Slashdot Mirror
Steal This Idea
Most of the themes and arguments in Steal This Idea will be familiar to anyone who's read a Slashdot thread on patents. Michael Perelman is an economics professor at California State University. In Steal This Idea, he takes the position that patents (and trademarks, to a lesser extent) hurt science and the economy more than they help. He makes a pretty convincing case.
Roughly half the book is devoted to the negative effects of patents on scientific research. Perelman claims that tying research to intellectual property skews the balance of study away from basic research on fundamental problems, and toward short-term research geared toward improving existing products. Several real-world examples are given--many of the most potent come from the world of biological and pharmaceutical research:
Two decades ago, Philip Needleman, then a researcher at Washington University, in St. Louis, and his co-workers postulated the existence of two cyclooxygenase enzymes, COX-1 and COX-2. By 1990, Dr. Needleman, then chief scientific officer at Pharmacia, had guessed that the COX-2 enzyme plays a critical role in inflammation. By 1992, three other groups, including one at Rochester, had confirmed the existence of the enzymes by describing the genes that control their production. Although Rochester won the patent, the competing teams at UCLA and Brigham Young University claim that their work was fundamental.
Whether UCLA, Brigham Young, or Rochester deserved the patent is beside the point. More important is the idea that the granting of a patent on a bodily substance permits the owner to demand royalties from any company that produces a medicine that targets the substance.
Perelman gives historical evidence of IP hampering the development of new technology. His best example is the thicket of radio patents that entangled the baby radio industry, until the U.S. government voided many of them in the interest of accelerating radio technology during WWII.
Finally, Steal this Idea makes the case that scientific progress in the last half of the twentieth century owes a greater debt to basic research from academic and publicly-funded scientists and researchers than to corporate research. The concern is based on the large amount of time (decades, rather than years) needed for basic scientific discoveries to become marketable products is largely ignored by corporate research, which is focused on quarterly results.
It's curious that the internet--maybe the most obvious example of this, is barely mentioned. After all, business research has failed miserably at defining network protocols that match the resilience and utility of the network designed by publicly-funded scientists in the 60s. This may be because Perelman is less interested in obvious examples than lesser known ones, of which there are several in the book.
The second half of the book argues against patents (and Intellectual property in general) in terms of economic theory. Economics is Perelman's area of expertise, but it is not mine. I had to read most of these chapters twice before I understood them. They're interesting stuff, though. Perelman illustrates various ways economists attempt to shoehorn non-tangible goods (information) into economic models based on "lumpy objects." He illustrates the flaws in several of these models, and how these flaws translate into inefficiencies in actual markets.
Good: The book isn't just a rant, although it sometimes reads like one. Perelman is firmly biased against IP, and he sometimes uses a few paragraphs to rail against corporations in general. But the book is logically laid out, and presents evidence in well-defined pieces, always clear about what each example is meant to illustrate.
The examples. Those mentioned above are just a few of the many real-life events noted in Steal this Idea. They comprise the bulk of Perelman's case against patent IP. It's always tough to build an argument on anecdotal evidence, but in this case, there's a great deal of evidence.
The scope. I had doubts that a 211-page book could do justice to the issues with every type of intellectual property. Fortunately, Perelman doesn't attempt to cover copyrights, and barely touches trademarks. The overarching theme of the book is that intellectual property (mainly patents) in the hands of corporations works against the original goals of its creators--to encourage innovation and help the economy. The book does a solid job of supporting this claim.
Bad: IP is supposed to be a "limited" monopoly. Patents are, arguably, the most "limited" of the three types of IP in the US (copyrights, patents and trademarks). Perelman could have acknowledged this, and given concrete examples of why the limits aren't enough to balance the monopoly power. He doesn't explicitly do so.
Copyright is nowhere to be found. That's not all bad, since any book would be hard-pressed to do a better job of handling copyright issues than Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright . Still, Steal this Idea might have included a few more references to copyright-specific cases or works, if only to encourage further reading (patent & trademark examples include many references).
Perelman gives some illustrative figures about why the patent mess is so bad, and why the USPTO is unable to control it. But there's not much meat there. Hopefully, someone will take a more in-depth look at the USPTO itself, and how it operates.
Conclusion: Steal this Idea has a great deal of information, packed into a fairly short book. It's a good companion to Digital Copyright, and well worth reading for anyone interested in how IP works (or doesn't work).
You can purchase Steal This Idea from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do patents slow down scientific growth? Sure, if you have to go through the patent owner to do something, it creates a bottle neck, and increases expenses. But you also have to understand, patents motivate people. It encourages them to invent, and discover, because they know if they find something knew, or create something, they can patent it and make money from it. If inventors couldn't make money off their inventions, there would be alot less of them.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
I think it's ironic that the Hoffman book is found online in it's entirety after being brought to mind by a book about copyright protection and IP law. The universe has a strange sense of humor/justice...
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
However, when searching for the mythical Novell Unix patent a the patent office I was really struck by how bad every software patent was.
For example, when searching for patents assigned to Novell (search criteria AN/Novell), the very first patent returned is number 6,567,873, which is a patent having to do with spinlocks in an SMP kernel. Basically, the patent covers the idea of exponential backoff for a contented resource. This is something which ethernet has done for 30 years, and I'm sure there's even further prior art.
Another Novell patent involves resizing FAT file partitions on the fly, and involves no real insight at all.
But it's not these two patents. Almost every single patent is either just this obvious, or just this derivative of prior work. Check it out yourself -- pretty much every computer program ever written must violate hundreds of patents.
http://books.slashdot.org/faq/subscriptions.shtml
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
a slightly offtopic comment. patents can be abused by drug companies. when a patent for a drug is about to expire the company will release a similar drug and patent it to stop the generic companies from being able to profit. examples would be the weekly prozac and clariton-d. i am sure there are many more. i watched a dateline special on it once.
USPTO has experts. Most patents are not "new and unique" they are just modifications and mostly that any competent engineer could create without any special insight. Visit the USPTO and take a read. My wife's cousin worked at the USPTO in the 90's and the problem then was the Japanese would read each patent and file 11 patents covering each possible revision to the original patent in order to block improvement!
Patent is big business. Takes a regular person $6k or so to get one. Takes 3 years AFTER the filing last I checked. Used to be 2 years 4 years ago. At this rate before long, patents will expire before granted.
Only big business can defend a patent - look at lemon or whatever his name was who is #2 most prolific patenter ever and invented lots of the automated manufacturing but was not paid by the major automakers until he was like 65. Patents do not result in knowledge sharing etc.
I think everyone knows these things. Too many systems of our government made sense at the beginning of the industrial age but were never deprecated.
Clearly this is why one-world government is bad. The nation that structures around advancing knowledge rather than lawsuits about it will surpass the U$A. We need more competition in governments rather than more unification.
Would you vote for a candidate who sought to fix the patent technology roadblock? I would.
Tim
Expect Freedom.
and I'm also an Economics major. The economics is really mostly dead-on, except that the author seems to imply that research is of more worth than profit. Which is of course true, but not in a free-market system--or anything related to it. If anybody's interested on how you and I get screwed over, though, go read some Noam Chomsky. All the government thinktanks develop cancer drugs, malaria drugs, whatever, and once they're perfected, they're sold for pennies to corporations who then sell them for $102/pill. Really, the only way to salvage this is to either have the government manufacture drugs (but socialism is just one step from COMMUNISM BOO HISS) or impose rules on drug makers (which again is regulation--companies hate this.) The people need to realize that health care is a right, not a privilege. And that's why I scoff when Bush declares himself a compassionate conservative and then cuts welfare programs, or cuts his oil buddies' tax rates. Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Green Party, and I think that we should have a maximum income... better to screw those that live well than those that are too busy being hungry to sit around with bags of money and diamond back scratchers.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
A tangible object only becomes property when rights attach to that object. The core property right is the right to exclude others from using the subject property. To use another real estate example, think of the law of trespass. Trespass laws prevent others from using real estate.
Take this now to the next level - intellectual property. Because IP is based on an intangible ("an idea" as the author of this book has called it), the property is defined by the bounds of the rights in the intangible. The right to exclude is inextricably bound with the intangible and becomes part of the definition of the right. Therefore, the right is coextensive with the property because it IS the property.
To go back to the real estate example, the right to exclude is coextensive with the physical boundary of the land in question. That is why estates in land and the land itself are two very different things. The land itself is nothing. The estate in the land (that is, the rights attached to the parcel) is the property.
Most people (even most lawyers) never make this distinction when it comes to patents. You will sometimes hear talk about the "patent monopoly," but this term has been rejected by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the federal appeals court with exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases in the United States). The Court has made clear that patents define the metes and bounds of a piece of property and do not grant monopolies. There are sound reasons for this distinction that I hope you will forgive me for not discussing here. it is enough for this post that the distinction exists.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
n abbreviated form of the language with a weaker grammatical structure and a lower information-carrying capacity.
Interesting. While I'm not dealing with any teenagers at the moment, so I don't know what slang they are developing, I'm not so sure the dialects I've come across have any less information carrying capacity than the subset of standard spoken english that they would use if they didn't have their slang.
I think that it might be less that the developed dialect not having the capacity and more that the typical set of ideas in the sub-culture is limited. That is to say, they ain't got nuttin to talk about, so 'day ain't needin' all 'dem big words.
Folks,
.... All patent offices around the world need to shut down for a few (maybe 10) years. After a decade let the international court decide (and streamline) patent laws. I always chuckled at (the stupidity) a company owning the human gnome [definitely global community assets/property].
...).
... or developed supporting whatever. It appears more like the first to take all the credit with believable BS-smoke.
How can one company/person/university/... take the credit for creating anything that is unique, novel, and useful today with global communications and travel, internet seminars/conferences and universities,
I am not sure, but after many years of reading and experience, it appears that patents/USPTO are now a global government supported Welfare Institution for whoever claims all the credit first (patent variations patents, human/natural and mutations organic patents, obvious and stupid patents,
It is no longer who really did make
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Serendipitous discoveries are very important - look at Thomas Edison. He tried everything until he found what worked. However, the problem here is that the company did not try everything - they just merely suggested that it could work and were granted rights to practice that technology. There is NO WAY that the company could test all inorganic chemicals made from all 94 (I'm only including the stable elements of the periodic table) elements present and say that they all work and therefore can claim them all. This is the problem with the broad patents that the USPTO allows - they should only allow what the patent applier can truly prove they actually tried and proved to work - not what they made up.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
Money is Freedom.
So, let's print more money!!!
Seriously, I understand what you're saying, and I agree that there is an *almost* undeniable correlation between money and freedom. I too believe that personal wealth very much affects personal freedom, and I believe in creating wealth.
I also understand that nazi pro-consumer law hurts free enterprise when it restricts free trade, but I'm *ALSO* very familiar with pro-corporate laws/intitutions that do just as much if not more to restrict trade.
Examples of Anti-Consumer Laws/Institutions that Restrict Trade
* FCC Regulation of TV/Radio which favors long-range/high-ratings broadcasting with expensive licenses.
* Local/County/State/FCC Regulation of local telecommunications giving one company exclusive access to right-of-ways and infrastructure built with public money.
* The US Patent Office - Costing up to $500,000 in legal fees to disqualify a patent, this institution (with the courts help) restricts the free trade and innovation of both obvious and nonobvious technology by giving every asshole the opportunity to "call dibs" for it's exclusive use while bearing very little risk to both the patent office and the filer if the patent was fucking obvious and/or shortly inevitable.
If you want to keep believing that we're #1 because purely because we're a capitalist then you need to learn a lot about "other factors".
Other Factors:
* Trade Negotion Leverage
* Natural Resources
* Corruption (Equal Justice under Law)
* Workforce Skills
* Infrastructure
That's just to name a few...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
It's ironic, but the Amazon one-click purchase patent is a bad example of a "bad" patent. It's actually quite a good patent.
No site had, and no programmer before or since would ever feel comfortable letting someone buy something without a second click for a confirmation. This is well documented, and any programmer of any age would tell you this. It was a true innovation in thought to both the online community and the programming community.
A better example would be something that was an imminently obvious next step, like rendering "frames" in 3D to provide animation. Whatever happened to that guy and his patent and his lawsuit against the big 3D card companies?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
If I read the law correctly, simple variations on an existing patent should not be patentable. Here is the relevant passage, in party of the first part phraseology (from U.S. Code, Title 35, Ch. 10, Sect. 103): "A patent may not be obtained ... if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." Even though it is in legalese, the intent seems clear: an invention must be novel to be patented. That language, if applied rigorously, would set an extremely high standard for patentability. When did the patent office begin approving patents for simple knockoffs?
Patent applications made with the intent to stifle competition should be denied. Multiple applications for essentially the same invention should be denied. Patents which have not been exercised by introduction to the marketplace should be turned over to the public domain. It should be the obligation of the patent holder to demonstrate that the patented invention was produced for the market, although this will have to be designed to balance the interests and responsibilities of individual and small company inventors versus those of large corporations.
The main public benefit of patents now seems to be to spur corporate investment in R&D. Would the public be better served by direct tax credits for R&D and a phaseout of patents?
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997