I meet up with Suw Charman, Open Rights Group, at EuroFoo, and discussed briefly with her about patents and fabrication.
One of the gags in my presentation was about how easy it would be to produce individual antennas and IDs by printing and how that would make some labour people very happy :-(
Naturally, not being an ID card supporter and believing that "those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for security are deserving of neither", I'm not going to blog how to do it.
However, it does raise questions on who owns what in a fabrication world where hardware is more malleable.
Hence, I'm more horrified by the latest wheeze of the EPO and the attempt to create enforceable software patents across Europe.
There goes innovation, creativity and competitiveness - at the least the lawyers and vested interests will be happy.
How about "balancing the interests of patent holders and the broader public interest in innovation and competitive markets"?
It's about time that patent duration was changed to a variable amount - based upon how quickly could society be reasonably expected to independently discover such invention.
Giving the increasing pace of innovation, the current limits are too long.
