I'm no Lawyer, but I do think that the "man in the street" has it over the lawyer in one respect. He or she has not had to study law and therefore some things are still "Common Sense" to him or her. What I hope to do in this "article" is demonstrate how fancy lawyers now claim to own the rights to some things that they patently (sic) do not own the rights to.

Firstly, The Open Group, a San Francisco company that claims ownership of the Unix trademark, is suing Apple Computer. They have a beef with Apple for using the term Unix in conjunction with its Mac OS X operating system and want to license it to them.

Some say that is was Apple who started the trend when they tried unsuccessfully to sue Microsoft for stealing the "Look and Feel" of the Macintosh Operating System. Apple had in fact been invited to the Palo Alto Research Center to see what Xerox had come up with after Xerox had paid several scientists to sit around to research new way of doing things. Xerox invited the boys from Apple over to "have a look" in return for some cheap stock options. Apple scooped up the ideas they saw on that day and ran with them, first utilizing them in a computer called Lisa, then later on in the Macintosh.

Some history is pertinent here as so many of the developments in the computing sphere that we take for granted today, had their beginnings in a non-profit setting.

The Internet itself was originally funded and developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a part of the US Military. It was done so that fragmented communications systems during times of war could still pass along vital information along whatever lines still happened to be transmitting. (Hey! maybe there really is such a thing as military intelligence).

Around this time Universities also did huge amounts of work on variants of the UNIX operating system, and then fought to be able to give that work away so that other individuals and groups could improve and modify it for their own purposes.

Now the SCO Group come along with 80 lines of code they claim ownership of, and say to IBM "hey, if you want to use this you'll have to pay us, here's our invoice". Linus Torvalds and many other commentators just see the SCO Group as a puppet of Microsoft and refuse to give any credence to SCO's claims.

During the early heady days new ideas and radical technologies were everywhere and mostly it was plain old co-operation and shared enthusiasm that drove the advancements in computing.

Of course commercial companies sprang up like mushrooms. Names like IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Apple were all out selling their visions of the future. These companies, for the most part, had a unique hardware or software "Product" to sell and many grew wealthy very quickly.

More recently we have witnessed the "dot-com" bubble grow and then burst when speculative investors tried to cash in on the Internet. The bubble burst of course, due to greed and over investment in anything Internet related.

I think there is now a second wave of people trying again to cash in on the tech industry's successes. They are doing this by laying claim to the ownership of patents and then sending in the lawyers to litigate against companies and individuals simply for using a particular method or idea.

Adobe and Macromedia recently had a tit for tat claim against each other for interface elements, tabbed palettes no less!

The allowing of software patents has been likened to allowing a monopoly on an idea. In New Zealand one patent has recently been granted to Ed Pool and Doug Mauer of DE Technologies, for a method of conducting an online financial transaction. It appears that if you sell something via a website and allow a method of calculating the payment from a foreign currency, then you are in breach of patent no.505284 issued by the New Zealand patents office. A New Zealand website has sprung up to fight what amounts to an attack on those small businesses who now find themselves having to pay hefty license fees in order to continue trading. Australia is also watching us closely.

Look out for those flippin' under-armers though, on 11/8/2003 on TV1 News a report stated that 90% of DNA (Human and Animal) is "owned" by the Aussies! and New Zealand scientists will be expected to cough up millions in order to carry on with their research!.
Content Providers (as they are called in the US) such as Record companies and Hollywood Studios are pushing for the wider acceptance of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and many companies are hiding behind the DMCA to give themselves an unfair advantage. Websites have sprung up against the DMCA

Do you sense a trend in all this? Maybe I should start charging people whenever they speak my name and definitely if they use it to make a stupid cartoon. Sorry Bart, (Simpson), I'm claiming "Prior Art" on this one.

I am not advocating that a company should not profit from its own efforts or be stopped from protecting its own intellectual property but it seems to me that much of the wealth we enjoy today is only there because of a sharing ethic which seems to have been far more in evidence even a few short years ago than now.

I do not like this wholesale grabbing of everything that's not in clear ownership and then trying to sell or license it back to us. So while the air and sunshine is still free, enjoy it, you may pay for it soon.

If you wish to resist this theft by stealth there is one worthwhile organisation you could join.

And take a walk along the Queens Highway/Chain (the beach) too, while you still can!