Intellectual Property

[Brandon H]

In some case Intellectual Property is a good concept, but in some cases, it is easily abused. I'm sure most people remember NTP was suing RIM (Blackberry) saying they violated a patent on wireless e-mail. NTP does not sell any product or service and only makes money by licensing things that they own the patent for.

Another example is from a company called Eolas. Eolas sued Microsoft for some large amount of money claiming they owned the patent for embed media types into webpages. MS released the patch about two months ago to comply with this. I have not tested or updated the patch on my machine, but any page that uses the embed, applet, or object tags may not work on patched versions of IE.

I don't remember details, but Amazon.com claimed to have invented "one click shopping".

Rambus, a manufacturer of computer RAM, was part of a group of RAM manufacturers. A standard was agreed upon by the group, but Rambus patented the standard. Can't remember what happened next, but Rambus ended up suing other RAM manufacturers for royalties.

I could keep going (.GIF, LZH algorythm, and why people use .PNG; .MP3 and why people use .OGG).
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Video games, or music for that matter, which can no longer be purchased in the store, should be public domain. I remember when Classic Nintentdo Games were $30. While they may have "old hard to find" value, the value of what it would cost to sell and manufacture, would be pretty cheap.