Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl, Literally
But now Speak for Yourself in under fire, and from a surprising (to an AAC outsider) or not-so-surprising (to an AAC insider) source. They’re being sued by Semantic Compaction Systems and Prentke Romich Company, big names in the AAC world. SCS and PRC allege that Speak for Yourself is infringing on their patents. I’m going to be honest: I don’t know about patents and infringement, and I’m not going to get into debates about the legal merits of the case, because that’s a conversation in which I would quickly drown.
Over at Techdirt, there are plenty of hand-wringing and comments of outrage.
The hell with that.
Someone needs to do a Kickstarter or other fund where people can contribute to buy the damn patents. Every company has its price.
We live in a country where charities rake in billions. But we rarely know firsthand that our money has actually done any good.
This is one time where we would know we have done some good.
Someone needs to do this.
“Speak for Yourself” really should have thought ahead and bought some male hookers for a party at Barney Frank’s house. If you don’t have at least 2-3 politicians on the payroll, you should expect a company that *does* to absorb you or steal your patents.