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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."
A question one must ask one's self is when does a research result or algorithim or something stop being a matematical or scientific process, that should be shared with everyone and when does it become intelectual property?
I mean, the 'breast cancer gene' has been patented, the harvard mouse too; not to mention all of the computer algorithims that are patented. Whatever happened to the notion that mathematics and science should be shared with everyone? The scientific community has functioned on the 'open source' model for hundreds of years, but it seems that thanks to the concept of 'intelectual property' this is all changeing.
Really, I mean some of these patent claims are analogous to Newton/Leibnits attempting to patent calculus or Feynmann trying to patent his discoveries in quantum electrodynamics.The point is when does intelectual property become a rediculous concept, or is it a rediculous concept from the very begining?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Hey, That idea is my intellectual property. Time to get out the ol' IP Army again...
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.
What is it IP laws go far to protect? a forcing of people into one model?
Where to protect your rights and inventions you must sue people and protect them under a situation of IP laws that are too old now
Whatever happened to the idea of 'a good name'. A company could live off of its good name and good will by being well known and respected because of it their actions. If they truly have good IP then they will be respected for inventing it and earn more in other areas
that to me and mindshare is worth more than copywriting their invebntions and just making forceful noises about people paying them for it.
note:the slashdot user 'danamania' is a transexual. beware of him
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
Everyone seems to be saying the same thing, but no major party seems to notice. You could just say they're in bed with business, or you could say that people aren't vocal enough about this issue.
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]
Hmm wouldn't there be lots of prior art on the cancer gene already over the last few thousand years how can you patent a natuarly occuring gene.
I had a pet once
The United States has developed a litigation culture in many aspects of everyday life.
Read this:
PBS, Who invented Radio?Its about how Tesla filed for patent on the radio in 1897, Marconi applied for his patent in 1900.
Marconi's patents were thrown out at first. Marconi became rich and powerful, then Tesla's patents were thrown out in place of Marconi's.
So you end up with a market in which the patent owner isn't the inventor and the whole purpose of patents - to reward the inventor, is turned on its head.
You can see the same pattern happening in software patents and the constant requests on Slashdot for prior art.
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.
From The Relevance of Adam Smith by Robert L. Hetzel.
With added commentary by yours truly...
Everyone realises and acknowledges that Microsoft is a business, there to make a profit to share with it's marjor stakeholders, from it's shareholders to it's employees. However
For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer containscurrently 20 unpatched vulnerabilities , a disproportionately high number in comparison to all the other browers on the market today. Also, because of a general disregard for security in the past, many of those same vulnerabilities are exploitable though other Microsoft applications.
And there is many a CIO discovering that the new Microsoft enterprise licensing agreement is far more expensive than before.
The next section is very IMPORTANT.
In fact, the term "intellectual property" is a misnomer, a more correct term would be intellectual monopoly. Patents, Copyrights and even Trademarks are a government granted monopoly, they do not occur naturally. That does not mean that they are a bad thing per-say, but their use should be dictated by the benefit to socitety in general, with approprate limits so their use cannot be abused.
These statutes give the power that the ol' Mercantile laws gave to those monopolies. There is no true effective choice in the market. Compainies like Microsoft are sustaining it's dominate position in the markerplace by using a state-constructed and granted monopoly, which gives Microsoft the monopoly over it's protocols , effectively just as restrictive as the East India Trading Company trading zone monopoly of the Orient.
Each country would reward advances in science and technology. The catch? No idea hogging (no patents). Just simple and honest work to improve our world.
Of course, law suits would spring up as to who should receive the credit and the money, therefore, the only conclusion is to remove patenting. Lawyers would suffer (which is why they should be identified as the corrupt link).
One thing is for certain, patents have nothing to do in the computer world. The younger generation knows this, and it is waiting for the current generation to wither and die.
Why do "we" have to wait until the year 2525 to grasp this?
It's tough to take anything they say too seriously when they seem not to have bothered to do the most BASIC research and/or fact checking. They cite incorrect durations for both patents and copyrights. A rather impressive feat.
Design patents have a term of 14 years. Utility patents have a term of 20 years from filing. They had it reverse. Also, the current term for copyright is the life of the author plus 70 years, not 50 years--this was changed several years ago (is the piece that old?)--and I believe one of the reasons Disney and others had an excuse to request extensions of copyright law (yea right to "harmonize" the old and new law/copyright term).
That's in the first 4 pages of chapter 1. Perhaps they are typos and not indications of the intellectual rigor that went into the book.
The solution I'd like to see, instead, would be the government taking a proactive stand. Instead of granting patents and waiting for the mess to sort itself out, I want the government to go out and bust patents. Presidents like to portray themselves as trustbusters; well, "patent cartels" are one large trust that's never been busted. If some technology covered by a patent becomes truly umbiquitous - that is, so widely used that the inventor has ALREADY recouped his R&D investment - I'd like to see the government force the patent into the public domain. Example: CD-ROMs... Philips hold the patent, and has been very generous with it. But the technology protected by that patent is SO widespread that any abuse of the CD-ROM patent would ruin the technology sector. Think of how much some companies (or the RIAA, to supress non-DRM formats) would pay to control that patent - the value is inconceivable.
At this point, CD-ROM technology ceases to be a useful patent and starts to become something that the general public has a vital interest in... and here's the point where the government should "seize" the patent and turn the IP over to the public BEFORE the patent expires of its own accord. A widely used piece of IP (or any of the "obvious" patents we regularly complain about here on Slashdot) has passed the point where the inventors NEED a monopoly to protect their idea and has reached the point where the only purpose of that patent is profit at the expense of the public.
Monopolies are useful, but powerful monopolies are not; patents are useful, but exploitable patents are not. The government has an active role in regulating all other monopolies; it needs to take an active role in regulating IP monopolies as well.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
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.
Instead copyright lasting life of author plus 70 years (or whatever it is); make it 5 years. Instead of patents lasting 20 years; make them 3 years.
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.
Chapter 1: The idea of "intellectual property" is broken down into two components.
1. Right of sale. If someone has an idea, that person can sell a copy of it to someone else. If someone makes a copy of it and the originator hasn't agreed to sell it, legal action can be taken. Example: An aspiring screenwriter sends a copy of his latest script to a famous director. The director likes it so much that he makes a movie out of it -- without having first acquired the right to use the script's contents. The script's author could sue the director in this case.
2. Intellectual monopoly. The originator of information can decide what others can do with that information once sold. Shrinkwrap software licenses/EULAs are a great example of this.
They argue that right of sale is a good thing because it gives creative people an incentive to produce and some amount of legal protection. They also argue that while intellectual monopoly gives them even more incentive to produce, controlling what people do with information after they have bought it (including making copies for other people) cannot be done without terrible social consequences:
Take the case of slavery. Why should people not be allowed to sign private contracts binding them to slavery? In fact, economists have consistently argued against slavery -- during the 19th century David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill engaged in a heater public debate with literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens -- with the enconomists opposing slavery, and the literary giants arguing in favor. The fact is that our labor cannot be separated from ourselves. For someone else to own our labor requires them to engage in intrusive and costly supervision. Such transaction costs are socially damaging as they imply violation of privacy and essential civil liberties. Hence they are commonly rejected on economic, not just moral, grounds. Moreover, there is no economic reason to allow slavery. With well functioning markets, renting labor is a good substitute for owning it. And so we allow the rental of labor, but not the permanant sale.
For intellectual property we are proposing the reverse: allowing the permanent sale, but not rental. For with intellectual property, posession belongs to the buyer and not to the seller. If you sell me an idea, I now have that idea embodied either in me or an object I own. For you to control the idea requires intrusive and costly supervision. Similarly if you sell me a book, a CD or a computer file. In each case, I have physical control of the item, and you can control its use only through intrusive measures.
I haven't read all of chapter 2 yet, but I'm trying to compromise between providing a decent summary of what's obviously a very insightful text in the hope that people will read it, and not getting buried on the second page where nobody will see the post.
From what I've read so far, this is really good stuff.
The title of this story completely misconstrues the author's position. The paper is titled "The Case Against Intellectual Monopoly " Not property .
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."
I Am Not An Economist, so the second chapter was challenging for me, I must confess. However, I think I get the gist of the paper's argument. And, if I do, I admit I am (pleasantly) shocked by its "innovative" argument, which opened my eyes somewhat. Of particular interest to the slashdot audience, I believe, is probably the section titled, "The First-Mover Advantage" on pages 24-28 of the second chapter. These first-mover advantages, which the current patent law intends to secure through the granting of temporary monopoly to innovators, all apply in the absence of the IP law.
In other words, absent the present incentive model of temporary monopoly to an innovation, innovators will continue to innovate, given that they can recoup the "sunken cost" of initial research. Am I convinced that the above conditions exist for innovators as "first-movers"? Yes. And, as the paper points out, there might be other ingenious ways to take advantage of new ideas in the absence of the IP law.
However, I do see the abolition of the current IP law having a radical impact on the way the society functions. First off, product-placement in "copyright" works will increase dramatically, until indeed another innovative method of extracting the initial investment cost is found. Imagine each and every single song you hear on the radio having some kind of reference to Pepsi or Marlboro. What a trade-off! Secondly, related to the first point, the advertising industry will come to exert an even greater control over musicians, software programmers, writers than they do now. In other words, if you want to make money off your work, you better do what the advertisers say. Ugh, Gator comes to mind here...
I was going to go on about the fantasy list of impacts the abolition of the IP law would have on our world, but I just remembered a question that I had and the paper didn't answer. So I will just finish this post by posing that question and, hopefully, engage some of you in a debate of sort about it as well. My question is this: in the entertainment industry (publishing, music, film, etc.) wouldn't the initial impulse to control the distribution/reproduction channel be too great to ignore? This is happening to some extent already (AOL Time, invasive P2P software) and, were the proposal of the paper to be adopted, we may see the privatization/regulation of the Internet along the line of what China is doing or the cable TV industry. This, to me, would be equally bad as (if not even worse than) the ridiculuous extension of copyright to Disney.
Man, I haven't been this excited about the IP law in a while. I didn't really think of a way to get around the economic incentive argument for the IP law before tonight...
The web is a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit.
Radio was invented 5 years before the war, but before all the companies that held seperate patents were commanded by the government to give them so the war could be fought... Basically technology was at a standstill.
This is why I like Linux, without free code sharing, I'd be unable to create a 3d MMORPG to compete with the big dogs. Crystalspace has got me up and running on a 3d engine, all I need to do is add new networking code, some animations, balance, some levels, and a story.
God spoke to me
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.
Many of our founders felt that lawyers shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress or as the President because it'd be a conflict of interest. Afterall, if a lawyer can vote on the law, they can essentially vote themselves into a lucrative occupation at everyone else's expense.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.
http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302
From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.
This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.
For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:g e&NodeID=650
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypa
and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)i l03.html
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/
You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.
Here is a paper by an intellectual property lawyer against the current system: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarHere are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If the trend had kept going we'd be at over 100 million now, but (as all of us on /. know) the Patent Office can't keep up with the applications. Also, patents went out of fashion in mid-century (possibly due to public distrust of monopolies, as well as the depression) and didn't come back in until the US started to deal with real international competition in the 70s.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.