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Reason on IP Protection and Creativity
rnturn writes "A long but interesting article over at Reasononline discusses a paper written by a pair of economists and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (!) and the reactions to it of several other economists. A snippet from the article: 'Moreover, U.S. court decisions in the 1980s that strengthened patent protection for software led to less innovation. "Far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity," Maskin and Bessen write, "these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most."' Not exactly news to most readers but it appears that their paper is making waves in economic circles."
Indeed, we need more IP Address protection... er... wait-a-minute...
Wow. They should patent that "not anything new" idea, just like everybody else, nowadays ;-).
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Too bad a magazine with a better reputation than Reason didn't pick this story up.
GameTab - Game Reviews Database
"A long but interesting article"
;)
Ah, the true readership culture of Slashdot shows itself.
The coolest voice ever.
Reactions to the paper have been mixed. Robert Solow, the MIT economist who won a Nobel Prize in 1987 for his work on growth theory, wrote Boldrin and Levine a letter calling the paper "an eye-opener" and making suggestions for further refinements.
/. has been saying this for years, but some one with a Nobel Prize calls it an eye opener?
It is amazing,
Boldrin and Levine's original paper is available here (pdf).
IP protection does NOT work, abstinence is the solution.
Be cool, Don't do it!
As was mentioned above, it really is too bad that a better job couldn't have been done on this piece. Leaving the irreputable folks at "Reason" magazine to do this work was not the best end result for all of us. I mean, Rene Descartes claimed to be doing everything "in reason", but in the end, his ideas were debuncled by David Hume a century later. This left generations upon generations the opportunity to laught at Descartes' "reasoning" as he "proves God" throughout six different lengthy meditations.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Now you may hate the entire country of France, but they have a saying, "Der er biler paa striben i aften" which could be transferred to the Simpson quote "Take an existing product and put a clock in it".
Of course innovation requires that you won't get ripped of when you come up with a great idea, but at the same time what good is it if no one can use it. Would the WWW have accelerated so fast if you were to pay license fees for every application using HTML codes? I think not. It's a fine balance that you have to maintain. To little and too much protection is evil.
I already subscribe to Reason, but you can give it a try with a free sample issue (as usual, if you don't like it, just write "cancel" on the bill). Their archive also has the full text from all issues up to Jan 2003, in case you're undecided about subscribing.
Now if only their page (or their staff blog) were more Plucker friendly ;). (Plucker is a free offline web browser for Palm)
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
That's not bad. Where'd it come from?
That Crazypatents site is a gold mine of hilarity.
1 .gif
http://www.crazypatents.com/images/Large/4044405-
Here is something just like that idea actually, but it's implemented in a truly ingenious way. They have an image of a fly in the urinal which looks real and so people will automatically aim for it.
Oh, and I actually came across GameTab the other day. Great site, I've found it very useful. I'm looking forward to Freelancer right now, but think I'm going to wait until the reviews start coming in.
The recent trends in DRM etc are actually consequences of this. If you haven't yet, go read Stallman's A right to read. He anticipated DRM 9 years ago. The point is that there are certain things as unenforceable digital restrictions, such as sending a copy of a file on a machine you own to another machine you own through a channel you own. The media companies are seeking to prevent exactly this. To succeed, they will have to own all computing. From this point, I think we are on a path of no return. Either we will end up in a big-brother like situation, or there will be a major social revolution and rebellion, an overthrow of the existing order, and major reevaluation of the thinking on intellectual property issues.
From the article:
This guy "gets it". What needs to be done is to raise awareness on a large scale so that we can meet the threats head on.I like IP rights. I think they're good; people should have the right to make a few bucks with something they invented, without the worry of competition for a little while. This is a good thing, because it gives motivation to innovate -- why create something if your competitors are free to copy it immediately and glut the market?
However, I agree that IP rights are out of control. Copyrights are being extended indefinitely, patents are granted with broad wording that allows for devious undermining of previous IP.
The cause is very obvious: corporations. They have the money and power to lobby for extentions and special rights on their legal monopolies. The solution is simple: eliminate corporate right of ownership of IP, and return it to the hands of the inventors and authors.
Obviously even with such a change, there would be openings for abuse, but they would be greatly limited by also eliminating the right to sell or transfer IP rights. Anyway, that's my opinion on the subject. Feel free to pick it apart.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
This is a Good Thing(tm). This isn't some long haired hippie hackers. This is the fscking Federal Reserve! CongressCritters actually listen to them! Of course, the Fed doesn't throw suitcases full of money at them, but still...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
YOu'd think they knew that the economy would tank, because they were/are the one's protecting the "old economy", so they let all this investment into the new economy happen, knowing that their attempts to grop control via strict patents and IP would stiffle the industry and now they've put the final nail into broadband dsl service, through their cronies at the fcc.
It makes only sense, to vote the bastards OUT!; but then again, the population is as smart as a bag of rocks, oh.. NO TERRORISM, DUCT TAPE YOUR HOUSE!
Terrorism, in the eyes of the elected official, is "a level playing field" and "competition" to their two party olygopoly. I bet the old economy corps are patting congress on the head, saying "good job".
I just had to leave my place of employment, as the new management wanted us to sign new contracts. Part of the contract stated that any idea, document, illustration, patent, trademark, (and the list goes on and on) that I may come up with, on or off the clock, or on or off the job site, at any time during my employment, was then the property soley and exclusively of the company.
Most "innovation" and invention has traditionally been done by a person in their garage or basement, working on the proverbial better mouse trap. Corporations are trying to cash in on this, saying stuff like, well, you wouldn't have gotten that idea if you didn't work for me, so it is now mine. No wonder there's been a lessening of "innovation", invention, progress, etc. What I do on my time is mine.
I may work for a corporation, but I refuse to be owned by one.
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
The basic idea of civil society, as articulated by the great enlightenment social contract philosophers, is this: You give up your "natural rights", that is, the right to take by force whatever you have the power to take, to the state, and in return, you are granted "civil rights", such as the right to your own property, the right to freely enter into contracts, freedom of speech, and so on.
Now, most copyright and patent infringement advocates don't have a problem with private ownership of material property, even though this is also an artificial construct which takes away their "right" to steal whatever they like and gives whoever acquires ownership of property through lawful market transactions a "monopoly" over its use. So why do they claim that intellectual property is any different? Usually the answer is a hodgepodge of weak analogies, claiming it is similar to such things as oxygen and water, unsubstantiated slogans like "information wants to be free", and of course the favorite retort of totalitarian zealots, "its inevitable".
But the most insidious of them all is the recent pronouncement that copyright, and intellectual property laws in general, create "monopolies", and so in fact are in opposition to the principles of free market economics. This is a gross perversion of the term monopoly, as it usually applies to monolithic, stifling state-supported enterprises. You might consider the case of the Coca-Cola corporation: They sell a popular soft drink which you may be familiar with. The secret to its popularity is great taste, and this is because of a time-tested, proprietary formula. In order to produce this beverage, naturally, operators of bottling plants have to enter into agreements with the Coca-Cola corporation, and pay royalties. If one is to follow the analogy favored by piracy advocates, Coca-Cola has "monopoly" on this drink, and it is unfair that only they are allowed to sell it, and it impedes the operation of free markets. But just ask their competitors: This idea is ridiculous. Just because they can't sell beverages made according to the exact Coca-Cola formula doesn't mean that they are prevented from selling soft drinks. It just means that in order to compete, you are forced to innovate yourself, and this results in the diversity that a market economy should provide: Pepsi, RC Cola, Jolt, and many other unique varieties of cola are available, and they are all able to profit because of their distinctive taste and branding. Why should they not be rewarded for their investment in research and development? And why should someone who rights software, books, or music not also be rewarded?
Of course an individual or corporation ought to have rights to the unique result of their own creative work, and they should also have the right to transfer these rights to anyone they please if it is in their own interest. Exclusive rights over something like the text of a particular, source code to a particular program, or a particular performance of a popular song, do not translate into a "monopoly" in the general case: It only forces competitors to produce their own original products, which produces diversity that we as consumers should value anyway. It isn't like Oxygen or water: Every O2 or H2O molecule is the same, but Microsoft Windows XP is the result of billions of dollars of research and development money invested over 20 years. And maybe it wants to be free, but perhaps so does your car: That doesn't mean that someone who tries to steal if from shouldn't be thrown in jail. We accept these abrogations of "natural law" because the result is more prosperity and more fairness for everybody.
"...it appears that their paper is making waves in economic circles."
I'm extremely happy to hear this. You can't imagine how upset the issue about patents makes me when I keep hearing about more protection, stronger laws, another lawsuit against infringement, another idiotic patent issued, and more power to the large coporations that in reality due some of the least amount of innovation, especially considering their size, power, and wealth. Good to see the issue finally coming out besides just in court suppressing the little guy. I read most of the paper a few days ago, well said, and its good to see such a long article discussing the issue on Reason.com. I must say that the issue scares a lot of people. It is because the elimination of such strong laws giving an individual or corporation ownership of an idea would in effect help bridge the gap between rich and poor. Scary isn't it? The idea would also cause a major shift in economic structure in various industries that have relied on using intellectual property as a means of profit or part of their business. Like on the front of "Programming Perl" says, "There is more than one way to do it." Yes, the current system works, but how well? Does the constant threat of piracy and increase in spending to fight it a sign of an efficient system. I sure don't think so.
Question everything.
one question I have is that if you have no right to protect your innovation, then what is to stop IBM, Sun or Microsoft from saying "thanks, we'll be using your innovation now" so that right after you come out with it it is useless (as far as unique and able to bring you business). The argument of providing service is only half valid since some things may just not lend much on the order of service. Besides, if you are not a service oriented group/person then that may actually be harmful to try (doctors rarely work as demolition engineers and vice versa). What is the worst part is that since the big companies already have such a dedicated place in the market plus tons of reserves and assets then you really just do not have a way to compete with that. Most consumers and other business decision makers will want to go with the big names even if their actual service sucks... why, because they are both betting on them being around longer (stability) and sadly are also just stupid slaves to groupthink. So, does getting rid of any and all IP really help or hinder the small businesses and thus the public (and innovation at large)?
It is such a relief to hear this. Intellectual property is not free market, or even a valid form of property. People just take it on faith that just because the government calls something a property, that it is - and has all the advantages of free market property ownership. In fact if you don't believe in it, you are even called socialist. Identifying myself as libertarian, this irks me even more. They just don't get it, IP is not about property at all - it is about controll.
Here
It's actually from march 2002. It's a 30-page academic paper with differential equations and other nice stuff, for the impatient I have reproduced the abstract:
ABSTRACT: We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In fact, established wisdom claims monopoly power to be instrumental for innovation and sees the nonrivalrous nature of ideas as a natural conduit to increasing returns. The results here challenge the positive description of previous models and the normative conclusion that monopoly through copyright and patent is socially beneficial.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Now THAT is something that should be illegal right away. I really hate those agreements, it's just a way to be able to cash in on your employee if s/he happens to ever invent something smart.
I think California state law has this one right (or at least better): if you work on something on your own time and with your own equipment then how the hell can it ever be your employers property. (Possible exception: obvious derivate of work related research). Slavery is supposed to be illegal these days.
The problem with these agreements are probably only getting worse. I can see many employers trying to push stuff like this now when the job market is much more competitive.
This is such a refreshing article which finally attempts to put good economic theory to work rather than the extremes on both sides: artists will dies f starvation, or IP will make it illegal to think.
I particularly found interesting the concept of rent-seeking bahvior,
I sure would like to have seen a deeper exploration of that theory, as I feel that is where the most problems lie with the whole IP issue. Consider for instance the cost of the patent itself. The article does a good job of analyzing the cost of R&D; the initial investment in technology. But it doesn't talk about patents in their own as an object of value. How many IP-hoarding companies exist soley to accumulate patents, and have never made any investment into research or innovation?
The patent has an inherent value separate from that of the technology that it may describe.
I would also like to see more thought about the issue of the interaction of patents with each other. The article seems to concentrate solely on one idea at a time...that each patent or IP instrument exists in isolation of all others. It does not deal with the deadlock of interdependent patents. When company A has a patent on idea X and company B has a patent on idea Y, it becomes an impediment to invent idea Z which is created from both. And in the real world, this deadlocking of ideas is out of control.
And finally, the article does not consider fully the costs imposed by the patent or IP system itself. Especially since patents are written in such a manner as to be maximally ambiguous and stealthy it becomes an extreme economic burden on any inventor to know if the ideas being developed have already been claimed. Thus why we are seeing such strange imbalances; you know, 10 lawyers for every engineer.
First of all, Reason is the one major publication other than a Linux rag or The Nation, that would get it right off the bat. The Reason Foundation does what its conservative counterparts screech about doing, but never get around to: rolling back government involvement in ours lives. They can claim credit to saving Indianapolis taxpayers around $600M because they put together a plan to privatize all non-essential government services.
/.'er in the US should keep bookmarked in case they need it against a cartel shill.
This is very bad news for the content cartels. While many people may not know about Reason, most Libertarians do and a lot of Libertarians who actually sided with the cartels will probably be swayed over against them. My father is frequently amazed (he's a staunch conservative) at how many times he's been forced to agree with a position taken by Reason Online because it just "makes sense" more than anything from the National Review. I've long said that Libertarians and Classical Liberals better represent the conservative platform than Conservatives themselves.
I read this in their print magazine. This is not a turning point against the cartels, but it is certainly a major blow. There are two types of the Right: those that believe individual rights are an essential ingredient to morality and those that believe that individual rights are expendable in order to maintain public "morality." Reason in my experience wins over the former quite easily on most issues because its arguments are realistic and it proposes how we can balance morality and individual rights in its articles related to vice and stuff like that.
One of the things that IIRC I've seen argued in Reason articles on drug prohibition is that stripping drug users of free medical care even if they are veterans would do 10x more to stop drug usage than jail terms. They frame such issues in terms that the Right can appreciate and make it very clear that such programs are nothing more than government subsidizing licensious behavior.
Invariably Reason ends up kicking its conservative competitors' asses on a regular basis. It indirectly exposes them for the statist hypocrites that they are such as ol' Goldberg over at NRO who thinks that those who are complaining of slippery slopes in regard to the PATRIOT Act and DeptHS are whiny paranoid nuts. This is an article that every
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Not too far above your post, a poster (bninjapenguin, if I remember correctly) reported that he had to leave his job because he refused to sign a "we own you" contract.
Now, what exactly is to stop IBM from taking your ideas before you even have them, and thus making them useless to you? (Except common sense, of course). Nor was that an isolated case. This exact same thing happened to my brother. The boss said that it wasn't his preference -- the banks insisted upon it -- and I actually believe that, because the company is in debt, not up to their ears, but definitely up to their belly button.
So essentially what we are seeing at this point, is if there are going to be IP laws, then there will not be, in reality, any IP, because the IP will all be owned by whomever is the most powerful. Typically, the "most powerful entity" is called the government.
Think about that. These IP laws are taking you closer to being owned, as chattel, by your government, than you've ever been before. It's no different than in "communism", where everybody owning everything means nobody owns anything.
As for your question "what can a little guy do...?", Little guys can always fit in niches that big guys never notice. Sooner or later, of course, bug guys do notice if you do well. At that point, the smart big guys buy you out. You continue to look for more niches.
----
You think this is a sig, but
it isn't. I type this by
hand each time, of course.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Government is not about sacrificing rights for common unity and security, but rather about people having natural law rights who organize to secure those rights. Property rights are a natural law right, copyrights and patents are not. (accept that if you invent something you always have the right to keep it secret, and you have the right to be acknowledged as the first creator because someone else who claimed to would be acting fradulently)
The right to copy things is a natural law right that exists outside of government. It is like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms. These rights exist outside of government, or anywhere in the world even if local governments refuse to acknowledge them. Unlike other property rights that derive from the fact that not every body can use something at the same time. With information and ideas they can - copyrights and patents are an artificial construct that has artificialy harmfull consequences.
like running in rivers available at no cost...would you still want to pay for it?
That is the situation with music.
Just a question here... if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
Because if it is, then an obvious defensive position presents itself: the homestead.
You have enough money to set up your own self-sufficient, cash-free homestead, and stick it in a state that is free from land taxes (such as W Va, or California -- whoops, scratch California: that was a joke).
Then you can invent and use what you want and need, to your heart's content. Of course, a self sufficient homestead doesn't run on the power of just one family, so part of this will be that you allow others to live there if the contribute and fit in. But still, all cash free.
Now, this ends up being unprofitable for those who live and help out, but unprofitable does not equate to a loss, when real losses are occuring elsewhere. In other words, if that's the best deal they can get, then they will come.
My train of thought isn't to advocate anything -- but simply to note that if things are really progressing in this direction, it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
according to this.
Googlecached because of site failure or so it seems.
I had long held the same opinion of the paper, that patents are fundamentally just government sanctioned monopolies. But the theory the article presented made me rethink; there is one huge and important difference between a capitalistic monopoly and these artificial monopolies. With patents it is possible to obtain a monopoly with 0% market share!
Essentially patents allow you to get a monopoly on not producing something. You can't do that in the real market-driven world where monopolies must be gained by capturing near 100% of the market. This is also one of the main differences between copyright and patent: I can't copyright something before I write it, but I sure can patent something without ever having to produce anything.
Patents used legitimately as a means to allow an inventor to safely outlay a large initial economic investment are somewhat defensible, but patents which exist soley to prevent anybody from ever acting upon some idea are just evil. And that's what seems to be happening so much today, especially in the area of software patents.
Who one this year's Nobel Prize in Economics and what was it for?
What, you don't know off the top of your head? Why not?
IMHO, DRM is about the copyright lords trying to fense off their own territory as society moves into the information age. Of course noone is going to respect that fense, so with trillions at stake all hell will certainly break loose.
It is analogous to the plantation masters trying to get back controll over slavery as society moved into the industrial age. In a desperate attempt, they broke off from the union. Of course, noone respected that boundary either.
The following site says the language is Danish.
G ue sser
http://www.xrce.xerox.com/cgi-bin/mltt/Language
And to quote the article: Much of Arrow's article examines economic means of dealing with uncertainty, none of them completely successful.
So it seems that the granting of monopolies for innovators is also not completely successful. So it goes...
That is all.
Data stabbed Troi and something... and something... and whatever... who cares?
Laws are for people with no friends.
Well said! It's like taking the car keys from a drunken friend until they sober up.
I am so damned tired of this moronic binary "either yer fur us or yer agin us" (no matter what we do) rhetoric. Life just aint that frigging simple and it's not a John Wayne movie. Anybody with half a brain that was a true statesman and leader would know that.
he finds it works well if he tweaks assumptions about the consumption and production of the intellectual assets, but it falters if he changes time constraints.
Everything works greate as long as there is a delay before people copy you. You just need to make sure the time contraint doesn't get too close to zero. You just need to artificially maintain the lower limit.
Patents and copyrights are an artificial time constraint. They preform a useful function. They give innovators a motivation - an opportunity to profit from innovating. The necessary "monopoly profits" can be captured very quickly. This does not require DECADES, this can be accomplished in MONTHS.
The current durations of copyright and patent protection do not encourage innovation, hey stifle it. Strong protections are fine as long as they are SHORT. Hell, even idiotic software patents and business method patents would be harmless as long as they expired rapidly. No one will bother to file for "defensive" and "frivolous" patents if they expire rapidly.
It would also be easy to immunize yourself against ALL patent and copyright attacks. You just need to prove that you first created/aquired your product a year or two before you actually started delivering it to customers. All copyrights/patents that predate your prototype have expired and your prototype is "prior art" for any that have not expired. It usually takes about that long to go from "prototype" to shipped product anyway.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
if I remember correctly, patents *only* apply to commercial use for sale. They do not apply to making a thing for yourself and using it. Is this correct?
By law, a patent owner can " exclude members of the public from making, using, or selling the claimed invention".
It's very hard to claim damages from noncommercial use, and traditionally lawsuits from that were rare. However, pre-internet, commercialization was just about the only way someone could spread an invention widely. So today, it's possible that a project like Debian may be claimed as damaging a company by infringing it's patents and distributing the results.
What a patent holder cannot do is stop someone from discussing or analyzing the invention. Even it they use full duplicates of the patent text to do so. (Patents are unlike copyrights in that way). But the age of the internet has muddled this point as well. Now that patents are handed out for software, what happens to the kind of person (and they do exist) that can execute source code in his head? (or just on paper?)
it would seem a form of feudalism with petty kings will be next.
The end result of a "free market" process will always be feudalism or totaltarianism, unless some force outside the market acts to maintain the "freedom".
Makes sense. After all, the pimp doesn't get paid when she does it with her husband...
In my case my employer wants me to sign something similar. What I've done is come back and point out problems with specific areas, with questions about why something worked on in my own time (like a book or photography) would belong to them, or why anything worked on up to a year after I leave would belong to them as well.
Those question go to HR, then to the lawyers... who seemingly ignore them as I never hear back from them. That cycle has been going on for about two years now, with HR wanting me to sign about once a year.
If the lawyers ever come back with responses that don't alter the document the way I like, then I'll simply re-write the document a bit to favor myself, sign that and turn it in. What are the chances they would actually read what you sign if it looks similar and the first page is the same?
This kind of post is why I like to be able to post Anon.
One problem I don't see addressed, though, is social stagnation in addition to economic. When a movie can be rereleased to the public 20 years after it debuted and pull in millions of dollars (E.T. anyone?), it's not because people are dying to see what happens, it's because it's become part of our culture. In this day and age, twenty years is a long time for something like that, and if the courts considered that a little more, they might realize that we as a people have a constitutional right not to pay $8.50 to relive our childhood memories. The writing has been done, the money has been made, it's time to stop milking it and put it in the public domain, where it belongs. I'm guessing that when ET was written, they were considering the immediate incentive of a theatrical release, as opposed to the incentive of re-releasing it twenty years later.
Is it science or supposition based on who paid for what results. The truth and the lie together.
Politicians and Business CEO/Managers love to prove things with well paid for supposition.
This allows them to point the finger and blame others like civil service employees.
The past 18 months prove again that Politicians and Business CEO/Managers are the failures
not the heroes doing their job. PA-1&2, TIA, Opt-Out stupidity, current laws on copyrights,
Patent Rights for Single-click, Penalties against non-criminal cracking, . . . all this shit is getting
to frick'en stupid.
Last month I told my wife; Hun, I did not go to Canada in the "60s", I was in the USMC at 17,
I went to Desert Shield/Storm at 39, but we may need to retire to Canada to be safe fin our old
age from what is happening to US.
However, I know, only Foolish College Kids and Patriotic Old Retires can afford to stand in the
Streets all day long and scream reality until those damn fools politicians hear US.
By the way has any of the criminal CEO and managers gone to jail for at least a couple months yet?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Are you a Nerdy TechnoPolicy Wonk? If so, then you will enjoy this paper which argues, get this, that Lawyers and Politicians discourage innovation! As radical as this may sound, my experience in the software industry supports their case. Is the software biz really in trouble? Well, all I can say is that you can tell something is really a problem when even economists start to notice.
end of blog. Yes, not too many nerds were busy writing academic papers on the subject because THEY WERE TOO BUSY PROVIDING CASE STUDIES FOR ECONOMISTS...
"IP is not about property at all - it is about controll."
Both IP and physical property are about control. If you don't control either one, then of what use are they to you? Would you invest anything in said property if someone could come along and abrogate your "control"?
Both can have a value, otherwise what would be the point of having either one? Value comes from [1], be it you, or another person. A valueless item isn't worth controlling.
Because they can have value, they have the potential to benefit the owner. Is a plot of land, unused beneficial?
So really the two aren't as dissimiliar as you think.
[1]The "worth" of the physical universe is extrinsic, for without humans, and their need/want of a "benefit", everything is naturally valuless.
" Like on the front of "Programming Perl" says, "There is more than one way to do it." "
True, BUT were's the incentive to discover those many ways, if all you have to do is use someone elses way? Progress comes in part from exploring those many paths, not following the "one true way". Patents and Copyright are the legal way of addressing that issue. The ABUSE of patents and Copyright is what we should be fighting.
So anyone game for an alternative for Patents, and Copyright? Just keep in mind that any viable "alternative" you come up with, must deal with the twin "the nature of humans", and "the nature of the physical universe", and must be better than what came befor, else what would be the point of replacing it?
And ironically, anyone who actually mods this post up is sure to be $rtbl'd too.. :)
--
Why can't I use my karma bonus on Anonymous postings?
There was a Dilbert strip that went something like this:
Asok: Sweet mother of potatoes! I've just come up with a million-dollar idea!
PHB: We own all your ideas. Cough it up or we will fire you and then we will sue you.
[Asok cries]
Alice: The first million-dollar idea is the toughest.
And I thought this was fiction. It's frightening how much of Dilbert is more real than you'd think.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
It's protected by its status as a trade secret -- which means, contrary to patents, that if I figure out the formula &/or process, I can do what I want with it. A trade secret's protection is the fact that it *is* a secret. A patent, however, must be publicly disclosed in order to be registered under patent law (Military/National Security concerns may allow for an exception to this requirement).
Calling my product "Coca Cola" however, would contravene Trademark laws. These can also be problematic (eg when MacDonalds tied to sue people for calling their business or product something starting with "Mac").
Bernard Swiss
But Reason is a good magazine, and its online version is even better. I find them to be more intellectually honest - by far - than the Cato Institute, they have a good sense of humor, excellent writers, and are generally fair-minded. And I'm not the only person who thinks so; a lot of people who don't subscribe to all of Reason's views still give it props as a source of writing, especially in the last year or so.
This is a gross perversion of the term monopoly, as it usually applies to monolithic, stifling state-supported enterprises.
...? Last time I checked, it was the state that enforced copyright and patent rights.
Um, and you point would be
The fact is that copyright, and patent rights are artificial, state enforced monopolies, as the creators of these concepts were quite aware. IP monopolies are granted for the purpose of increasing the total volume of creation, but they render any particular work unnaturally (by comparison to a situation without state force) scarce. For example, due to copyright there are more movies, but once a movie is created, there are fewer copies for sale than there would be otherwise be.
I think your reluctance to consider IP rights a form of monopoly may come for a sense that state granted monopolies are automatically bad. However, this is not necessarily the case. There may be a public interest in certain monopolies, as there were in early telephone utilities which were granted monopolies and the corresponding profits to attract the investment necessary to create universal service. However, it is very important to note that once monopolies have served their purpose, they are probably best dispensed with.
Of course an individual or corporation ought to have rights to the unique result of their own creative work, and they should also have the right to transfer these rights to anyone they please if it is in their own interest.
The question is what right does a person have to the fruits of his labor? Information is a fundamentally different thing from physical objects. If a person laboriously cuts a highly accurate circle out of a piece of steel he owns, then he owns the result. If he calculates pi to 1000 digits, does he then own that information? Of course not. A physical object can only be used by one party at a time; a fact, idea, strategy, or expression can be used by unlimited parties.
Of course, the need to ensure the most efficient use of a piece of information is not the basis or intellectual property, the way it is for a physical object like a hammer or a car. It can't be, since it has the opposite sort of effect, by limiting the utility of ideas and expression. Nor is the basis of IP the need to reward effort, as I have just demonstrated above. The purpose of IP is to reward originality. However to proceed from this to an extreme natural rights position is to take an unrealistic view of the creative process. Originality exists, but complete originality does not: all new inventions employ the intellectual commons. Presume for the moment that it is OK to patent genes. But what would have happened if the idea of DNA had been patented? Or the very idea of a gene? To treat ideas as natural property means that these would never enter the commons unless they were abandoned.
There are two approaches to this question: one of utility, and one of fundamental rights. From a perspective of utility, the question reduces to this: does it make good public policy to permanent close off the intellectual commons to any ideas that are not abandoned? The answer is no, because to do so will hamper future thinkers, and burden them in perpetuity with the need to consult a database before they can think along certain lines, or to hire a lawyer to examine all their potential utterances.
A rational public policy promotes the interests of the public by both enabling and incenting creativity; that is to say by allowing a rich commons to form, while giving creators a limited time in which to enjoy monopoly benefits. This in fact represents the ideal situation for the creative person, for his creativity is given plenty of raw material to work with, but is then rewarded at a rate than otherwise would be possible.
Now on to the natural rights perspective. Given that limits on intellectual property benefit creative people as a rule, then to assert that these people can have an absolute and unlimited right to their intellectual work is to posit the existence of a right that, at least in the form envisioned, harms its possessor. Perhaps such rights can exist by certain ways of thinking, but it seems more or less absurd to me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and "Havenoplotsoresorttotechnobabbleotons"
would that mean that a plastic bag over your head is an IP condom?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"Are you serious? Do you really believe what you have just said?
Either one of us wouldn't be posting in a public forum if we weren't
"People don't want to use "someone elses way" when they want to increase efficiency for example. The incentive to "discover" comes from the increase in quality or quantity. "
I thiink I see were the confusion comes from. When I use the phrase "incentive to discover" as it relates to my original post. I'm referring to revolution (multipathed), while your "increase in quality or quantity" more times than not, can be achieved through evolution (one path)..i.e. The wheel. The original could have been a stone that was round. Everything after is an evolution from that idea. While a revolution would be going from none to the hover sled. Just on the principle of least effort, which one do you think people would have picked?
I should not have to hunt around all day just to find real assistance to problems. Example: Lets say I got screwed over by a company recently and the courts seem to be ignoring the situation of fair business and contractual obligation. I really do not want to go to the government to solve my problems, so I think to myself, "Self, lets look online for some help to this problem." Instead of finding real answers I am greeted with ambiguous niceties that do absolutely nothing for me or anyone else like me. So I fire off some emails asking for some directions on where to turn next for starters. Instead of getting treated like a person I get a very generic and very much offtopic form letter type of response. In the end I a very broke, very frustrated and will either resort to violence or its neighbor... government. Perhaps there was already a precident in place that is similar to protecting me as an individual from being robbed or extorted by another individual (but obviously dealing here with business). I however will not know that unless I can somehow find some way to get some extra money and hire a lawyer to find out. However, I generally do not trust lawyers and feel that I should not have to rely on them simply to be able to do fair and honest business in the USA. So much for rhetoric... it has yet to help me. Sound bites don't help either.
Back to reality though, as for niches I agree to a point but then I have often seen "the little guy's" niche taken up even by the roaring leviathon (sp) several states over. I gained interest in the idea of "IP for ransom" where you make a certain payback and even profit and then give up your IP rights. Sort of like some game software companies do with opening the source of their engines. Bah! I am in shape to be typing now, so will quit now.
I think you are just opening a can of worms trying to so finely legislate the ownership of a property. This would generate yet more lawyers and lawsuits settling isses based upon loopholes in your imperfect legislation schemes.
Make it illegal for this in case of this unless this and then what about this.
Lets be realistic.
I invent a new gizmo and whatever protection I receive I can choose to enforce, give away or sell just like my Buick.
Keep it simple or it gets real complicated (just what we need)
Put the IP throttle where it is most efficient and effective.
The issue with IP protection problems has more to do with shoring up patent quality via obviousness and utility criteria.
Also, give anyone more opportunity to strike down bad patents (without litigating).
PTO has moved in this direction with recent law changes (patent improvement act of 2002) but you would never hear anyone on
And lastly.
I get sick of hearing those that think patents on ubiquitous items are bad.
The ubiquitous item was, by law, unique (non-existent) when the patent's inventor first conceived of it.
"I'm sorry sir, but everyone is infringing your patent, that's not fair so we must revoke your patent. You are only allowed to retain your patent if only some people infringe upon it."
Congratulations! You've just rediscovered communism.
Example of too little protection:
The GPL is outlawed, so that it is illegal to prohibit people reusing your code and not providing the source and the same rights, etc.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
The natural partern of human society is to wide spread the info. At the lowest level from the highiest level "secret" spread like widefire. There is no intellectual property. Once you say it to somebody, it is gone in the WILD.
:).
IP is the natural evolution of ULTRA CAPITALISTIC society, where everything from idea to DNA can be sold or stamped with a price. And I would dare to day that DRM and ultra big brother state is not the natural evolution of a human society or any police state, but this is the natural evolution of CApitalisitc society where everything can be controlled to be sold.
A bit like Neuromancer and its big corporation spionning on each other (Zaibaistsu ?) and the nation which are never mentionned because powerless
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Just so you know, I am not one of the "pie in the sky" libertarians. Rather, I believe that libertarianism is the best state for an economy to be in, but it is incredibly hard to maintain, because *it essentially requires both an inherent sense of honesty and charity in the daily life of each person*.
So it can exist where everyone is devoted to essentially being honest and charitable to others. Aside from that, as far as I can tell it *must decay* to violence and slavery of one form or another.
It is for this reason, in part, that I am such a reactionary [read religiously conservative and morally driven] in my viewpoints. I like Libertarianism, and I hate to see things get worse. That is not to say that I think that religious conservativism should be forced on anybody. I don't. Rather, I think that if people don't force themselves to religiously honest, conservative living, then they'll have something else forced on them that they like even less.
As for me, I can put up with either the one, or the other, or that brief period of immoral freedom between. And I'll live like a libertarian, not forcing my religion on others, even if it kills them to let them choose otherwise, even if it eventually kills me [which is quite possible] when others choose otherwise.
But anyhow, I like libertarianism the best. I just don't see any real action, except for moral living and urging others towards moral living, which will help get us there.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Ummm... yeah, it's me again, and yeah, that's communism all right. But see my next statement, where I point out that it looks like overly restrictive IP leads to one form of feudalism or another.
Communism never works out incredibly well. It's a miserable sort of existence [though arguably there are more miserable forms as well].
And in reality, Communism is indistinguishable from another form of feudalism, unless it's completely voluntary and not the "best option available" for people who don't really want that either.
But yeah, that's communism. I don't like it, but I could see that being an offshoot of all this IP overkill. I hope it doesn't happen, though.
Now let's presume for a minute that you could somehow devise an algorithm to compute the proper share of the IP that each employee would receive on this new drug. OK, fine. So then who is going to pay for the other 9 drugs that were heavily invested in but failed due to things that couldn't be forseen? The employees in your probable idea would not be absorbing their fair share of risk to actually create a product from start to finish. It's one thing to cash in on an idea after it has succeeded; it's another thing entirely to actually incur all of the costs and risks to fund a whole effort that is necessary to generate those few successes.
In any event, the markets are pretty efficient in reality. If, say, an engineer is very good at what he does, then he can take his skills to a higher bidder or start his own company. As long as the company can maintain margins sufficient (through IP) to make that engineers compensation worthwhile, in a competitive market you will see that engineers compensation rise to a point that is reasonably close to his value. It is a fact that in many companies you have large bonuses for such innovations and stock options. I personally know a couple engineers who are now millionares today just by working for the right company: they took stock options, they absorbed part of the risk and they got a good piece of the pie. The point is that strong IP ultimately benefits the employees too. Even if they're not as lucky to get a lot of options, their salary is at least somewhat derived from IP. Now I grant you that not every company compensates their employees as well as they should, but there's a certain amount on inefficiency built into everything; eventually the company will either improve compensation or risk losing market share by producing marginal products--in other words, it's in the corporations best interest here.
That's a cheese danish, which isn't half-bad with a cup of coffee or hot tea.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I have proposed before (Sorry, no links to examples) that the geek community lobby the Nobel nominators to consider Stallman, Raymond, Torvalds for a joint Nobel in economics.
While none of them is officially an academic economist (nor do they agree with each other on all things), they have each, in their own way, contributed to a radical rethinking of economic models relating to IP. I don't know any of them, but I would think that all three would consider such a prize as representing not their efforts but in the spirit of this new theory, all those who participate in this +1 game - the community as a whole could be considered as receiving the prize.
In true "Open" spirit, the rethinking has been done, not in the theoretical realm of academics (the "Cathedral"?), but in the empirical, rough-and-tumble real world of the Bazaar. Thus, the model and its proof (or at least evidence) are created at the same time.
Eventually the academic economists (perhaps me - I'm going back to school to finish my BS-CS and then hopefully earn a PhD in Econ.) will formally define the theoretical models that describe the bazaar. But IMHO 'twould be better and more appropriate if the folks (all of them, not just the SLR trio) who have built and proved the Open model by betting their careers and businesses on this model, received the credit.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
How can a post about free subscriptions to Reason be off-topic in response to a Reason article?
You have been meta-modded UNFAIR. This lessens the chance you will moderate in the future, DUMBASS.
You mods are really pathetic sometimes.
Anonymous MetaMod
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