Patent Pirates and Damaging Lawsuits

I joined the OpenRAW group because I like many others are sick and tired of legal chicanery and the obesession many corporations have with owning the markets they are in. I like that open discussion in encouraged and that there is a healthy balance between personal and professional perspective. Corporations must reaalize that the bottomline will only carry you so far and that trying to stifle the competition through expensive Lawsuits and chicanery throught coding does nothing but hurt the market and peoples perceptions of it. What I hope for is that sooner rather than later someone puts a stop to all these stupid and expensive games which makes no one but the Legal advisors rich. The recent spate of patent suits filed is an example of this ... there should be more of a sense of logic placed in the process of patent filing and the use of real industry pundits in the assesment process. Maybe an independent body who's job it is to assess the concept of prior art and to curtail the granting of sweeping and potentially damaging patents for which Prior art exists. With OpenRAW and concepts like Opensource the idea is to encourage a healthy atmopsphere of development and to prevent the hijacking of ones personal intellectual property. In the Case of RAW files the technology and software may belong to the developer and manufaturer but the content doesn't and anything which may interfere with the owners ease of access is to be considered suspect. I for one like the idea of standards, and things like the GIF and Unisys debacle in the 90's and similarly the whole JPEG thing involving Forgent does little to foster goodwill to an industry already burdened by suspicion. Open standards must prevail and bodies like ISO must be encouraged to adopt new formats that are truly open in scope and application. We as consumers need to start flexing our muscle and getting our respective governments to respect us as voters and as their bosses rather than the other way around. For too long business has had the ear of government and the policy makers, time for a change don't you think.