The patent subject was exhausted on this board last week. The Company's philosophy is to copyright, not patent software.
Arthur, my impression was that by the time we exhausted the subject, we had determined that copyrights were ineffective for protecting proprietary software solutions. They are fine for protecting the brand characteristics and wording used on the product, but they cannot protect any proprietary methods developed by the company.
So, if we take a giant leap of faith and assume that the company has software which performs as claimed, there are two possibilities. First, the software was developed using known and available techniques. In this case, what is to prevent anyone else from coming along and doing the same thing? Second, the company has achieved some sort of technological breakthrough which allows them to achieve these results. In that case, I also ask what would prevent a competitor from doing the same thing (e.g. through independent discovery, reverse engineering, leaking of information from NCDR employees, etc.)? Once it is known that this can be done, it should not be too hard for a competitor to figure out how to do it. If anyone does succeed in doing this, they could patent the process and sue NCDR to prevent them from using their own technology. Seems like a lose/lose situation to me. |
