of big business ass-raping the government and forcing it to give out goodies to their lobbyists.
Get business out of government and everything else will take care of itself. Keep business in government and no solution is going to work anyway.