Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
If only that were true. But as orphan works (and the town of Marshall, Texas) show, there is always someone around to sue  |
Fair point to an extent. But if a company the size of Amazon was to cease to exist, there will be no ambiguity about what happens to its patents. And, of course, as per my earlier post, there is current open source software which converts and reads those formats without a licence from Amazon. Are they violating Amazon's intellectual property rights and Amazon is doing nothing? Or is it that an application which reads and converts the formats does not require any license?
And, of course, so far as a patent is concerned, patent terms are usually no more than 20 years from the filing date, often less.