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The Case Against Intellectual Property
dhilvert writes "David Levine and Michele Boldrin argue that current IP laws encourage an inefficient rent model and stifle the potential for innovation without intellectual monopoly. Levine teaches at UCLA and maintains an Economic and Game Theory page."
Now, the wolves are guarding the hen house. In the early 90's, when Bruce Lehmann hosted the USPTO's sham hearings on whether to institutionalize s/w patents, his panel was comprised entirely of lawyers.
IOW, lawyers chose to instititionalize s/w patents in spite of strong protests from individuals throughout the software industry.
From that point on, it has been accepted that lawyers have the right to reap profits and taxes off of so-called innovation in software. It's a huge inefficiency, impossible to enforce, and impossible for anyone to prove virtually any software is unencumbered by patent conflicts. It's ridiculous.
The USPTO loves it though. They just increased their staff to handle their backlog which will forever increase since software patents are prolific and easily twisted into patent submissions.
Better yet, lawyers are having a heyday. The more lawsuits, the better. They get wealthy while the software industry grinds to a halt. It's obscene and a severe conflict of interest that they should have instituted s/w patents over all reason from the s/w industry itself.
I'm not even sure it's legal. I wonder what authority the USPTO head, Bruce Lehmann, really had. Was he appointed, and by whom? He certainly wasn't a member of Congress where laws should be created.
S/w patents should be abolished.
Protecting businesses with regulation returns the least effort with the most campaign contributions. Politicians are great advocates of the 'for rent' model.
Now the very definition means you can't even copy, use, view, or even talk about something if you do not have a license to do it. You should be able to ask Kinko's to copy a copyrighted photo for your daughters elementary school product. The copyright system was created for this and now you can not.
With patenting something physical is one thing because you can see how it works but patenting something virtual like software which is required to access something is totally different. I feel Microsoft's move with palladium and patenting drm is bad. Not only is the information not publicly shared but it will lock every computer to only Microsoft so they can kill competition and raise prices.
http://saveie6.com/
Disclaimer: I work at an IP firm as a programmer, but not as a professional in the IP field.
:)
Before people post "Burn down the IP laws!", make sure you have a valid alternative that comes some way toward protecting the rights of creative people.
As a model for handling commercial rights, which not too many creative people seem to mind having, intellectual property laws are not a perfect construction. Especially now we are trying to stretch paper rights around a digital wordl. But to the distant cousins of anarchists would like to see the whole system trashed (because destroying things feels good):
Go and read Animal Farm and construct a good alternative before you go starting a revolution.
Cheers, and good luck
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
I remember learning about James Watt... I certainly never learned about the patent angle, and his subsequent crushing of his competitors. An interesting hypothesis, that his patent and "rent-seeking behavior" delayed the industrial revolution by 30+ years.
I don't know when the IP-seeking behavior began in academia (I haven't been in it long enough to pontificate about the "old days). Perhaps it has always been there, and people were simply much more discrete about their patent filings.
Some of the patent drive may be related to the "publish-or-perish" mentality that exists at many larger universities. Aside from generating prestige and name-recognition, having a nice fat generating-income-for-the-university patent out there could do wonders for your chances of being granted tenure. Then again, it might also be a transparent attempt to financially rest on one's laurels, as it were.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
"The point is when does intelectual property become a rediculous concept, or is it a rediculous concept from the very begining?"
:) ).
That is a really difficult question. At what point does an algorithm become a mathematical equation. At what point does patenting it become a detriment to society.
To use medical stuff as a starting point the theory (and it is well played out in reality) is that the development cost is huge, manufacturing cost is tiny - same is true in CS. In order for them to recoupe costs (and therefore make them want to do the research) they are given a period of unilateral controll of sales. In the end it drives progress, for a few years only a select few get the rewards, in the long run the poorest are extremely elevated.
Software, unfortunatly, does not have the much harder line that a pill does (not really a physical product from quicksort). Is a windowing system patentable? is Quicksort?
Ultimatly the question is "does this help advance society". We, in many cases, are quite capable of answering this question. That question is supposed to be the job of the courts or the patent office. Unfortunatly they want an expert system type of decision making. A simple yes/no based on a simple given input written in a few pages of documentation. Patenting online sales in our current date is idiotic, but it passes thier simple "yes/no algorithm". Patenting a new extremely low latency/high throughput network interconnect is patentable (and really should be).
The next question is length of patents. In our industry a 5 year patent is really "in the past" let alone our current patent system. If you can't make a profit in 5 years in CS a ten year patent will not make you a profit, nor will a longer one. On the other hand it seriously dampens societies progress.
Patents are supposed to be, and should be, a balance between the need of society to benefit from advances in tech, and the people who invented the tech (or corperation) need to profit from the tech. When one is given great priority over the other the system gets screwed. It generally takes a person, capable of rational thought, to find that line, not a simple "yes/no" solution. Plus they need to realise the line is not necessarily in the same place each time (and some may disagree), that is why there is such a thing as "comprimise" (which is where neither side is happy, and neither side is greatly unhappy
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Everyone knows everything belongs to the corporations now. There's no such thing as individuality anymore. It's only a matter of time before this open source thing is snuffed out by one megacorp or another for violating IP regulations put in by some special interest group trying to monopolize the market in their favor and protect their own asses in search of the almighty dollar.
Just watch. Intellectual property will be the first to go. Then personal property, then private property. All land and all items will be owned by an oligarchy of megacorps, and most if not all personal freedoms will not even be a memory, as revisionist history will be rewritten to make the times we have now seem like the dark ages. Dissidents will be jailed and executed. Freedom will be a thing of the past. The country will OWN you, and you will be a slave to your corporate government.
Does this really protect the individual who actually *invented* something or protect the ones who say they have the rights to it and have the resources to protect it.
The post before mine recognizing Newton/Leibnitz and the possiblilty of "patenting" calculus drives the point home.
This seems to me just to be another excuse not to work. My whole country seems to be doing this. It seems everyone is out not to produce anything per se, but to tie up anybody trying to do anything and exact a fee. Somehow this system passes as "free enterprise".
Now, if the patent protection lasted for seven years or so, I would consider it much more appropriate. That way one could profit during the market window, but not tie the works up in perpetuity.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The United States has developed a litigation culture in many aspects of everyday life.
Anything to draw attention to the IP problem.
/first/, your worl is that much harder, since the corrupt people can change the rules of the game while your solving some far off symptom.
But it would be more efficient to go after corruption. It's the root cause of failure for systems other than the IP system. Also, if you don't go after general corruption
You remove the top of a wart, and its roots will bring forth another wart. Over and over again. Eventually, you have to go through some trouble and dig out the roots before the area can finally heal properly.
The whole difficulty of corruption in government is they write the rules of the game. And as you follow the rules of the game to eliminate corruption, you might find some difficulty.
I'm still counting on the Enron anamolies to bring about some change. Sooner or later people will have to realize this is not currently a society where everyone plays by the same set of rules.
Seems a weakened effort for people to run around trying correct various symptoms of the disease when they might make a more powerful and unified stance against the root cause of many of the problems. The corruption. Shouldn't be to hard to find a govt sector to begin with here in the US. Just pick..anywhere.
is where do we draw the line?
Amazon's one click nonsense, how was this even patentable? In essense that idea was click a virtual button, and it does something, does that sound innovative? No step in that process was innovative, Amazon, like a million other companies keeps a cookie in your browser, and you're shipping/billing info in their file/database, what was new with that? And yet here we are, patenting these simpleton ideas a retarded chimpanzee could have come up with.
Software techniques should not be patentable on the simple basis that the staff on the USPTO simply seem incompetent, due to no fault of their own, to designate what truly deserves a patent and what is merely an old idea in a new dress. The system is set up by lawyers for lawyers, in the end tilted toward corporations with cash and IP agreements with each other, so the small software development houses can't get in.
Really, Software should not be patentable, at the most, copyrightable in certain aspects, the name, logos, and protected in regards that nobody should be able to legally take the binary and resell it as their own.
But that is about it.... otherwise all you are asking in the future with this so-called 'ip property' is a constant headache with unscrupulous people who are smart enough to patent an idea that has been around for ages and ask enough so you pay them, but don't ask so much that you fight them in court.
A patent is not a right one person gets when he patents something, it is a right everyone else loses. If Amazon had not patented the obvious one-click order, everyone could do it. I think that taking away the right of every person (save one) in the entire world to do some action is a very serious thing to do.
Therefore, patent granting should be very restrictive - not like today, when you can patent obvious bits of code, obvious business processes, DNA sequences, the wheel, swings, whatever.
When the patent is obvious, patenting is theft - taking from all and giving to one.
And it scares the kerpookie out of me.
No matter how you design or code anything, you are sure to step on something someone has documented. I mostly do analog design.. now there are several circuit topologies for switching power supply design.. but are any of them safe to use outside of an academic lab? Or as mentioned, can one even use a quicksort algorithm without the risk of the letter in the mail? What if I use a m-way search tree in a custom mini-database which keeps track of some activities my robots are doing... can I expect somewhere someone is going to see I am using an m-way tree and hold my company ransom for it?
I can only imagine what it is like in the biochemical industry. I have seen my share of organic synthesis books.. and how similar organic molecules are. You can darned interpret anything you want if you get Congress to back your patent. Its like coming to the building industry because they used copper wire, copper pipe, bricks, nails, whatever in the construction of the building, and you have your lawyers hold them hostage for it.
Scary indeed...
But then my great hope is the Chinese. Hopefully they will look at us and learn. They will be able to innovate and construct and hopefully use their resources for production instead of litigation. It won't bode well over here in the States, but then Congress may have another thing to consider, how do you control the masses of people once they have lost their homes and no longer have money or jobs to pay rent. I do not like to be a fat man in the presence of hordes of hungry wolves.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
There's also a historical precedent for supporting IP laws, namely that countries without strong IP laws (e.g. the USA prior to the late 19th century) have typically produced far less innovation than countries with strong IP laws (e.g. the UK and Europe in the 18th, 19th and even early 20th centuries).
Having said that, I think current IP laws probably go too far. I think a balance is needed between encouraging people (writers, artists, programmers) to produce IP and allowing them to keep a stranglehold over it for obscene lengths of time.
Incidentally, Palladium is basically the MS implementation of the TCPA proposals (though not entirely in line with the TCPA specs, which are still evolving). If the TCPA is able to establish open standards for trusted computing, and MS uses them, there's no lock-in. That's why I think it's important to support the TCPA and ensure it's implemented on more than one platform.
Software patents should be abolished. If you have discovered a cool algorithm that enables your programs to run 100x faster than a competitors, keep it secret and benefit from it alone (Closed Source). Most companies do that already. What really gets to me is the fact that they try to prevent others from making use of an independently developed but similar technique. Just because you thought of it first does not give you the right to reduce the dimensions of everyone else's thought.
The only benefit you get should be the time-advantage you have in thinking about it first. Publishing it (Open Source) means you accept to forego the advantage, for common good.
Most people who believe in software patents, do so because of a complex. They can't stand the fact that most people are as intelligent or more so than they are. Since they know that someone else will have that idea, they try to prevent that by patenting it. They preach how patents are required for innovation -- bullsh*t!
That is what destroys inovation IMHO.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
Seldon was a lawyer who patented the automobile. He didn't build one, he never even so much as understood them, but he understood that sooner or later someone was going invent the thing, and if *he* already held the patent the actual inventor would either owe him a mint or simply be forced out of business.
So he filed a patent on the *idea,* and got it.
The fight between him and Henry Ford is one of the great sagas of intellectual property dispute in any nation. The patent was eventually broken, but not until after many, many years of courtroom fighting had passed, and millions of dollars such fighting takes to wage had passed from the hands of innovators into the hands of lawyers.
The Wright Bros. invented flight. Then they made sure that America became the absolute *last* in aero technology through patent fights. By the time we entered WWI, hardly more than a decade after that first flight at Kitty Hawk, America had to license aero technology from Europe in order to be competitive in the military aeronautics.
The Europeans either outright ignored the Wright Bros. patents, or found work arounds they could claim didn't violate them.
KFG
Software patents should be eliminated because they are just plain unnnecessary for promoting innovation. There isn't any software out there that would not have been developed if software patents didn't exist. Most software produced in the world today isn't protected by patents (although they may unknowingly infringe on somebody else's patent). Of those that are patented, either the original developers would have created it anyway, or somebody else would have independently created an equivalent. The vast majority of software patents already have been accidentally implemented by others, who created their equivalent implementations without the incentive of owning a patent or the knowledge of somebody else's existing one.
The same thing applies to patenting business processes - just plain unnecessary. A business won't decide to abstain from an innovative business model because of the lack of an ability to use patents to prevent competitors from using it. Quite the opposite - once having conceived the idea, they will be in a haste to implement it precisely because they fear their competitors may also do it and they don't want to get left behind. A business model or process that would be unprofitable without patent protection isn't a truly innovative one. Only bad ones and obvious ones have a need for patent protection to make them profitable, and the truly innovative ones would be implemented anyway.
The purpose of patents is to encourage or accelerate the innovation that would not have occurred if patents didn't exist. Software and business patents don't fit that mold because whatever the patents implement would have been done anyway, either by the original creator or soon afterwards by someone else.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Yup, before Bayh-Dole universities and non-profits weren't allowed to patent inventions that came out of federally-funded research. There are two schools of thought on this amd I'm fairly sure where the slashdot crowd will come out:
1) This is a good thing, it fosters research and brings money back to the University creating a cycle of innovate-to-profit.
2) The entire idea of allowing someone else to lock up knowledge invented on the public dime is repulsive and even if it HAS icreased tech-transfer rates and numbers of patents filed (and I've yet to figure out why that, in and of itself, is a goal) this is certainly no direct measure of increased INNOVATION.
Personally I think it was a terrible thing. It let the federal and state governments cut funding to major universities virtually in lock-step w/ the amount of cash those universities were bringing in with tech-transfer revenue. This creates a desperate cycle of invention-for-survival and patents and tech-transfers for cash, NOT for science.
Ick.
-j