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> Patents increase the sharing of information

Do you know of anyone who has had a software development problem, searched a patent database, found a solution in the database, then implemented that solution? I know that I never have, if people actually do that I'd be interested to know what sort of problems they are working on.



Not for software, but I have looked at patents for physical machines to try to figure out how to do something well (card shuffling machines).


They don't search a patent database to build their own, but license a pre-existing (patented) solution.

You don't look at mp3s patents to build your own awkward version of a sound compression algorithm, you just use mp3


If you'd rather license than build your own, copyright covers that fine. Patents only come into play when you are building your own.

And compression is really close to pure math to start with.




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