12 Oct
2000
12 Oct
'00
11:43 p.m.
At 12:36 PM 10/12/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
In a crypto anarchic society, patents will mostly be moot.)
Really? If you have a factory, or open a virtual storefront, you have a public (meat, seizable) presence. Patents are enforced by guns against locatable assets which have exploited the patents. I realize that *copyrighted* bits will be hard to track, but not an address that ships patent-infringing (or for that matter, trademark-infringing) goods. To paraphrase, Meat is vulnerable, bits are safe. But (with the exception of software patents) patents are embodied in things, and things are traceable.