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Disclosure is unreadable

Revision as of 07:04, 12 October 2009 by Ciaran (talk | contribs) (There was an Australian government study of the patent system in the 1980's. It concluded that aside from international pressure, there was no reason to have a patent system -- it did no good for the)
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"There was an Australian government study of the patent system in the 1980's. It concluded that aside from international pressure, there was no reason to have a patent system -- it did no good for the public -- and recommended abolishing it if not for international pressure. One of the things they cited was that engineers don't try reading patents to learn anything, as it is too hard to understand them. They quoted one engineer saying "I can't recognise my own inventions in patentese".[1]

Disclosure happens without patents, and better

In a 2008 in re Bilski brief, this quote is pulled from the in re Alappat ruling:

"[i]t is estimated that 85-90% of the world's technology is disclosed only in patent documents." (Newman, J., concurring)

Of course, using this quote when discussing software is disingenuous given the massive, complete, and freely reusable information disclosed by free software such as GNU/Linux, and given that many authorities have said of software patents that the disclosure is useless.