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Why IP Laws Are Blocking Innovation
DrJimbo passes along this quote from Groklaw:
"The White House is asking us to give them ideas on what is blocking innovation in America. I thought I'd give them an honest answer. Here it is: Current intellectual property laws are blocking innovation. President Obama just set a goal of wireless access for everyone in the US, saying it will spark innovation. But that's only true if people are allowed to actually do innovative things once they are online. You have to choose. You can prop up old business models with overbearing intellectual property laws that hit innovators on the head whenever they stick their heads up from the ground; or you can have innovation. You can't have both. And right now, the balance is away from innovation."
No IP was a contributing factor.
proud caffeine whore
Patents. Bloody software patents, and fat cats using patents to bludgeon little guys. IIRC, the intention was pretty much the opposite - patents were supposed to be a way to put the law on the side of the little guy. Where did it all go wrong?
As for copyright - no more damn extensions. Indeed, ratchet back.
The original goal of copyrights and patents was to reward people for creating things that benefit all of us, not to create huge corporations that prevent people from creating things that benefit all of us.
"Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate."
Really. Interesting - innovation seems to predate "intellectual property law" by at least millenia.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
LOL.
The 'reason to innovate' is to make money by making better stuff than your competitors.
Or do you really think our ancestors sat around in a cave saying 'you know, I'd really like to invent the wheel, but since I couldn't patent it, what's the point?'
It has become disgustingly easy to patent something that really should not be patentable. One result of the fast and loose IP laws is an entirely new method of profit for enterprise: using the court system as a means of revenue (i.e. sue for profit.) In the end, the IP laws have become the United States undoing because how can we be technological innovators and leaders if the would-be inventor is scared off by some superfluous patent over something ridiculous.
examine western european history in the 300 years in between 300 AD and 600 AD. you will see that the feudalization of economy and politics in that period closely resembles the feudalization of economy, and now intellectual sphere in our modern times.
a concept is like a bridge. once you give the ownership of the bridge to someone, that someone has the control of that bridge, can use it to do anything, toll anyone, deny access to anyone. and buy more bridges. eventually, most of the bridges get concentrated in the hands of minority, which then end up controlling the social, political and economical aspects of life through their power. its the inevitable result of inheritance-supported, unlimited ownership.
Read radical news here
You fail to patent, or file slowly? That's okay! We will patent for you, and then sue you for violating our patent!
As I understand first to file, prior art published outside a patent application can still invalidate a patent or application. It makes a difference only when two inventors have pending applications on the same thing (e.g. AG Bell and Elisha Gray).
The fashion industry manages to innovate just fine without strong IP laws for anything but trademarks.
The food industry does just fine without patentst on recipes.
etc
it's a myth.
A myth perpetuated by a horde of business graduates who wouldn't know an original thought if it bit them in the ass and who just accept the idea that patents are utterly essential because the general idea sounds kinda good.
I am a web developer by day, and am a software developer by night. I make software so that I can sell it. One of my biggest worries is that I will make a really great piece of software, start selling it, then some big company filled with lawyers starts suing me because it run in Windows, and according to some messed up, obscure patent, I can't do that. I understand that they would not touch me right now since, let's face it, none of you have heard of me (as with the rest of the world). I am not banking hardcore. It is possible that one single program I write will though. That is a very high possibility. I try to program safe and not go too insane with the software I make and sell. If I go insane and make something incredible, these sleazy, douchbag lawyers will want a piece of my pie even though they had nothing to do with it, so they sue me. You should not be allowed to simply buy up a patent. You should be required to have a working model of what the patent is for. If you have a software patent for software that does not exist and you have no proof it exists, why are you allowed to own it? You have nothing to do with the software outside of a small piece of paper saying it. You have no programmers on payroll. You have no engineers on payroll. You are not paying or contracting anybody to make these innovations, you simply own them to say you do. I think it should be revamped to make these people show proof of concept at the very minimum in order to own a patent. Unfortunately, for people like me who make just as much selling software on the side as I do at my normal job (and it is not a small amount, it is just not big either), it is only a matter of time before the "I can retire now" software gets sold off, and then I get sued for some software patent from a company that has nothing to do with software outside of having a piece of paper saying they can. Proof of concept, or you lose it.
If these patent trolls started losing patents for no proof of concept, that would up the innovation then and there as other big companies would be bringing in people to make a proof of concept so they could own the patent. A 2 for 1 deal and it is super simple. Innovation gets sparked, and patent trolls get smacked in the face. And all we do is force the patent trolls to show proof of concept of every single patent they own.
The world is how you make it
Yep. Remember what happened the last time the President used the internet to ask the people what they wanted? The most popular response, by a long shot, was marijuana reform. The President came out and laughed, as if tens of thousands of people in jail were some sort of joke. I don't expect patent reform to be taken any more seriously.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The thesis "Current IP law stifles innovation" is a good one, however I don't agree with the examples provided in the paper. I think a more persuasive argument would have used company vs company lawsuits are are going crazy right now (between the like of Apple, RIM, and Sony) and the hoops that things like the GPL has to jump through to placate Novell selling out to M$ amongst other attacks on open source software. Comparing the situation to the aircraft industry pre-WWI and using other examples of stifled innovation would have given our current situation more context as well. /sighs
Anyway, I just think the sheer amount of licensing boondoggles and lawyers required to build any kind of useful tech device these days is completely out of control, and I don't know if the paper made that clear (it didn't to me anyway).
you needed a the support of the Church or a wealthy patron to make a living as an artist.
How is that different from today, where the wealthy patron is a mainstream publisher? Try to do it yourself and risk getting sued for plagiarism.
All those votes were probably from me. I just got really high and forgot that I'd already voted.
Sorry about that.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If they don't have a working model, then they don't really have it outside of a piece of paper, do they? When it comes to codecs, use it or lose it. Sure they can write something up, so they should. If all you have is a piece of paper saying you own something, but you don't have it, well that is pretty dumb if you ask me. You don't truly own it since you don't have it. You say that you do so that you can sue if anybody really makes it. That needs to be stopped. These are to the point where companies are owning ideas. That is why we have not seen many super innovative thing in the software market. Sure, there are some incredible ones out there that are new, do not get me wrong, but there could be so many more if these companies did not "buy ideas".
The world is how you make it
In the "good old days" artists needed a patron not because there was no IP law but because most artists' audience was incredibly small by today's standards. The Church and the aristocracy were about the only ones to commission artworks or have their buildings elaborately decorated. Not because everyone else got their art fix from ThePirateHorsecourier but because everyone else was too busy working their arse off to feed themselves or bashing in skulls. Given the circumstances I would still consider that era a prosperous time for the arts. I agree with GP's point that the ability to freely use whatever you got your hands on and create something new from it was a very good thing, and I would like to extend this to say it contributed considerably to the wealth of cultural legacy that has serves artists up until this very day as a solid foundation to build upon and a rich repertoire to draw inspiration from.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate.
Innovations are made in spite of and not because of strong IP laws. The amount of ideas popping out of your mind doesn't increase if you can make one innovation or magnum opus and then live happily on it for the rest of your life. That actually stifles innovation.
Force the innovators to continue innovating, by taking away their exclusive rights after a time short enough that they can't rest on their laurels.
And make copyrights and patents non-transferable and only licenseable for a year at a time.. If the company who hires you only have access to your innovations as long as they still pay you, the bright minds who come up with the ideas would be rewarded much more than the fat cats who reap the profits from other people's ideas.
Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
No IP was a contributing factor.
I don't know what you people are talking about. There is considerable innovation in America today. The US is the leader in CDOs, derivatives, tax avoidance, and is always coming up with new and innovative schemes to part working people from their money.
No lack of innovation there, it's just misdirected.
Really. Interesting - innovation seems to predate "intellectual property law" by at least millenia.
In ancient Egypt: "Hey, buddy! You in the chariot with the wheels! Pull over! I own the IP for my innovation of the wheel, you owe me license fees. So pay up, or take them off the chariot!"
In the sixteenth century, the Venetians innovated ways to make colored glass. They protected their IP by turning the glass blowing factory into a fortress. Revealing the secrets to folks outside the factory was punishable by death.
The Chinese had a monopoly on silk making, and used similar methods to ensure that no silk worms left the country. Italian monks eventually managed to smuggle some out hidden in hollowed out walking sticks. Hey, ancient Industrial Espionage!
So ancient cultures did understand the value of protecting their innovations. They just used different methods to protect them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yes because this stuff is not patented!
Imagine a world where cooking wasn't covered by IP law you'd never be able to set up your own restaurant!
Why would a chef ever come up with a new recipe?
Surely if he came up with a good one then McDonalds would just steal it and include it in their own chain and lock that chef out.
As soon as you came up with a good idea, theme or dish someone would just swoop in , copy your ideas and push you out of business.
Nobody would ever even try!
We'd all be stuck without anything good to eat!
Well, there's no reasoning with pure authoritarianism. If the law is the law because it's the law, and breaking the law is bad because it's against the law, the law is always right, tautologically. Any sane individual (and most insane ones!) will realize that there are just and unjust laws. People imprisoned for possession of marijuana are victims of a repressive regime. There is absolutely no reason why that should happen, the punishment should fit the crime.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The purpose of IP laws isn't specifically to foster innovation and you're right, innovation occurred before IP laws.
The purpose of IP laws is to foster the sharing of information. In the old days, if you had a really clever idea, you kept it to yourself because that's how you could make money out of it. Sure sometimes really clever people could work out what you'd done, but that's why you formed a guild and beat the crap out of anyone operating in your sector who wasn't a member.
The problem with this of course is that important information doesn't always get to the right people. A guild is highly unlikely to contain many experts from other fields who might take an idea in a new direction and if the only people who know something die it can be lost. See Damascus steel for an example. IP law basically says to innovators, you can have all the benefits you had when you kept everything secret while at the same time letting everyone know what it is you discovered so that it can be built upon and preserved.
If we eliminated IP law, innovation would continue, but information sharing would largely disappear. New discoveries would simply be kept secret.
That's not to say that the current IP system isn't broken and isn't stifling innovation. The system is so complex and so uncertain at the moment that it's pretty much impossible to tell whether something you're developing is covered by a patent or not, or whether there's prior art or not, or whether either of those things actually matters. The system desperately needs to be reformed, but eliminating it won't make information free, it'll just make it secret.
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
You cannot 'steal' a digital bit. It simply exists and is copied or erased. But you cannot 'take' or 'steal' it in any way.
Napster is a bad example but for a different reason. Napster was busted for violating the copyrights of the music they were allowing to be traded.
How about Guitar Hero being killed because the copyright holders of the songs demanded ridiculous amounts when the game amounts to free advertising for them? They are certainly in the rights to do so, but it doesn't mean that 'innovation' isn't being stifled by it.
Patents are the bigger problem. Specifically software patents, but patents in general too. That Tivo can be sued because someone patented a completely vague idea without actually building their idea hurts everybody. Vonage also got sued over really technical things that Verizon (I think) purchased patents for and then sued Vonage. Worse, 'Patent Trolls' - companies that literally don't make anything purchase lots of patents solely for the purpose of suing companies who actually create things - *that* stifles innovation significantly.
I'm not advocating illegal sharing of copyrighted works. I am advocating that the current mindset of today's 'media' companies is very short sighted and backwards. Digital copies, instead of being a 'product' like a CD, are now the 'advertising' they should be using to drive people to buy things that aren't available in infinite supply. (This is not saying that because it's illegally available they should just give up).
Digital copies can be made in infinite numbers at just about zero cost. Say I'm selling apples and one day, someone comes and, without taking any apples, creates an apple tree next to my apple stand. Now apples are available for free right next to me. The value of my apples is lowered. I have not lost anything, nor been deprived of anything. There are simply more apples on the market and that causes value to go down. An infinite supply of apples puts the 'value' of any one apple at zero. I can complain that free apples exist - this is what 'media' is doing today. Or I can shift to having people come to my cart to by my 'worm free' apples. Instead of selling apples, I'm now providing a service of quality apples. I can certainly take apples from the tree too, I just spend time verifying they are worm free; that's the 'value' I am providing.
For the music industry, the 'value' is in live performances and merchandising. You simply can't produce a live performance infinitely, it can only be done at the concert with those musicians for a finite set of people.
But unfortunately we have billions of dollars fighting this basic fact of the digital world. Best description I've heard "Trying to make digital bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet".
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I wish I hadn't blown all my mod points to increase the visibility of a couple titty jokes. You should have got one.
Even the jokes need their patrons.
When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation.
That statement assumes a great deal that is not true. It is terribly loaded. Competition harms a business' profitability. Should we therefore ban competition? Of course not! We recognize that competition (within limits-- don't want rival businesses murdering each other's employees) is what made the West great. But lately there's been confusion on this point, a tendency to ascribe our success to capitalism rather than competition. In the 19th century robber barons showed us that capitalism alone isn't sufficient, for the most profitable thing they could do, as many of them shrewdly saw, was eliminate all the competition. And that's not only the competition from rival producers, but employers as well, so that workers will have little choice but to take employment at the only company in town, at a very low pay rate of course. Therefore we now have some protections from all this in the form of labor and antitrust laws.
But creating monopolies is what current IP law does. You write as if the only way to profit from an innovation is to grant the innovator a monopoly on it. Then you scream about evil pirates whenever anyone intentionally or inadvertently infringes. And how they're undermining the system, and will ruin it if they aren't stopped! Well, the system is already dead. It just looks alive in the same way a zombie looks alive. Consider that piracy is unstoppable. Our attempts to quash it are ludicrous. Even if the Internet was shut down and we gave up the immense value it has brought us all, piracy would still be unstoppable. Why cannot we just pay the innovators? And stop wasting all this effort on futile enforcement and DRM that at best serves only to enrich IP lawyers? And at worst causes almost all innovation to grind to a halt? I'll hit back with another loaded statement: Do you want the West to fall behind China? All because anything other than patents and copyrights somehow isn't fair enough, and the poor starving innovators and artists might not get their due? But you see, the current system fails miserably at getting them their due now. And we know the "starving artists" line is a joke, what with the industry's long history of ripping off artists worse than pirates ever allegedly did, and so prevalent is it that we have this term, "Hollywood Accounting".
But don't be mislead into thinking that cleaning up the corruption will make the current system work well. Even if there was no unfair bargaining, and the patent office massively tightened up the standards, and terms were drastically shortened, even then, the system would still do a poor job. And that's because of a fundamental difficulty, stated so well in the very term "Intellectual Property". It tries to treat the intangible as "property" that can be held, sold, and traded like material goods. It almost totally fails to account for the biggest difference, that ideas are infinitely copyable, by simply declaring that by legislative fiat, copying is not allowed without permission! It treats ideas like they are mining claims. And so we have thousands of people out there staking and trying to defend claims. Too easy to spend more time fighting over claims than innovating, and many of our businesses have been doing that. And the disease has spread into our universities. It's worse than mining claims because at least boundaries of mining claims can be clearly established. Ideas cannot be so neatly bounded, and so it's never easy to decide when claim jumping has occurred.
Your comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia is too simplistic. You overlook that Wikipedia's expenses are way, way lower. Wikipedia does not pay contributors, and does not pay all the expenses associated with paper editions, things like printing and distribution. Wikipedia is a HUGE win for the public. More information than Britannica can ever hope to cram into a paper edition, at a fraction of the cos
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'm not implying that you are a fascist or totalitarian thug. I'm directly accusing you of it based on immediately obvious observations. Your willingness to do violence to random third parties for consuming substances you dislike in private is clearest, but the real clincher is the law-worshipping mentality evident in your original post: you regard law as defining ethics, and identify yourself with its enforcers. It's the classic authoritarian submission trait identified by Theodor Adorno.
This is, of course, a complementary to the authoritarian aggression trait: you assuage your psychological insecurities by identifying with established power, and express your sadistic tendencies vicariously through its violent enforcement, which is why you find criticism of that structure so threatening. Really, people like you are the slime of humanity; merely pathetic when encountered singly in a context like this, but lethally dangerous in sufficient numbers.
Oh, and for the record: I'm more of an LSD sort of girl.
It's a bit sad, considering the amount of energy spent on Slashdot discussing IP and innovation, that a sweeping and incorrect generalization like "No IP protection in the Baroque" that is still considered "Insightful." You would have hoped that people would have spent a fraction of the time writing and ranting instead reading.
There were of course considerable legal efforts used to keep smart people in place and harvest their output. This was an era when monopoly rights were routinely granted to restrict competition and the wealthy were obsessively worried about secret knowledge.
If you were, say, a glassblower in Venice, it would be impossible to take that knowledge and use it elsewhere within Venice; risky to use it outside Venetian control; and downright fatal if you did use it outside Venice and then returned home. By comparison, a patent lawsuit where most of the time you split the profits is downright encouraging.
In the arts, Handel basically had to defect from Hannover to compose in England.
This is not to over-dramaticize; states were weaker and their understanding of what could be considered a "valuable innovation" much more limited. I don't know how you could reasonably compare "IP" restrictions and say one era was better or worse; they were just very different. It would depend what you were trying to do.
I'm afraid my own opinion is fairly bland--clearly IP laws hurt innovation and clearly IP laws help innovation. (I could give personal examples of both--projects killed because an invention was patented but not developed by a competitor; projects not considered because you couldn't establish exclusivity and thus saw no path for ROI.) They have different effects in different industries. The proper balance between freedom, basic fairness and innovation is tricky.
I'm going to buck the trend here and say it's NOT patents and copyrights and IP laws that are blocking innovation. No, it's a little more of a direct cause: An unproductive workforce that expects to get paid just for showing up with a degree.
There are a lot of people out there in the professional world, in technical professions, in engineering, in project management, etc. who can talk and talk but can't or won't deliver results. A lot of people full of degrees and education and smooth talk but no actual practical skill or work ethic. All hat and no cowboy as some say. I interview people all the time who bill themselves as hard-core in-the-weeds technical people, but when you actually dig and ask probing questions you find it's all superficial and the person actually isn't really capable of providing much value. For example:
Me: So, you write C++ software and work at XYZ corp, great! We're looking for C++ talent. Tell me about a project that you worked on! ...
Candidate: Well, we developed software that did ABC...
Me: We? No, what exactly did YOU do?
Candidate: Well, I worked on a major sub-component of the software...
Me: OK, so what are some of the algorithms and/or data structures you used while writing the code?
Candidate: Um, well I didn't use much of that. I provided analysis and resolution of major defects...
Me: So you fixed bugs. That's cool. What are some of the common C++ mistakes you have identified?
Candidate: Uhh, I didn't really get deep into the code. I basically facilitated the analysis.
Me: Oh, so you talked to the engineers and wrote bug reports?
Candidate: Well, no, but I ENABLED them to deliver their results by...
Me:
It sounds like the "So what exactly do you do, Bob?" segment in Office Space, but these people are everywhere, and not all of them are interviewing. Many are in nice comfortable do-nothing jobs in corporate division 23 department B in high tech companies everywhere. These people are dragging down our companies and our country and need to go away.
This country has a major talent gap. You guys all deride the government when they talk about the huge shortage of technical talent but it's absolutely true. We have a shit-ton of people with "Engineer" on their diploma. We have a lot of people who claim to be technical but simply sit in meetings and "enable" others who are actually doing the work. We have a very, very small number of actual implementors who know their stuff and can actually innovate.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is, but think I see the symptoms all around me every day.