Sure, so long as you make the chips yourself, invent the electricity to
run it yourself, and so on. This is a distinction without a difference.
>Software patents are *EVIL* because they IMHO are always too long and too
>broad!
Apples are bad because they are always rotten.
>Ideas are something that once freed can never be bottled! If you dont want
>anyone using your ideas then dont tell them to anyone.
That's what patents are for. Ironically, the only way to know what it is
that you never tell anyone is for you to put it down. To get a patent, you
must refrain from disclosure without contractual restriction, otherwise you
cannot get a patent. Simply put, a patent protects innocent third parties
who had information leaked to them without contractual restriction against
the wishes of the idea's owner.
To put it more simply, suppose I don't tell anyone, but someone somehow
steals it and gives it to a third party. A patent would publically alert the
third party to the fact that the idea was not his to use but was in fact
stolen.
>"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible
> than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the
> thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively
> possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is
> divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the
> receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too,
> is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the
> whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction
> himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
> receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread
> from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual
> instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have
> been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made
> them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their
> density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and
> have out physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive
> appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of
> property." -- Thomas Jefferson
This is precisely to goal of patents. To allow people to continue to own
an idea, without loss of its commercial viability while still allowing
others to develop superior ideas. You have what you want, you're just too
blind to see it.
DS
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