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What Happens When Patents Meet Antipatents?
Roblimo pointed out an interesting piece by Grant Gross of NewsForge tying together some of the recent thoughts on Slashdot and elsewhere about preventing the creation of bad patents. Gross examines the idea of "antipatents" as formulated by Media.org co-founders Rebecca Hargrave and Carl Malamud. From the article: "'Antipatents are simple, a registration mechanism for your open-source inventions. ... Taking the time to document the antipatent prevents some clueless corporation from making it their property. Perhaps a handsome certificate, suitable for framing, can be sent with each antipatent for a modest fee.' Hargrave and Malamud also call for a formal way for the community at large to shout down 'clueless patents.'" Sounds good to me.
First, you must always carry a baseball bat. (Wood, aluminum, steel, lead, iron, etc. it doesn't matter)
Second, as soon as a clueless executive says "Hey, I have an idea, let's patent sedimentary rock." you smack them in the leg with the aforementioned bat. They may limp around for awhile after that.
Third, when they get the lawyers together and get ready to apply for the patent, hit them all in the head with the bat. (Make sure you hit at least one of the lawyers twice)
Forth, if they are still insisting on getting this patent, don your sporty black armor with the classic skull facemask helmet, grab your trusty sword, bust in on a board meeting, kill the chairman, and exclaim "I am your leader now, fool mortals! Does anyone wish to challenge this?"
Finally at the beginning of your first meeting with the executives, proclaim in a deep booming voice "From this day forth, no one shall patent what is already a reality! Those who defy me will be destroyed!"
Alright, I'm done.
Oh, and make sure you always have scantily clad female servants following you around everywhere. (Uh, mostly for your pleasure.)
Thank you, and have a good day.
The central problem with the patent system is not the idea behind it, but the stupidity of the people granting that patent, and the rights it gives the patent holder. That should be fixed. It's hard to see how having another database would change things.
What they are is a very effective tool for fulfilling the ORIGINAL INTENT of the patent system- furthering the arts and sciences. This is a social benefit and those who cannot see beyond individual benefit will be at a disadvantage in understanding it, but there are individual benefits to antipatents too, again in the same way that there are individual benefits in GPLed software authoring. The significant factor is that the creator of the idea must be thought of in a context of 'what other ideas might this person produce?' rather than 'how much money's worth of ideas does this person keep control over?'.
Phrased that way, maybe it might make more sense to people who can only think in terms of how much idea-property is controlled by a given person. Ideas, code are all well and good, but the real jackpot comes from implementation- putting the idea into action- and a person's real value can be considered in terms of their capacity to adapt to new situations and environments and get the most out of the new situations.
In a way this is strikingly reminiscent of Alvin Toffler's pontifications: he postulates a future in which change accelerates so unbearably that only the most adaptable people will thrive. We are in fact seeing that- Napster, for instance, is a type of change that few people predicted, and the environment of music distribution is still changing. The key concept to remain aware of is that the change can't be willed away- in the case of Napster, the RIAA is already dead, even with all its money, because it is determined to prevent the change in its mode of business, and in the long run it must fail. If it succeeds in totally controlling audio, suppose people begin producing and exchanging forms of interpretive dance, or audiovisual media like film off their desktops? To completely bind a media (like audio) and force it to be an unchanging 'cash cow' is dooming it to irrelevance as the change will swirl on without it.
To apply this to patents/antipatents, it's instructive to consider that patents are by nature denials of change. They are attempts to define ideas as if they were indispensable as laws of nature, and charge a toll for them- as if the context for the ideas won't change and leave the idea as orphaned as a patent bull-powered combine harvester. By contrast, antipatents are by nature completely dependent on change, as is the GPLing of software- to put out an idea as utterly free and unencumbered (i.e. antipatent, the only restriction is that someone else can't patent it) is by nature accepting that the idea itself is of transient use- the important thing is on the one hand showing "Hey, I can think of ideas like this!" which has value, and on the other hand putting an unencumbered idea into the hands of others who might find it inspires other ideas- cross-pollination.
The more hysteria over all these IP issues I see, the more I think that Toffler was right- the rules are changing faster and faster, and the only survival technique worth a damn is to develop the capacity to react to new situations and make the most of them. Establishing a community that can communicate ideas is a very good way to do this- as illustrated by the rise of Linux. There's no reason to believe this is any different when it comes to _physical_ inventions, or for that matter business models- as interactivity rises, rigidity is death, and patents and hysterical IP protectionism are rigidity, with very bad survival value.
In the spirit of change and getting thrown nasty curve balls by life, might I make note that mp3.com has begun committing suicide by changing their contracts and embarking on a brave new learn-to-spam-hopefully-responsibly-to-appease-RIA A-labels program? So as a _result_ of this, if you ever wanted to check out that music I so often go on about, OR BUY ONE OF THE 5.99$ CDS that mp3.com makes, be advised that now would be a good time because my page with them is going to go AWAY once small issues like payment are resolved. In the future I will repeat WILL be selling CDs myself, probably not as cheaply as that but better quality audio (mp3.com CDs are a convenience burning of the mp3s to Red Book CD, with nice cover art and labeled media) but I'm not going to have squat for a while. So if anyone ever considered picking up some of that music on CD, do it before the music goes away, 'cos it WILL go away at some point- I am absolutely not going to consent to mp3.com's new artist agreement terms, so our relationship is maintaining under the old agreement and no future development will be possible.
Don't you just _love_ change? ;P now I gotta start pricing _CD_ _duplicators_ and stuff like that, oh joy. But at least I understand the importance of being ready to adapt to such change. I think mp3.com are going to die by the side of the major labels they're trying so hard to appease.
What if somebody patents the concept of the antipatent? Then do they own all our antipatented ideas?
To invalidate the possibility of others producing patents, IBM publishes a journal. Any good ideas that are borderline patentable get put in the journal. If someone sues IBM over patent issues, the journal is one of the first things that are searched.
Slashdot code could be used to the same purpose. Submit a patent idea as a story, let others flesh it out. Any open-source product that gets a cease and desist letter can send back a URL of where to pick up the discussion on Slashdot.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I don't think this would work. You'd generate a patent-antipatent reaction, destroying the whole Patent Office in the process.
SCOTTY! Get more more ANTIPATENT!
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Prior art and first use are excellent items for disputing patent claims.
The "antipatent" system seems a bit cumbersome, since registering something obvious is counterintuitive to most of us, but patenting something obvious seems to be what the patent office thrives on.
It just seems unworkable on a basic level. That being that the patent office does not seem to do much checking on prior art anyway and neither do these courts that keep handing out insane rulings.
I wish I could be more optomistic, but having a differently worded older patent or even documentation of inventing something before a current patent awardee was born does not seem to matter much these days.
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This presupposes our ability to deform our minds sufficiently that we can even conceive of what might require an antipatent. That's a problem for me; in my wildest dreams, I'd never have figured out that XORing repeatedly to produce a blinking disply cursor would be a patentable concept. How about one-click ordering - would any of you ever have thought that something so obvious needed protecting? I've spent a lot of years getting my brain aligned - I'm worried that thinking in this way could get it seriously out of balance.