Hello Nathanael,
not you to be innocent. That's the opposite way.
Everybody is innocent until proven guilty, right ?
The problem is, in the US at least, that companies have entire rooms full of
patent lawyers whose job it is to file patent claims for every idea that flashes between the synapses of an employee on company time.
I seriously doubt Tom Jennings has a patent on Fidonet (or Fidonews),
despite his claims to the contrary.
Cobble together a high-falutin' description, toss in a few CADCAM diagrams,
and voila! The USPTO is easily impressed.
His gay partner might be impressed, but I doubt anybody else is.
Problem is large majority of those patents are never developed beyond the initial concept.
Fidonet is an idea, which is not a patentable product.
Jennings doggie and diskette ascii drawing is his own artwork,
and he does own copyright to that. Whether he chooses to sell
any rights to that artwork is up to him. But he has absolutely
no right to patent a community of sysops who freely call their
own network as "fidonet".
Then they have other rooms of more patent lawyers whose job it is to scour the world for anything that vaguely resembles a patent already held by the company.
Hey, let's get a bunch of folks together and play a game of baseball!
Nine sysops per team! What a neat idea, don't you think? Does that
give me, or you, or anybody else the right to patent (or trademark)
that idea? Of course not. Regardless of how long they might make the
claim, it is frivolous.
As Donald Trump would say, it is all "fake news"!
The result is there are so many spurious patents today that it becomes very
difficult to develop non-infringing new technologies.
Yeah? Let's see how long it takes Tom Jennings & Co. to sue sysops
and non-sysops who continue to infringe on his "patented" product of
Fidonet (tm).
--Lee
--
Laying Pipe Since '88
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