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Venture Capitalists Lobby Against Software Patents
ciaran_o_riordan writes "No matter which side the US Supreme Court's Bilski decision pleases, it will be just the beginning of the software patent debate in the USA — the other side will start a legislative battle. The lobbying has already begun, with venture capitalist Brad Feld arguing against software patents, mailing a copy of Patent Absurdity to 200 patent policy setters. As Feld puts it, 'Specifically, I'm hoping the film will bring you to an understanding of why patents on software are a massive tax on and retardant of innovation in the US.' The patent lawyers and big patent holders often tell us that patents are needed to secure investment, so it's interesting to see now that venture capitalists are refuting that. And Brad Feld isn't the only vocal one; there's a growing list."
Seems logical that a venture capitalist would see the absurdity in software patents. After all, how many venture capitalists are investing in all the fresh innovations and inventions coming out of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.
As time goes on. Ultimately, I'm hoping that software patents go away completely, since there is no clean way to define anything code a computer executes in a tangible way like actual physical products. If they survive in some form we will, eventually, end up with a completely unenforceable mess of lawyer bait (yes, worse than it is already).
Remember to maintain your supply of
"Against intellectual monopoly" by Boldrin and Levine:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
This book nicely sums up the arguments against patents :-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
Every now and again the United States does get it right.
Before the United States government forced aircraft manufacturers and patent holders into the Manufacturers Aircraft Association there was a patent war that resulted in lots of litigation in the United States but no aircraft manufacturing or innovation once the patent war started.
When a real war broke out, WW1, the United States had to buy aircraft from France because the United States business ventures were more interested in lawsuits than making aircraft.
After ending the patent war by forcing everyone into a patent pool the aircraft industry in the United States took off.
There are other similar cases that plainly show how the patent system has been a failure from the beginning in serving the Constitutional requirements. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Those individuals and groups need to patent their activities... ;)
Remember to maintain your supply of
I am no fan of Michael Moore (well, i liked TV Nation)...but these dudes could learn a lot from his style of instigation-based film-making.
I watched the video all the way to the end....it only resonates with me cause i already agree with it. It's a film for the echo chamber. But it will fail to convince anyone in the middle...
THL phish sticks
To refute something means to disprove it.
From TFS:
A venture capitalist said that patents are not needed to secure investment. That pretty damn well refutes the idea that venture capitalists won't invest without patents.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
In 2005, venture capital investors who had backed (among others) eBay and Skype - and meanwhile also Twitter - supported my last-minute lobbying effort in the European Parliament against the EU software patent directive. The related press release mentioning Benchmark Capital (eBay, and more recently Twitter) and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures (Skype) is still online on the MySQL website although Oracle and Sun certainly do favor software patents. Guess they forgot to delete it. Other references to MySQL's position on software patents disappeared after Sun bought the company in 2008.
Those venture investors had previously supported an open letter to EU decision-makers warning against the possible consequences of an adoption of the proposed bill (which ultmately got thrown out, fortunately).
However, I also got turned down by many venture investors whom I asked to support such initiatives against software patents. I don't think the resistance movement is strong enough in economic and political terms to achieve the abolition of software patents anytime soon. I regret to say so but the hurdle is high and politicians won't be convinced if it's basically just the Free and Open Source Software movement that takes political action against software patents. A few venture capitalists won't tilt the scales either. There would have to be broadbased support. In Europe, the leading venture capital organization (EVCA) actually lobbied for the legislative proposal we fought against. I guess the major American venture capital associations would take similar positions.
In the near to mid term, I believe the Defensive Patent License (DPL) could have a very positive effect.
Campaign contributions - is at the root of all the other issues listed. Until campaign finance is reformed the elected (with a few rare exceptions) will be beholden to those with the deepest pockets instead of those who elect them.
My hope is that software patents will be made irrelevant one way or the other... by those countries that don't implement them.
In effect, it's trying to force a (IMHO: ridiculous) concept onto the rest of the world. Some countries may go along with that, and patent holders (& lawyers!) will profit. But other countries may not, and will be able to do things that would require lots of red tape elsewhere. And thus: be more competitive by ignoring software patents.
Any type of 'intellectual property' is only a profitable starter if you can get others to go along. But the more you push things into the realm of ridiculous, the fewer people/countries actually will. And when that happens, you have the red tape slowing you down, they don't.
Copyrights may have a place, patents may have their place (I'm not so sure about either), but patents on pure software constructs are totally uncalled for. The sooner they're abandoned, the better.
Let patent owners state a value for their IP. Let them be taxed at a certain percent, say 1% per year. Allow anyone to buy the IP into the public domain for the stated price. Ideally this idea would be applied to both patents and copyright. I claim this idea as my own. I had it while taking a shower about eight years ago. Please make use of it.
The VCs dispute that patents are needed to secure investment.
I got the point, but he was wrong. The VCs are the people who do the investing. If they say they'll still invest even without patent protections, then the premise that VCs won't invest without patent protections has been refuted.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980
Say hello to risky and out of control lending
Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, 1982
Enjoy the savings and loan crisis
Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 would do away with restrictions on the integration of banking, insurance and stock trading imposed by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933
Welcome the age of "too big to fail"
Patents don't mean diddlysquat anyway if you're a small start up going up against the big dogs. They will simply steal your idea anyway, then if you try to sue them, they will keep the case tied up in court long enough for the legal costs to drive you out of business. The only patents that are worth squat if you're an individual or a small business is a chemical patent, because a chemical either is or isn't a particular chemical, and no amount of fancy lawyerspeak will ever manage to obfuscate that fact.
The problem with software patents is that large corporations can patent things that are obvious or that everyone is already doing anyway, then use complex legal cases to drive their competitors out of business.
...is that the regulation is generally written by the very industries whose behavior the legislation is supposed to curtail. This is a consequence of our corrupt campaign financing system in which large corporations have more say than voters in what our government does. If you don't believe me, just look at how the supposedly-socialist Obama administration is using government resources to prevent reporters from taking photographs of wildlife injured by the oil spill. This serves no purpose other than to help BP manage their PR crisis, and certainly isn't in the best interest of the public.
Patent Absurdity explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy
Call it a fallacy, but using that term automatically destroys a significant amount of your credibility. Particularly when you use it incorrectly. It does not mean, "any judicial decision which I dislike." Judicial activism is when a judge writes new law... For example, if a judge were to look at 35 USC 101, which says that patentable subject material includes "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter" and pretend that software is not a process, or that "process" doesn't include software, that would be judicial activism.
In fact, technically, the rule that everyone who's against software patents points to for why software should not be patentable - no patenting abstract algorithms - was a judicial decision writing a new limitation into the law, and was therefore "judicial activism". But we don't call it that, because we like that decision.
But had those things not been in place to begin with, sane fiscal policies would have been made by the banks because there would be no way they would be "bailed out". Had it not been for regulations, the banks would have failed before they became "too big to fail" thus eliminating the problem.
...and don't even get started with all the flaws in the Federal Reserve....
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Don't think about this topic at all! You may be exposing yourself to risk. As your counsel I advise you to not question me on these matters because that may expose you to even greater risk!
The Slashdot article's Venture Capitalists seem to forget that software patents protect small players more than big plays due to: "... entrepreneurs and small, innovative firms rely more heavily upon the patent system than larger enterprises. Larger companies are said to possess alternative means for achieving a proprietary or property-like interest in a particular technology. For example, trade secrecy, ready access to markets, trademark rights, speed of development, and consumer goodwill may to some degree act as substitutes to the patent system. However, individual inventors and small firms often do not have these mechanisms at their disposal” and “small patenting firms produce 13-14 times more patents per employee as large patenting firms” http://bit.ly/aSnz61
Refute can also means to argue against the truth or correctness of something, not always proving it's erroneous. In other words, like most English words it has multiple meanings. I do see your point though. It's a strong word.
So, after they succeed in getting all software patents nullified, I hope they'll willingly give up copyright on the software they're creating using all that free IP.
A copyright is a significantly and fundamentally different thing than a patent. Patents can conceivably cover any implementation of an invention. Copyrights apply only to the particular fixed expression of an invention or creative work. There's no inconsistency to simultaneously holding objections to wholesale appropriation and accepting multiple re-implementation of a given concept.
Otherwise their argument boils down to "I don't want anyone to steal my intellectual property, I'm just not smart enough to come up with anything truly innovative."
Or, more likely, they think it's more valuable to investors to safeguard implementations/applications of a given idea than the idea in abstract.
Tweet, tweet.
For some reason, America just doesn't understand how to do proper regulation. Every attempt at regulation ends up causing more problems than it manages to fix, or the lack of regulation ends up allowing horrid behavior to occur.
"Every attempt"? Nice rhetorical device, but I think you seriously underestimate how many regulations there are, and how many of them work reasonably well--not to mention how many things are unregulated without problem. The thing is that when regulation works well, it's almost unnoticeable, but when it fails, the results are often spectacularly obvious (as with your examples). This is the "man bites dog" effect: dogs frequently bite men, so that's not news, but the other way around is definitely news, so if you go just by the news, you'd conclude that men are more likely to bite dogs than the other way around.
For that matter, while I would tend to agree with you about other western nations, there are some notable exceptions. An obvious example is US vs. UK laws about libel and slander; in the US, truth is considered a defense, a proposition I find it hard to imagine that anyone could reject. Likewise, while copyright law is a general mess on both sides of the pond, I think "fair use" is a good example of something that the US got more right than most.
This is so true! According to "Innovation for Dummies" book, a patent only grants the right to forbid others to make a product. Patents do not give you any right to make anything. This is a very important distinction. A patent is the ability to deny others, not the ability to make something.
If you build a better airplane, you can patent all the innovative features (and not so innovative ones) as much as you like... and then you probably still can't make the plane... because there will be other patents or IP that your innovative airplane incorporates. If you can't get all the patent holders to agree to let you make the airplane, then you cannot make a product. The only way to make money off of your patent is to further deny others the ability to use the idea until they pay.
The notion of counting the patents issued in a country to measure "innovation" is terrible. It really means the opposite; that progress is actually slower in that country the more patents are issued. It doesn't mean that the whole idea of patents are bad, but each patent already issued slows future product development for the country as a whole . Given the societal costs of an issued patent, we really should put the bar higher, and grant patents only for really great innovations. Each current issued patent is like a grit of sand gumming up new product development... so each patent issued, if any, had better be worth quite a bit.
There was this event in history commonly referred to as The Great Depression which was followed by many of the same regulations that were removed because prior to implementing these regulations there was a similar financial melt down in many cases caused by similar financial bubbles and out of control chicanery.
I find it to be more than a coincidence that the S&L crisis followed deregulation and the current financial melt down also followed deregulation.
And the fact that the regulations, like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, came after the Great Depression suggests your conclusion about the regulations causing the crisis are dead wrong. Hell, the deregulation is what created "To Big to Fail" not the enactment of regulations.
Unfortunately the dividing line between software and 'actual physical products' is becoming increasingly vague. Pretty much any nontrivial machine now has a microprocessor (or several). Currently, in (most of) the EU we have the ludicrous situation that you can write an implementation of an algorithm in C and not infringe any patents, then implement the same algorithm in VHDL and infringe a parent. Given that there are now compilers that can take C code and generate ASICs that implement the algorithm, you find that the mere act of compiling is what takes you from not-infringing to infringing - running does not.
Focussing to much on software patents hide the fact that the entire patent system has serious problems. Software patents aren't the problem, they just highlight the problems of the system as a whole.
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The Great Depression was caused mostly by A) Fractional Reserves Lending (something that makes no sense in a fully deregulated economy) B) The Fed creating money essentially out of nothing creating an unsustainable financial boom C) The WWI powers unable to repay debt.
Had it not been for the fed, chances are we wouldn't have had either the current financial crisis or the great depression.
Like I said in an earlier post, markets work under -complete- deregulation, you can't half regulate and half deregulate something and expect it to work. Capitalism, communism, socialism and fascism can all work when -always- held to, when you mix them you get a complete mess.
The problem wasn't the lack of regulations but rather the presence of some regulations and the relaxation of others. Either have it be fully regulated and have it work 90% of the time, or have it be unregulated and have it work 100% of the time. When you mix them, you get disaster. Always.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There is a commonly-held assumption - at least by pimply-faced 15-year-old "experts" - that the government has nothing better to do with its time than think up new regulations out of the air. Because Government is Bad, Regulations are Bad, and Taxes are Stealing.
Our government is much too busy talking with lobbyists, pocketing bribes and planning junkets to do that.
At one time everything was unregulated. However, enough people got hurt, scammed, or otherwise offended that they demanded that certain activities be regulated, even if if meant that they had to hire lobbyists to pay bribes in order to distract our government officials from their junket-planning. And sometimes even if it meant paying Taxes to hire enforcement officials.
It is, unfortunately, true that once you get rolling on a Good Thing, it's hard to stop, but we live in an age where a lot of times, letting one person go to Hell like they deserve would punish so many more-or-less innocent people that entire systems would collapse. Such as The Too Big To Fail effect, where if the fundamental faith in institutions is allowed to be undermined, even good investments will be impossible because you can never be 100% sure what's a good investment to begin with. Just ask Bernie Madoff's customers.
I don't think it is so much a lack of regulations, but rather a lack of trust in democratic concepts and institutions. If anything, an open and free market is based upon the assumption that ordinary folks, when left to make their own choices and given freedom to innovate and come up with solutions to problems that they face, will tend on the whole to make the best choices possible to fill those needs, wants, and desires.
The issue isn't one of regulation vs. deregulation, but rather freedom vs. tyranny. Every time a regulation is written, the question ought to be asked "does this allow ultimately for more or less freedom... and is it worth the price for this kind of restriction if we lose some precious freedom?"
From a long view of human history, the pattern has usually been that tyrants have come into political power in some form or another to take the freedoms from others... sometimes for "the public good" and sometimes just for raw acquisition of power. Often it is hard to determine which is which. If you don't have a government that is actively trying to squash that tyrannical behavior, it becomes more a part of the problem than the solution.
Regulations can exist within democratic institutions... indeed they are necessary for a well-organized society. The American Constitution in fact was written under such a philosophy... one of limited government but acknowledged that a government of some kind still had to exist. Business regulations was one of the first orders of business in the First American Congress (just after passage of the Bill of Rights), and the fight to ignore those regulations created the first real test of the power of the U.S. Federal Government (with the Whiskey Rebellion). Having George Washington put on his general's uniform again and personally lead the U.S. Army into battle sort of helped to kill the opposition (the only time a U.S. President has ever lead a field army into battle).
Regulations do make some sense, but they really ought to be simple to comprehend and certainly shouldn't require a full time accountant, lawyer, or a whole team of them to be able to simply comply with those regulations. When congressmen who pass legislation that significantly alters the regulatory landscape have not even read the legislation they are making into law much less even tried to comprehend the long term consequences to that legislation, is it a wonder that the rest of us trying to actually follow those laws start to complain?
The problem with a patent pool (see the MPEGLA for details on a current one) is the buy-in and cost to participate. These by their nature tend to be very monopolistic in nature and are also often rigged to drive out competition and certainly to set the barriers of entry for new start-ups from getting involved.
It is a real trick, too, in terms of trying to "divide the capital fairly". Organizations like ASCAP have been collecting money for years on behalf of individual song writers but almost without exception have never actually paid those royalties to anybody but the very largest organizations involved. In the end, it is the occasional and part-time innovator that gets screwed completely.
Of the three major "intellectual property law" branches, patents, copyright, and trademarks, I'd say patents are by far and away the most onerous in terms of the complications they provide to genuine market competition and the complete lack of protection "of the little guy" when somebody new to the system shows up. I've said repeatedly that patents are nothing more than a legal scam that screws over the private inventor and is just a way to part a fool from his money.... the fool in this case is the one who thinks that patents actually offer some sort of protection to their invention.
Repeatedly, as was mentioned with the aircraft industry and I should add the patent fight that Philo Farnsworth also had to go through in regards to the development of electronic television (he eventually won... but it literally took him a lifetime to collect and fight for credit that still is not properly given) there is very little productive that happens in regards to patents. If, as was done by both Philo Farnsworth and the Wright Brothers, you create your own factory and make your invention by putting some skin in the game.... there might be some value in terms of a defensive application of patents to keep competitors temporarily from completely copying your ideas. You will never make millions by coming up with a unique product, patenting the thing, and then trying to "sell" the invention to somebody else.