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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997