James Siminoff RSS

I am currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Unsubscribe.com the former CSO of Ditech Networks Nasdaq (DITC) the founder and former CEO of PhoneTag, founder/principal in NobelBiz and founder of GRID.com. This blog is about my life as a serial entrepreneur, husband, traveler, inventor and father.

jsiminoff@PhoneTag.com













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Aug
15th
Sun
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In Sun’s early history, we didn’t think much of patents. While there’s a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn’t file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the “RISC patent” - a patent that essentially said “if you make something simpler, it’ll go faster”. Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn’t have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business. We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure. There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system.
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via James Gosling - Quite the firestorm : On a New Road

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The idea behind patents has lost its way and this story only reinforces my opinion that patents are like nukes for the enterprise.    As a startup company your only defense to infringing on someone’s patents is prayer.  If you are doing anything more than breathing in the market you are probably violating something.

Hopefully some sort of reform or cost effective defense is coming because every year this seems to get a bit worse.

via bijan and he commented:

James Gosling is known as the father of java. patents started out to protect the inventor but they are now all about big company interests and who can fund more expensive legal activities. 

I still like the idea of patents. To protect the creative ones. But when I hear about huge corporations going on a “patenting binge”, well, then we need reform. 

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