Sometimes I think that we take the mythos of Yankee ingenuity a bit too much for granted. Particularly when we expect to invent some new gadget that will set the world on fire and drag an entire economy out of its doldrums.
The essential problem is that we expect the proverbial golden eggs without any thought to what we're feeding the goose. To illustrate:
- The U.S. patent system is an unmitigated disaster that exists to keep lawyers in Armani suits.
- AP was suing its own affiliates for posting AP content. Fortunately, AP clued into its own cluelessness before any serious damage was done. (Which is only one level of stupid below Fox News suing The Simpsons a few years ago, which would have lead to Fox essentially suing itself.)
- A couple years ago, Microsoft's Visual Studio blatantly ripped off a feature from the open source BlueJ project, then attempted to file for a patent--which would, presumably, have led to an infringement lawsuit against the feature's actual creators.
- The whole issue of whether or not "orphaned works" can even be brought into the public domain--a no-brainer, one would think--devolves into an Olympian squabble over who cashes in, in the unlikely event that one of them turns out to be the next DaVinci Code.
So...explain to me how, exactly, the legendary two guys (or gals) in a garage are going to pull us out of this mess?
[Sound of crickets chirping]
Yeah, I thought so.
