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Critic of Software Patents Wins Nobel Prize in Economics
doom writes "You've probably already heard that the Nobel Prize for Economics was given to three gents who were working on advances in mechanism design theory. What you may not have heard is what one of those recipients was using that theory to study: 'One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress.' Here's one of Maskin's papers on the subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).
The similarities between software development and Evolution are striking. As this article states, software tends to progress slowly, building upon the previous generation, improving on it and occationally adding new features to give it the advantage over it's competition.
But when a software product progresses with little or no competition to speak of, it's innovation stops, it gets bigger, slower and more bloated.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Easy mistake to make since they are listed on the Nobel Prize's official web page. They are listed as receiving a price in economics though, not a Nobel price in economics, even though they are under the "Nobel Prizes" banner.
While Sweden is a Scandinavian socialist state, the economics prize is generally awarded to neo-liberal economists. The judges are based, but they are actually biased against the popular values of their own country.
As a country develops it's own intellectual property, it becomes important to protect it. For example, India seems to be moving towards proper copyright protection. However, this article is specifically about software patents, not copyrights. Of course software copyrights need to be protected. The authors need to have the rights to do whatever they want with their software, and it should not be stolen from them. Software patents are different. They don't protect your software, but restrict me from writing equivalent software. I can't recall a single example in history where a software innovator was rewarded by their patent - there are probably a few, but they are vastly outnumbered by the software patents that have restricted innovation. Instead of rewarding innovation, software patents make it possible for M$ to attack Linux, while doing nothing to help innovators break into the software market dominated by M$. Don't get me wrong... I'm a big supporter of M$ in general, but lets face it: software patents exist to protect M$ and other huge calcified players, rather than reward innovators.
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Seconded. The Nobel Prize in Economics is NOT a real Nobel, and is awarded by the socialist Swedish central bank. Their awards are biased.
Honestly any economist who doesn't recognize the value of creating and protecting intellectual property rights in an information economy is a POORLY trained economist. Hernando de Soto has pegged a lack of real property rights as the primary issue that prevents wealth from being created in the third world (agricultural economies).
You do realise that property rights have absolutely nothing to do with "intellectual property"? One says that you are not allowed to steal other people's things, the other says that you are not allowed to create certain things if someone else created it first. Property rights is a rather obvious concept derived from the simple fact that if you take something from someone else, they lose it. "Intellectual property" is a government-sanctioned privately owned monopoly that prevents other people from creating something identical to what you have, or in some cases even just slightly similar.
As government-awarded private monopolies, "intellectual properties" are artificial barriers for the free market and thus you can certainly be opposed to them without being a "socialist".
That said, I doubt the Bank of Sweden knew about Maskin's patent critique, or if they did, that they cared about it. They gave him a prize for some neat theoretical work.
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Money for nothing, pix for free
That's partially because, despite what the people posting here would have you believe, the economics prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences -- the same organization that awards the prizes in physics and chemistry. It was established and funded by a grant from the Swedish central bank, but the bank does NOT determine the laureates.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Honestly, anyone who doesn't recognize that using the term "intellectual property" to refer to several very different types of purely artificial monopolies created by government action is highly problematic, is ignorant on the subject. Copyrights are not patents and neither are trademarks; refering to them all as "intellectual property" is obfuscatory. And the obfuscataion is usually deliberate, as someone stands to benefit from fooling people into thinking that ideas should be treated the same way as objects, that learning or copying is theft. But it ain't so.
And anyone who believes that patents should apply to mathematical algorithms is a POORLY trained computer scientist.
It does not follow at all, since ideas are a very different thing than land. You distort the issue by using the term "property" to refer to ideas.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
He's not against patents either, just against certain application of patents. To the degree that you believe that receiving this prize confers total authority, the anti-patent people certainly aren't coming out ahead on this one.
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No, it does not follow. The differences between real property and IP have been hashed out over and over again; what holds for one does not necessarily hold for another.
Major relevant differences --
1) Lack of exclusivity. One user of intellectual property does not interfere with another.
2) Less limited resource -- with few exceptions, no one is making more land. New IP is created all the time
And a difference in the systems protecting them
3) With real property, a whole system of rights-of-way has been developed to prevent my use of my real property from interfering with your use of your real property, even if my real property stands between yours and some shared resource you need. With IP, it's the opposite -- your patent on your invention can easily prevent me from implementing mine.