Slashdot Mirror
Greenspan Examines the Economics of IP
lilgerry writes "Alan Greenspan is asking some tough questions about the correct balance between rewarding innovators and inhibiting follow-on innovators. There's not many answers here, but there's a hint that there could be some clear economic thinking coming to be added to the discussion. Several good questions raised, and in very precise terms that should get papers published on these topics for years to come."
So, does anyone know of somewhere that I can say, hear, the speach. I mean it is a speach.
it read like a bad history paper...i couldnt make it through. any body want to paraphrase it accurately?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You shouldn't be able to patent anything that has no mass. Think about it.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
You won't hear any "speach", anywhere. They're called speeches.
Just thought I'd point that out.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
Damn, I had my heart set on patenting neutrinos...
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
I think Greenspan is a smart guy. He has the moral understanding of Capitalism that he got from Ayn Rand and that lot, but unlike your average ideological Objectivist, he's also pragmatic. He understands that, say, the inefficiency of the federal reserve affecting interest rates is balanced against the short-term chaos and unpredictability of an unregulated money supply.
So what he's saying here is interesting and balances the ideology of "intellectual property" with pragmatic reality. The main point I notice is this:
To put it another way: free markets are beneficial, we all agree on that. We also most note that free markets are self-organizing. Which means that most people act in a way that supports the existence of a free market. This idea is echoed by Greenspan's statement above.
When 20 million people trade files on P2P networks, they may be commiting an act which is morally wrong according to our present views, but they are merely exploiting a property of information that has always been bubbling under the surface: it can easily be copied. Technology today is simply exposing the false assumption, made long ago, that information is difficult to copy.
A "free market" in information is therefore not self-regulating, and should not be called a free market at all. It's more like a kind of "non-laissez-faire capitalism"
We should ask ourselves, is the massive regulation required to prop up this system worth it? Or should we just fix this assumption and start anew?
. . . is when Slashdot's resident hyper-socialist posts a story that links to thoughts that illuminate the problems of socialism's primary mantra: regulate everything.
Thanks for the questions. Now does anyone have any answers? A very philosophic paper, but philosophy doesnt solve problems. It creates debate, but those that fight the most for their side of the issue will be well-funded by Disney, I'm sure.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
>>If our objective is to maximize economic growth, are we striking the right balance in our protection of intellectual property rights?
Definitely not.
>>Are the protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so broad as to shut down follow-on innovation?
Definitely not. We are on a path to stifle ALL follow-on innovation.
>>Are such protections so vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of capital?
Definitely yes.
News at 11!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Censored by IMF!
HEY TIM-OPPY:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
But if you create a work of art (music, literature, etc) and store it digitally, at some point its reproduction will need photons. Since they're energy they're supposed to have no mass...but they do by virtue of their motion.
Back to square one!
Wait, so when you patent an algorithm, it's just a mathematical thing, therefore it has no mass, so it shouldn't patentable. What about drugs? Are you patenting the physical drug, or the method of making the drug, or what? The method of making the drug has no mass. All patents can be reduced to massless things. What exactly are you measuring for mass? It's not as simple as you make it, I don't think.
I think much of the rest of the world is like this, at least for software patents.....
Kids, Alan Greenspan is asking exacly the questions that have been flying around here forever.
I think he is a closet slashdot reader.
Yeah... I'd vote for him for President, but he's far to smart to do something like that.
He uses a lot of words to talk about a few simple concepts.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
A molecule has mass!
Intellectual Property covers things that are non-tangible e.g. trademarks, and all those Amazon.com patents. WIPO
One of the biggest problems with reforming IP laws is that these are disproportionately impacted by those lobbying for special interest groups. Just think how happy the entire coutry will be if MP3s could be freely copied and shared on the Internet. Does it really stifle music creation? I don't think so. Just think of the free software movement ... it should not exist but it does. Creative people are not in "it" solely for the money. But who is there to ask the really tough question?
Alan Greenspan is asking some tough questions about the correct balance between rewarding innovators and inhibiting follow-on innovators
What balance? Doesn't rewarding innovators with a patent naturally inhibit follow-on innovators?
From the speech: How appropriate is our current system--developed for a world in which physical assets predominated--for an economy in which value increasingly is embodied in ideas rather than tangible capital?
Can't wait to see what they come up with at the conference. We've been saying the patent system needs an overhaul, wonder if they'll reach the same conclusions we've reached here.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Some time ago an experiment showed that they do have mass. However, this mass is so small that we cannot detect it.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Maybe it's just me (it is about time to go home, and the spectre of getting drunk is looming ever larger in my mind), or was that scoop extremely non-sensical and vague? I understand the importance of ReadingTFA before asking questions, but shouldn't the scoop in some way articulate the actual purpose of itself? Where the hell is Nietchze?
The question, then, is what happens if someone else patents the anti-matter version of whatever you patent. Clearly, both patents considered together cover a bunch of energy with no rest mass. Thus, can I void your patent! =)
Greenspan is saying everything that has been said on Slashdot and other venues: the laws are unbalanced towards hyper-regulation, and there's an "untamed" frontier trampling IP rights totally unaffected by the hyper-regulation.
Although said in the usual Econo-speak, one of his themes is that trying to use the court system to tame this frontier is a waste of time, and ultimately useless. Other markets don't need constant lawsuits and court intervention because everyone understands and respects the rules and have no desire to cross them. The rules seem fair and the market prices things at an appropriate level so there's little desire to break the rules by most participants.
That's Greenspans way of saying the DMCA and the Lawyer Heavy tactics are going to stunt growth. He's really suggesting that IP rules be re-written so everyone can respect them and live by them, and implicitly, the IP vendors should try learning to live in a true free market where their prices come down due to competition.
That's one of his themes.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
scripsit BetterThanCaesar:
I just did a quick search, and I think the Supreme Being has prior art there. Sorry.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
You shouldn't be able to patent anything that has no mass. Think about it.
No!!!! I'll never be able to get rich off of the mass-less aircraft I'm working on! You'll ruin me! I'm so shocked I can't even come up with any more knee-jerk responses!
In all seriousness, though, that's a very, very good guideline for those who can't seem to grasp the whole concept versus invention thing. Like lawyers and patent clerks for example.
Emerging issues in Intellectual Property
To this day he is still pushing on the string. I don't care what he has to say about IP - its as irrelevant as what he has to say about stock prices, the bond market, or the weather. The man is a fraud.
Hold on. For an experiment to have shown that a neutrino has mass, they would have had to detect the mass of the neutrino, therefore it cannot have mass "so small that we cannot detect it".
If a neutrino has a mass "so small that we cannot detect it", we can obviously not perform an experiment that shows that they do have mass, as experimental evidence is based on observations (and thus, detection).
Indeed, the nature of intellectual property is importantly different from physical property. In particular, one individual's use of an idea does not make that idea unavailable to others for their own, simultaneous use. Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate. From an economic perspective, this provides a rationale for making the calculus, developed initially by Leibnitz and Newton, freely available, despite the fact that those insights have immeasurably increased wealth over the generations. Should we have protected their claim in the same way that we do for owners of land? Or should the law make their insights more freely available to those who would build on them, with the aim of maximizing the wealth of the society as a whole? Are all property rights inalienable, or must they conform to a reality that conditions them?
Hmm.... This is the exact same line of reasoning that I've seen in hundreds of /. posts. I think it's more than likely that Mr. Greenspan has pirated one of these postings. If he wants to make a living discussing economic issues, he needs to go back and innovate his own arguments, then exercise the due dilligence to make sure that they are in fact totally novel. This previously used argument is the rightful property of those whoever first posted it here.
I think a intellectual output calls for two protections which are to be VERY differently managed. All too often the two are wrongly lumped into one or at least muddled.
One is attribution: Your idea is yours, and anybody quoting or using it should attribute it to you whenever possible. I think this is an inalienable right and cannot be argued away. The GPL, for example, is very clear on this.
Second is compensation: Your idea MAY be yours to profit from it. Society MAY decide to let you use the idea for profit and help defend yourself from imposters. This is NOT an inalienable right, but merely a social bargain and will change over time to reflect market and societal environment.
I think Alan Greenspan in his speech correctly goes back to the underpinnings of the second protection and asks whether our current system of IP protections benefits or hurts the economy.
The whole idea behind patents is that you patent the PROCESS, not the material product. You can't patent a cheese burger or glass or steel, but you can patent the process of making the cheese burger, manufacturing and refinement of glass or steel.
You don't patent a car, you patent the DESIGN. Think about it, you can't patent matter. That's absurd. "You've got 10 molecules of naturally occruing versions of a material I've patented. You owe me XXX!"
Thinking like yours is why people people oppose anything with the word patent in it. You don't understand it at all.
It's a ton easier to whine about a problem than to offer solutions. But at some point before you offer a solution you must find out what you are solving. Such a monolithic problem as this seems appropriate to some subdivision before we have the all encompassing solution laid out on a silver platter.
This article is very relevant to this discussion: http://www.eff.org/IP//against_ip.article
Test 1 2 3 4
The only economist crowd is the one that has a job not in accounting.
Try it some time. You'll learn true economics.
You shoudlnt be able to patent an algorithm. Its friggin mathematics, it is the laws of the Universe. What if someone patented 1*2? What, no more math textbooks? WTF are you talking about? Why in god's name should algorithms be patentable. They fall into the exact same case as software patents. (And don't go off on how if algorithms aren't paentable who will research them. Hint: people don't become methematicians for the "huge" profit margins. They do it because they love acedemia, and these people will continue doing mathematical research in the acedemic community regardless).
As for the drugs, no they should not be patentable either. So you have the cure for AIDS, but you have a patent on it, so what now *I* have to die because you are a greedy bastard? This lack of mraility in American dug policy is incomprehensible, instead of putting human lives first, they put profits first. All research into medicine and drug research should be publicly funded. End of story. No corperation should be able to profit off of someones terminal condition just because they happen to have a piece of paper saying they own the equation to make the drug that cures them. Such a thing is morally disgusting.
Glad to see someone in a position of such great power and influence (arguably he is the most influential single person in American) considering these issues with deliberation.
Reform of IP laws for the better have long suffered from the impediment of entrenched special interests benefitting from the current laws.
To gain the trust of the extremely important business community, Greenspan has had to cultivate an aura of being above the fray of petty politics where insistent congressman want him to push the gas pedal to the floor just in time to make the economy "look good" right around re-election time, even if such policies are not in the long term best interest of the economy as a whole. Since Volker, the Chairman of the Fed has been the Wizard of Oz and business people like the predictability of low inflation.
Being in that position gives special credence to his words.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Sigh. He lost me right there. I thought our objective was to maximize joy and minimize suffering. (I guess I'm either a utilitarian or a Buddhist.) Almost everyone seems to believe that the society with the fastest-growing economy is the best society for its members, but I've never seen a coherent argument to that effect. In fact, until I see something of the sort, I'm inclined not to believe it.
OK, if you're done being apoplectic about me challenging this particular sacred cow, how about explaining this belief to me slowly and calmly, in a manner suitable for a weak-mided fool like myself who somehow misses the point.
mt
IP has become so broken, that the stench of it's failure has caused even the most gung-ho of businessfolk has taken notice.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
"Alan Greenspan is asking some tough questions about the correct balance between rewarding innovators and inhibiting follow-on innovators."
Are they tough questions because they're difficult to answer? Or are they tough questions because no one understands what the fuck he's talking about?
Being a fan of C-SPAN, I suspect it's the latter.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You should be able to patent a silicon chip that implements an algorithm, but not the algorithm itself. Someone else should be free to write a software program that does the same thing.
You should be able to patent a factory that produces a drug through a certain process. You should be able to patent the actual pill that is produced. One should not be able to patent the idea of a factory that makes a drug.
Patents on inventions are good. Patents on meta-inventions are not good.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
You ask: "What about drugs? Are you patenting the physical drug, or the method of making the drug, or what?"
Then you state: "The method of making the drug has no mass. All patents can be reduced to massless things."
If the thing with mass is the only thing patentable, then that's it. Your questions become irrelevant. Sure, all patents can be transformed to methods or algorithms in a sense that a patent may have to describe the method to arrive at the end goal. But if the end goal is a physical product, it has mass and the patent is for the end product, not the process to produce that product.
So the poster's suggestion that only products with mass be patentable takes that into account. Don't overthink it.
I admire the simplicity of the capitalist ideal, but using it as a justification for making everything behave like property by enforcing scarcity where there is none, is an ugly perversion of capitalism, in fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of capitalism.
Capitalism is a means to manage scarcity, and it is very good at it, but artifically creating scarcity just so that capitalism may be applied is like shooting people to create a demand for hospitals:
"stop shooting people!"
"what, you don't like hospitals?"
AG is not saying anything that hasn't been said before.
The federal court of appeals (patent court) judges all realize that they control important economic valves by their infringement decisions (in deciding how to rule on adjudicated patents' breadth).
And he is not saying that IP laws should be abolished or weakened.
Are the protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so broad as to shut down follow-on innovation? Are such protections so vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of capital?
He is just saying that they play an important part in our economic performance.
A lot of papers have already been written on the basic subject matter that he broached.
Greenspan is a former "Randroid" and even though he has been holding a job that involves government micromanagement of a certain aspect of the economy, his exposure to the other side apparently still has him meeting Planned Economists with hesitancy.
"If our objective is to maximize economic growth.." If indeed.
And as for economic growth.. my cat got sick after many years of wellness. I took the cat to the vet and wrote a check for the bill she presented me. The vet's service and my payment -- that was economic growth. And thank Allah for the coming economic growth in the construction industry in Manhattan. More illness and disaster is just what this economy needs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Let's ask Greenspan to do a Slashdot Interview!
Why not? What's the worst that could happen?
Hmmmm., maybe he doesn't have/use email.
scripsit Sylver Dragon:
You can do that IFF a != b, else you're dividing by zero. You already knew that, though, right?
Still cute, though... I wonder what proportion of people can find where that doesn't work.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
(a+b)(a-b)=b(a-b)
(a+b)=b
Uhmm, you can't divide both sides by zero, which is what a-b or (1-1) is. limits/L'Hopital's rule and all that. It's the same as saying since 4*0 = 1*0, ergo, if we divide both sides by zero, 4=1.
Greenspan writes:
"More generally, in the physical world, the usual situation is that each additional unit of output is more costly to produce than the previous one; that is, production, at least eventually, is characterized by increasing marginal cost. By contrast, in the conceptual world, much of production is characterized by constant, and perhaps even zero, marginal cost."
This is a common economic confusion of production with distribution. The production of an intellectual work is not the same thing as its reproduction, but economic theories evolved in the past have no conception of this.
To take Greenspan's example, creation of an on-line encyclopedia, the fact that "the cost of reproduction and distribution is near zero" does not enter into the cost of actual production, i.e., the foregoing creation.
What economists like Greenspan are attempting to do is justify ex post facto a regime that compensates those who reproduce and distribute works, when what is really needed is an economic model that compensates the producers of intellectual works. The two may often be assumed to be one and the same, but this is often (perhaps rarely) the case.
Peace and love, y'all
> One of the most significant inventions of the
> nineteenth century was the cotton gin. Perhaps it
> was a harbinger of things to come that the
> intellectual property content of the cotton gin
> was never effectively protected from copiers.
Yet the invention was wildly successful and the inventor became wealthy and famous. This implies that the inventor's monopoly need not be perfect.
> Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected.
Ownership of ideas is not protected at all. Copyrights protect expressions of ideas while patents protect inventions: configurations of matter.
> In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen
> to strike a different balance in recognition of
> the chaos that could follow from having to trace
> back all the thoughts implicit in one's current
> undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator
> of each one.
Again the confounding of ideas and inventions.
> So rather than adopting that obviously
> principled but unworkable approach,
I see nothing obvious about the notion that ownership of ideas should be protected. Quite the contrary.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Economic growth? Taking your cat to the vet may support the current economy, but it in no way changes it. Construction also is a well established part of the economy, and the exercising of that part does not create new possibilities or change the economic landscape.
Growth implies change, and your examples exhibit no potential to create change.
Greenspan is questioning whether the current state of and direction IP laws are going are really promoting economic growth or stifiling it, and so questions what the motives behind them are. Hence, "if our objective is to maximize economic growth..." It is a good way of expressing that, I would say.
I thought that the administration had him lined up to be replaced in May (after his war/ defect/ uncertainty). Does anyone know about this .. source / links? I am sure the markets will just dive with the yahoo that bushwill select.
As I read, an interesting thought struck me.
Part of the problem is that unlike real property secured by a deed, intellectual property claims are terribly vague. In fact, the entire field of patent attourneys pride themselves on being able to be just specific enough to get the patent granted and no more.
No property deed is allowed to claim this house and the land out yonder as a valid description, but that's exactly what patents are like. The resulting uncertainty is increasing the risks at an alarming rate. A good first step would be to tighten up patent claims to be as concrete as possible.
Even a strong supporter of IP should agree to that.
Neutrinos were originally theorized to explain a reaction which had to produce an extra particle with no mass (but with its other properties such as spin non-zero). I believe it was something along the lines of a particle decaying into other particles with the sum of the masses of the non-neutrino particles being equal to the mass of the original particle. However, it would seem that since neutrinos have mass, the other particles didn't sum to the total mass, it just seemed that way due to the inaccuracy of our measurements. You could say that the neutrino was assumed to have zero mass because of an underflow error.
I hope I've made all of that accurate enough to satisfy the people who are better informed on physics than I am. I'm just a math student.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
When you patent a drug you patent the actual active chemical. The patent clock starts running the day you submit the patent on the drug substance. You then have 20 years to make your money. By the time you have completed all the studies to convince the FDA that the stuff is safe and effective you are generally down to 12 to 14 years to recover your costs (usually in the 1 to 2 Biliion dallar range). Typically you will also patent any formulation and process that you use to make the finished product, but once the patent runs out on the active ingredient you can be sure that someone will figure out an alternative formulation. The upshot of all this is that with a drug the patent is on the 500 mg of cipro in that little tablet. Definativly, this has mass.
If everyone who invented math did this we wouldnt have progressed this far. Imagine if Egyptians patented math?
Or what about drugs? Why should you be able to patent this? Sure no one else should be able to sell the drug, but if sick people in countries who cannot afford to buy the drug want to make it themselves why cant they?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
If I may be so bold, how many concubines do you have in your harem?
Well some people don't agree with physical property laws. Doesn't mean the government will or should do away with those. I'm sure you have good reasons against such laws--especially since they are being abused in ridiculous ways.
However, these days the US government and others only count "IP" if some company is using it to make a profit. Ordinary people "create" "IP" all the time. When you wrote that post, you created "IP", yet you didn't charge any money for it. According to the government and the entertainment cartel, your post is worthless. The US is a great country isn't it?
wrong. if drugs can't be patented then nobody will be willing to pony up the cash for the research. what we need, and it sounds like what greenspan is saying, is a balance between protection for corporations of intellectual property and a protection for consumers from privateering pharmaceutical companies.
What a crock, if they need the cash that badly then form a co-cop. I assure you, if I had AIDS, I would be happy to pony up the money even if someone else could copy the cure. With that logic we could say that Ford has no incentive to invest a billion in safety research unless they have a monopoly on making cars. SO WHAT!, there are plenty of lunatics and governments out there that have no incentive to do grand good unless they have the power to coerce the masses. Over time, they have all proven to be full of it, and so are patents.
What amazes me is that there are so many people who buy into the thought that patents are free market like some type of property right. WRONG! This is a government imposed monopoly, and a dysfunctional one at that.
dan kohn wrote a nice essay ("steal this essay 1") about why when the marginal cost to produce something is zero, the property regime must be rethought. bradford delong, a berkeley economist (and occasional wired contributor :) in conjunction with froomkin wrote a more detailed piece here. oh and delong also presented with lawrence summers (former treasury secretary, now president of harvard) this stuff at the 2001 annual federal reserve symposium in jackson hole, including an interesting proposal:
"New institutions and new kinds of institutions--perhaps even some that have been tried before, like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century (see Kremer (1998))--may well be necessary to achieve the fourfold objectives of (a) price equal to marginal cost, (b) entrepreneurial energy, (c) accelerating the cumulative process of research, and (d) providing appropriate financial incentives for research and development. The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer (1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."
Patent examiners are overworked and underpaid. As a result, many are foreigners, and can barely speak passable English. Additionally, they only search against other previously patented ideas when deciding the fate of a new patent.
As a result, a patent like 1-click by amazon is quickly approved. Since business process patents were only in existence from the late 90s, no one had the chance to patent this obvious business idea.
ds
I believe the best way to maximize the public benefit (creation times ditribution) is with "classic" copyright protection.
I agree that restoring fair use would help bring copyright back into balance, but what are your thoughts on an appropriate term of monopoly? Twenty years, to match patents? Life plus 70, as under the Bono Act? Or something in between?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Are they tough questions because they're difficult to answer? Or are they tough questions because no one understands what the fuck he's talking about?
No, they are tough questions because nobody wants to accept the answer that's right in fromt of their noses - copyrights and patents are bullshit! They are not property, they are not free market, and they are not really the incentive they've been cracked up to be, and they are not going to work in the information age.
Exports of intellectual property are very important to the American economy. (see http://www.mpaa.org /legislation /press /97/97_10_24.htm) That's why we are getting a bunch of legislation that we don't like. Don't expect the leash to get loosened any time soon.
The $53 billion in IP exports may well be like the fruit in a monkey trap. The monkey reaches through the narrow neck of a jar to get the fruit but it can't get its hand out without letting go of the fruit. The monkey won't let go of the fruit and the people come and get the monkey.
Greenspan is right about what will happen when we go overboard with copyright and patent legislation. I just don't think he will be listened to. Too bad. I think that will cost us big time.
"Scrounge around for breadcrumbs"? Only if "breadcrumbs" is your code word for advertiser dollars. Movies already prominently feature products. Remember The Wizard, a feature-length commercial for Nintendo video games? And imagine how much LFO could have got for "Summer Girls". If you remember, the song sounds like a f*ng commercial for Abercrombie. Apparently, Chinese songwriters and recording artists are funding their albums through such advertiser patronage.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Damn, I had my heart set on patenting neutrinos...
I just did a quick search, and I think the Supreme Being has prior art there. Sorry.
I just did a quick search through my files, and I am sorry to say that I don't. It must have gotten lost in that nasty business. You know the one I am talking about. Caused quite a lot of deaths.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
AIDS victims often advocate that AIDS drugs should be free or have their patents nationalized or invalidated so that all of those who suffer from AIDS could afford medication. The big problem with this is that if the profit motive is remove from creating AIDS drugs, companies won't risk hundreds of millions required to develop the drugs.
I don't see any conflict here, at least under U.S. law. When the U.S. federal government nationalizes a patent, it uses its Fifth Amendment power of eminent domain, which guarantees the patent holder "just compensation" for the patent (James v. Campbell, 1882).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Keep copywrights and trademarks, but eliminate patents.
Lets say you can't patent anything.
This has many good effects:
#1 You have patent lawyers and government officials freed up to do other projects... Say roads and housing the homeless.
#2 Only really really rich corporations win patent suits anyway... So in the current setup, a poor man loses lawsuits vs big corporations anyway. A big corporation can make a product better than a poor man's product anyway.
#3 What, you think you invented something so original, 9 billion other people haven't thought of? What do you think you're some sort of god we need to revere? No, all men pretty much know what's capable to be made, your advantage of thinking of a new product is secretly creating , developing, and slamming it to market before other people do. Thats a huge advantage, and if used correctly, you can keep your market... The only thing a big corporation can do is undercut by selling cheaper than it is to make, and they should get nailed with a lawsuit for that as they already do.
#4 Since the 1900's patents have never helped progress, in fact they've been a stumbling block for development. Radio wasn't invented until world war 1 because different companies all held patents... Its just like that now, only a millionfold worse.
#5 Patents are a joke nowadays anyway... Corporations "shotgun" patents(patent 1000 things, with only 1 being the real one) because they don't want people "stealing and slightly modifying their technique" off the real patent. People are allowed to patent things they can't conceptually make until a new technology rolls around, but when the new tech comes in, it'd be easy to make.
#6 I don't know about you, but I'm not sure how much a multi BILLION dollar pharmacuetical company needs to have its money protected... Why can't another company compete with it, which would help the consumers? Oh and, how much do you think a company is looking for the cure to AIDS when its making billions of dollars off it?
I'm sorry Mr. Greenspan, you're old. You need to open your eyes. Stop looking at your laws, but look at how your laws are interpreted. Stop looking at the theory, and look at what's taking place in the market. If you know anything about economics and a free marketplace, you know corporations operate to make money abusing the "laws and system" you create to their best interest. Now you and congressmen are the men in charge to make newer and better laws. That's your job. I just graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, yet I don't have a job because of the economy.
God spoke to me
Greenspan is old. Its a fact. He probably doesn't know how to use email. He obviously can't open his eyes to see patents only benefit multibillion dollar pharmacuetical companies. When I'm making billions of dollars to sell AIDs drugs, I'm not putting a penny into research for a cure, so even though they're reaping tons of cash from patent laws, its not helping us get closer to a cure.
God spoke to me
Please note, first, that this started out as a reply to a comment a friend made in my blog.
But it grew to such proportions, and touched in so many ideas central to this debate, that I felt it was appropriate to post here. Take it or leave it, mod me down, or up.. but at least read it - I just want to get a few ideas out there.
--begin rant--
So you admit, then, that the RIAA *is* evil. That's a start. But you still think it's OK for these students to be sued for $150,000 per violation?.. (since you didn't say you disagreed with the law..) - that's just ridiculous. A law shouldn't be used to make examples of people (like capital punishment is, enforced so selectively that a lot of people who 'should' get it don't, and some innocents are caught in its web..) - it should be a balanced response to a problem in society (and I believe only problems that cause intentional harm *to* society), that mitigates the problem by providing a reasonable consequence to the officially-disapproved-of action.
Intellectual property laws are not, not, not 'good laws'. They are not part of the 'social contract' - John Locke would fucking roll over in his grave if he'd heard of them. These latest laws - like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act - were specifically designed at the behest of the rich, powerful corporations (like Disney and the RIAA) who happen to own the intellectual property of others - in the instance of Disney, they own the animators' and writers' work, and the RIAA owns singers' work. They make money - loads
of money - off of other people's work, merely to provide distribution (and in Disney's case, production) methods. They are not making these laws to provide a balanced good for society to protect artistic works and methods in the future - just look at patent laws, for god's sake. They were made to throw a bone to the rich (who contribute huge amounts to the politicians who make the laws - just look at the amount Hollywood and record labels pay them), to keep them rich and keep the people from getting the use out of the very 'intellectual property' the laws protect.
These laws are the reason books by HG Wells are still under copyright 80 years later, the reason you can't photocopy your high school graduation picture.. hell, they're the reason you can't even so much as draw and distribute a fucking picture of Mickey Fucking Mouse without Disney suing you. They're the reason fansites are operating on shaky ground, and can get shut down without warning (remember when Lucasarts did that with the Star Wars fansites?) - these companies are rich and powerful, but dumb and old. They're perfectly willing to take people who love their product and would like nothing better than to support the creators of said product, and ruin them, just to get a point across - you don't own your culture, we own your culture, and if you want to participate in this culture, you've gotta Buy Our Stuff.
It's the face of exploitative consumerism.
That's why people are forced to buy something before they get a chance to see it once (and the same reason, like you said, that people aren't willing to buy something after they see it on Cartoon Network and it turns out to suck - for a thought example, let's say I was somewhat interested in Inuyasha until I saw it CN and discovered it was yet another find-all-the-magic-orb-pieces anime, which I dislike. I might've ended up buying it had I not first been exposed to it FOR FREE. So, there, I got a chance to see something and I decided not to buy it. And just how is that different from getting the same thing for free on a P2P network? Maybe that's what happened to Catgirl Nuku Nuku - perhaps people saw it and decided it wasn't worth purchasing the rest of the series, because it just wasn't worth $30 a DVD package, maybe? Not everyone has the money to afford that kind of thing. The number of people who saw the fansubs is the nearly sam
World War 1 is where we saw our first patent problems with radio.
Art is the one thing that should be protected. Why should anyone be able to make money off Mickey Mouse or music than the people who made them?
Only art should be protected:
If you're so smart you can invent something useful the other 9 billion of us haven't thought of, and you can't make money off it... Then maybe you're not really that smart at all.
God spoke to me
I meant 7 decades, like in the range of
God spoke to me
"Anonymous Coward"
...maybe the smart people can be left alone to solve some of the problems that actually matter.
... the creation of artificial scarcity.
An interesting point was made about intellectual property rights in the health care industry (patents on medicine). Some here have argued that IP in the hands of corporations cause those in dire needs, such as AIDS patients, to go helpless. Others here argue that without intellectual property rights in the health care industry, nothing will ever get done.
It is important for everyone to realize in health care markets, governments should fund most if not all research; in the health care market, intellectual property suffers from market failure and inefficient allocation of goods.
In markets dealing with physical goods, such as a potato, goods are allocated efficiently because people who need those particular goods recieve them at the right price; that is, the demand for such good will be met by the supply for such good. Following this logic, if there is a market for, say bottled beef, those demanding the good will be supplied. Markets that allocate physical goods TEST such products to determine if they are useful and needed by society. Bottled beef would clearly fail the market test because people demanding bottled beef would be little to none, and the cost to supply such good would be greater than the benefit users or society derives. Markets that allocate physical goods act as a testing mechanism, determining whether society needs a particular good.
Intellectual property in the health care industry, particularly patents on drugs, does not need such testing mechanism because EVERYONE deems physical health necessary. A patent on AIDS drugs unnecessarily excludes those that can't pay for such drugs. Hence, intellectual property in the health care industry suffers one of the greatest market failures because everyone that needs drugs cannot recieve them. In this sense, health care, like national security, is a public good. Governments should find ways to provide health care to everyone universally, NOT exclude them ineffciently.
Greenspan has done a great job by putting some important questions into context. A century ago, this would have been a useful catalyst for political debate.
/.ers (who presumably are better educated than the average American) can't read well enough to understand a long article. Politics is no longer influenced by reasoned debate. When the voters are swayed by sound bites and the pols by money, there's not much room left for reasoned discussion.
Today's world is different. A lot of
Copyright and patent laws will continue to be written by corporations like Disney and IBM, and people who can barely read will go on saying "Copying is theft!" as though it was an unanswerable argument.
Here is my idealistic solution to Patent law. Feel free to rip it apart :)
:)
1. All patents must be detailed enough to be reproducible. Meaning if you want to patent a new chip you have to produce the schema. An Algorithm must be detailed enough to be programmed.
Problem: who determines what is reproducible? I couldn't take a Car design and reproduce it.
2. All patents are public record accessible to everyone.
3. All patents are usable by the public for personal use. I can go to the patent office website and get the Honda Accord 2003 patent, and build a Honda Accord for myself. What I couldn't do is build that Honda Accord and sell it to someone else for more than what it cost me to build.
4. All patents must be held by an individual. That individual can sell the patent to someone, or lease it for a given amount of time. Patents would travel with a person. So if I patent an algorithm at Dell, then jump over to IBM. I am still the owner of that patent. Unless I sold it to Dell.
Problem: Group efforts.
5. Regardless of how many times the patent changes hands, it goes into the public domain when the original patent holder dies. I.E. ownership dies with the inventor.
6. A patent is a new patent if it differs from a existing patent by > 50%. Meaning I can take my honda accord spec and mod it to where 50% is not the same, and receive a new patent for my design.
I know I know > 50% is relative. However I can't help to think if we had a strict patent description language we could do this with some sort of binary comparison. Sorry its the programmer in me
Well I would like to here what people have to say about these ideas.
Apoptosis
Anyone got Mr. Greenspans email address? It would be nice to send him the link to this page and challenge a few of his assumptions.
His assumptions that I believe are wrong:
1) "Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected."
Disagree. Ownership or authorship of an idea is fairly easy to record and protect. Controlling distribution of the idea is difficult.
2) "Furthermore, new ideas almost invariably build on old ideas in ways that are difficult or impossible to delineate."
Disagree. Difficult perhaps, but not impossible. Tracking changes from one set of bits to another and determining how different one set is from another is possible. Opening up (and recording)the innovative process will make tracking and differentiating of one piece of IP from another even easier.
3)"In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one."
Once you are able to reliably calculate the contribution of each innovator a system for division of (electronic) payments shouldn't be that difficult.
Even assuming that the payment system wouldn't be completely accurate or "fair", it would still distribute wealth to innovators better than the current system.
Greenspan is showing his age. Improved technology and understanding of information can more appropriately deal with intellectual property. Fight fire with fire.
Complexity Happens
Greenspan says:
What he means is: How does one measure wealth? Good question. Next. How does one measure GDP? Well, one comes up with an ammount in dollars. If we monetize knowledge, then indeed current trends lead towards an "increasing conceptualization of U.S. GDP." But will we be better off? Talking of GDP instead of wealth begs an important question.The consumption of physical property is rivalrous: if I eat your sandwich, you go hungry. The consumption of ideas is non-rivalrous: even if I use calculus all the time, your use of it is uneffected, you don't have to wait your turn. If the Internet allow dissemination of ideas at negligible cost, then knowledge becomes an intensive property, like temperature or pressure, and is not an extensive property, like mass, energy, or entropy. Given that the consumption of physical property is rivalrous, it makes perfect sense to go round counting things, and saying that ten automobiles are worth ten times as much as one automobile. Conversely, it is complete gibberish to claim that we are twice as well off becase Newton and Leibnitz both invented calculus, thus giving us twice as much calculus.
Greenspan's emphasis on GDP ducks the challenge of measuring wealth that is tied up in intensive rather than extensive qualities.
From a progmatic point of view because patents and copyright / IP is a crazy idea:
What happens if we inforce the opposite of patents?
- enforce _no_ legal rights over any idea what-so-ever.
For example:
-> John Foo releases his song "How man patent office officials does it take to perpetuate a way of thinking".
=> Minny Buck rips off the lyrics backing them to a thumping club 4 on the floor done.
It's a hit, so she goes live making a killing $£$£.
-> John Foo gets miffed and tries legal stuff.
=> Law says "That's Foo mister Foo"
Plausable?
Ok, I've stayed up 2 late
A blog I run for the wealth
Double the production volume, take a 20% cut in cost. With a bit of logarithm bashing:
first car $1,000,000
ten cars $ 476,500
one hundred cars $ 227,061
one thousand cars $ 108,197
ten thousand cars $ 51,557,
one hundred thousand cars $ 24,567
one million cars $ 11,706
I've forgotten where I got that rule of thumb from, it might be a semi-conductor industry one. Look at the hypothetical car prices. That is about how it goes, from prototypes through hand built luxury to large volume production. It is not a bad rule of thumb.
It is utterly different from the economics of software
The dilemma for GDP maximisers is easy to state:
Copyright is inefficient due to under-use of intellectual property. E.g. Photoshop is priced thousands of times higher than the marginal cost of production. Society would be better off in the short run if it did not have to pay a monopoly price.
Copyleft is inefficient due to under-production of intellectual property. In particular it struggles to solve this collective action problem: If there is a boring piece of software that a million users would each pay a $100 for, and it would cost $10million to get it written it, it is in societies interest for it to be written.
Alan Greenspan dodged. He could have stated the dilemma plainly, but chose instead to waffle. Oh, well, perhaps another time.
In coming weeks, if the eBay bids for the reports meet their reserve, Greenspan will consider the quantity and quality of the GDP flowing through TCP, DDOS losses, and the market value of whitehouse.gov.
Particle physics is very silly, I'm sure they make it all up as they go along. Interaction they haven't seen before? Invent a new particle. No different to savages inventing a new goblin or demon to explain a new phenomenon.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm "anti-bono"
Have you written your legislature in support of legislation like the Eldred Act? The Eldred Act seeks to apply only the bare Berne minimum copyright term (life + 50) to works whose copyright has not been registered, as a starting point for future reductions.
In some cases the testing period eats up almost the entire patent period. Rather than a global extention on patent durations they should "stop the clock" during any government mandated testing procedures.
They already do in the USA. A patent holder can apply for a term extension of up to five years to account for time spent waiting for regulatory approval.
Will I retire or break 10K?
> Wait, so when you patent an algorithm, it's just
> a mathematical thing
actually, you CANNOT patent an algorithm. no math whatsoever may be subject to a patent.
http://kered.org
You mean the creation of the universe? Horrible, that; so much death and decay.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
The "modern pauper" sleeps in the streets and wears and eats what other people throw away. Turn off Rush Limbaugh and look at the real world.
Each unit of production costs progressively less, not more. I think the rule of thumb is that costs are supposed to drop by half after production has doubled.
"Ownership or authorship of an idea is fairly easy to record and protect. Controlling distribution of the idea is difficult."
If protecting ownership or authorship doesn't mean controlling distribution, then what exactly does it mean?
"In the case of physical property, we take it for granted that the ownership right should have the potential of persisting as long as the physical object itself. In the case of an idea, however, ... we have chosen instead to follow the lead of British common law and place time limits on intellectual property rights."
Maybe Greenspan is behind on his reading. As most of you know, the US Congress has the right to define "limited" as "forever" if they want to (or rather if Disney wants them to), and the Supreme Court will back them up. An economy does indeed require rule of law, but rule of law requires that words mean what they mean.
First off, the free market is only good for determining how much money something is worth, not for determining how much society will benefit from something.
The is where the 'invisible hand' comes in. Though not identical, there is a remarkable congruence between monetary worth and value to society. This occurs because the same individual human beings who comprise society are also economic participants in the market.
Free societies are good, therefore so are free markets.
"To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individu
The only things you can do with your money that doesn't create new business investment is to a) put it in a matress, and b) spend it on something with no margin (i.e. that costs nearly as much to produce as to purchase).
The idle rich by definition create vastly more new business investment than the poor.
Whether that's a good thing or not may be debatable, but the fact of it really isn't.
Whatever your personal definition is, it's almost tautological that success is what maximized happiness.
This is why free market capitalism maximizes happiness. It offers the opportunity for success on more fronts than any other extant or proposed system.
Without a doctrine of equivilents, patents would not protect inventions.
With it, patents clearly cover ideas and not inventions.
All patents are software patents.
That's an interesting analogy. I'll have to use that the next time I make fun of physicists.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Use it or lose it: apply the patent by making something usefull, or lose the patent to the public domain.
And only allow patents to physical processes, not mental ones, organistaional ones or mathematical ones.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Aids Patents harm Africa
see for yourself
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
African leaders claimed HIV didn't cause AIDS, either.
I don't care what excuses they use. Don't confuse bullshit with "fact." They're not the same.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
If he's wearing and eating cast-offs, they are still cast-offs which are near-infinitely better than those any pauper in history has ever had. That's part of my point: it's not that the lot of poverty is good; it's that said lot is very much better than it has been.
This isnt even about excuses, you know for a fact that they'd make their own generic drugs if the patents were lifted. Its common sense that they'd do it if as many of them have HIV as we think.
Its not like its brain surgery to operate a factory.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
No, they really wouldn't. If they were several times more wealthy they would buy or produce their own drugs, regardless of International law. As it is, they're dependant on foreign aid and have massive foreign debts. A lot of the countries have questionable Governments, weak economies, and more social problems than money to address them. They use patents to scapegoat Western corporations for their inability to reign in something the populations of Africa themselves don't even mitigate.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Neutrinos were theorized to explain issues with beta decay.
When physicists started studying how neutrons decays in beta decay, they saw each neutron decaying into a proton and an electron. They also knew, from conservation of momentum and energy, that when a stationry particle decayed into to particles, the resulting two particles should have paths 180 degrees apart from each other, and should have a fixed velocity relationship.
Neither of these results held for beta decay. THe proton and electron did not shoot off in opposite directions, but rather at a variety of angles (and very rarely was that angle a straight angle). The velocities also had some variance, which shouldn't have happened. So either something odd was going on, or conservation of momentum and energy was broken.
Of the several explanations proposed, the one that made the most sense was that a third particle was involved. But the physics of the situation indicated that it had to have a very small rest mass and a very high velocity and be electrically neutral -- hence, the name "neutrino".
The original theories proposed a zero rest mass, but there was no good justification for that. Subsequent theories proposed interesting results of the neutrino had a small, but non-zero rest mass. The experimentalists have, until recently, said their results were "consistant with zero rest mass".
Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and
took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of
his followers.
One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and
there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing.
"Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his
commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your
Purpose in Life, anyway?"
Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The
Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.)
Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened.
Primarily because nobody understood Chinese.
-- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
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