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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!purdue!decwrl!megatest!djones
From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Apple Lawsuit
Message-ID: <486@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 28 Apr 88 00:27:53 GMT
References: <3bb68a91.ddc1@apollo.uucp>
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 48

I used to believe there was a moral justification for patents and 
copyrights: to protect the intellectual property of the people who 
invent things which we would otherwise not have.

No more.  Most all the clever inventions are practically inevitable.
There was a cliche in the seventies, "It's an idea whose time
has come."   That about sums it up.  It was the popular 
author/lecturer/T.V. personality James Burke who turned my thinking 
around on this topic.

But I still like the idea of patents and copyrights. (Sorry, Mr. Stallman.)
The rationale is to make new technology *more* available, not
to restrict it.  Patents and copyrights serve this purpose in two ways:

  1. They give incentive to new development, by increasing the
  likelyhood that the developer's efforts will be rewarded;

  2. They make new technologies publicly available, through the 
  Patent Office.

If the courts would listen to me (fat chance), I would advise them to
grant or deny claims according to the answer to this question:

  Will this ruling, as a precedent, tend to increase, or will it tend 
  to restrict, the general availability of new products and technology?

This question must be considered in light of consideration (1)
above:  If the courts systematicly deny patent and software copyright
claims to those who have acted in good faith, in the expectation
of gain for having done useful work, or for having had an original
idea, wouldbe developers will lose interest.

There are other desiderata, of course. You don't want to grant patents
to those who have only been the first to do the obvious.  Or to grant 
patents whose value is vastly out of proportion to the amount of work
done and to quality of insight which was required of the inventor.  
We want to reward cleverness and industry, not opportunism and sneakiness.
And we don't want to impair standardization unduly.

I will leave you to decide how my hypothetically instructed jurist 
would rule on the Apple case.  

I've got my opinion, but I'm not at all sure that I'm right.  
(I wonder if this is the first time that sentence has ever appeared on 
the net.  Don't worry. I won't try to copyright it. )


		Dave J.