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Google's Six-Front War
wasimkadak writes "While the tech world is buzzing about the launch and implications of Google's new social network, Google+, it's worth noting that Google isn't just in a war with Facebook, it's at war with multiple companies across multiple industries. In fact, Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology."
Patents were made to ensure that in exchange for making information public, the inventor would get temporary exclusivity. The purpose was to get information that would have been held as a trade secret, or in past ages by trade guilds, and potentially lost. Now, of course, patents are useless as they rarely describe HOW to make the item in question, and are instead a vague concept grab and used not to protect the inventor but as clubs to beat others down with.
Copyright is similar, though it was meant to give creators some incentive to create.
They don't claim property rights. They confuse the issue with the poor phrase "intellectual property" even though it isn't.
They do come with a cost. Eventually they will lose the exclusive privilege to the information. The problems lie around the laws that make up copyright and patents.
It's not about society. It's about protecting specific interests, to protect industry from the effects of new technology that threatens its existence. From Gutenberg's printing press right up through the present and into the future.
Ah, but you're ignoring the well-documented fact that copyright was invented well before Gutenberg. The very name dates from before printing technology, when all texts had to be copied by hand, by scribes. And the first documented copyright had nothing to do with authorship; the concept was invented to control the copying of bibles and other religious texts, whose authors were centuries dead (and often unknown). The function of copyright was to legally restrict the production of religious texts to only the versions officially approved by the local rulers, and to keep the number of copies sufficiently low that only the priesthood could get copies.
The application of copyright to original documents, for economic reasons, was an innovation of the late 15th century, some decades after Gutenberg's work, and a century or so after the first print shops appeared in Europe.
But most of the history of copyright is about limiting the production of hand-copied text to only "authorized" versions, primarily for religious reasons. The extension to commercial transactions is, historically speaking, rather recent.
As is so often true now, there's a useful wikipedia article that summarizes this, and includes some useful links (for people who want to actually understand the history rather than just repeat the current commercial propaganda on the topic ;-).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It is property because the law allows you to buy, sell, and transfer it.
Right; Just like, sex. In the US state of Nevada, and some other countries, the law allows you to buy and sell sex.
The term is "prostitution". Now, I don't know about you, but my sexual property rights are taxed heavily. Even if I choose not to exercise my ability to sell access to my amazing Johnson, I still have to list all the kinds of sex it can perform as taxable property when I file my taxes. Each time I get paid for sex I loose a little bit of my sexual property -- just like when you sell an idea!
Some clients have bought enough of my sex that they literally own most a majority say in the handling of it. ( You do have to be careful though -- Once, After I sold my sex, the client re-sold it on e-bay, and it was purchased by a 16 year old! I served 5 years for statutory rape! )
I once sold an idea that was so novel, it was in a totally invented on the spot language from a culture that existed only in my mind. A scarce resource like that -- the copyright traders, ie publishers, just had to have it, but they didn't count on the fact that no one but me knew what the strange symbols meant! Due to economics of scarcity, I'm now the richest man on InstainFrigth (that's Earth, but shhhh, don't tell anyone, it devalues my made up language).
Now, Don't tell me when you list your property you don't claim all of your ideas, passing thoughts, and your va-jay-jay!?
Why, those are 10 times more valuable than even a Big Johnson! You should talk to your accountant and maybe a sex or idea lawyer -- You could be liable for serious mental and sexual tax evasion; Even if you don't give a fuck!
I guess next you'll try to tell me that you are born with a head full of all the ideas you'll ever have, and a body full of all the fucks that you will ever give...
Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?
That's a rhetorical question, right? Beginning 1990's the US courts, in a couple of landmark cases, decided that software patents were legal. What you're seeing is the ensuing land-grab.