Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Created the Pencil Eraser and How Patents Have Changed
fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"
In this modern day patents simply protect firms from competition.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Into the hands of lobbyists, who paid for legislators to make it a pay-to-play activity.
I'm working on a patented drinking fountain water filter that will be required by law for use in all public schools, hospitals and train stations - it will also be a law that they must be replaced every 30 days with a recycling fee paid to franchised non-profit companies staffed only by the homeless.
"Service economy" with IP fantasy led to this bullshit world for the West and other developed countries.
And it would. Bureaucratic, parasitic, loophole-exploiting endeavors like lawyering, bankering, lobbying are most rewarded.
The West is rotting from within.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The shift in policy is an intentional, if unwritten, strategy intended to keep America a competitive force in the world's economy.
In the past, America's power was based on its vast, untapped resources; steel, oil, cotton, grain, whatever - we had it and could rip it out of the ground cheaply. We sold these resources to the world and became rich. But these days other developing nations are willing to sell their resources far beyond what we can afford, and we can no longer depend on those resources as the primary engine of our economy.
Later, America's strength came from its industry; our factories produced high-quality goods in vast quantities. And we became rich again (well, even richer). But today, we've sold the technology to poorer nations, and their citizens are willing to work for wages that would starve our own people. So America can no longer depend on its industry to sustain it.
So instead, we've turned to our ingenuity and inventiveness as a way to ensure our dominance; our patents, our copyrights, our trademarks. We've hitched our wagon to the idea that our "intellectual property" will keep us a prominent force on the world stage. Of course, an idea is worthless unless somebody is willing to put it to use (the greatest movie in the world won't bring in a cent unless you get people to pay you to watch it). So we make all our ideas available to the world... for a price. And we have greatly bolstered our laws - and made clear our willingness to use force to defend those laws - to ensure that OUR ideas are not used without our receiving adequate recompense.
Except great ideas - the ones that bring in great wads of cash - are difficult to come by (Sturgeon's Law applies with ideas too) and while inspiration can be encouraged, it cannot be forced. So rather than depend on those rare strokes of genius, we ensure that even our less-stellar conceptions are protected the same way as the truly inspired ideas. Patents are increasingly granted on the most insignificant, inconsequential and mundane ideas because it brings in the money.
This is not to say there is some overreaching planned conspiracy; there was never a shadowy group of power-brokers chortling in some dark room as they moved the nation onto this new path. But America has always followed the path of money, and right now the big money is in intellectual property. Keeping its businesses strong makes strategic sense. Thus, we see an increased strengthening of certain laws (or weakening of others) to protect the interests of those businesses.
That's why there is little incentive to revamp the patent system, or bring copyright back down to sensible terms. It's why the American government is pushing so hard to enforce its copyright laws in other countries. It's why there is such a concern about copyright violations and why the Internet scares the people in power so much. American hegemony, they believe, is directly tied to how much intellectual property it owns, and how well it is protected.
In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition ?
The issues regarding patents are not only about patents, but also the courts.
As the pencil and eraser case (circa 1858) has illustrated, the court back then still managed largely to uphold their independence.
Not now.
Today, the courts have become an apparatchik for the corporations, the banksters, the politicians, and the power that be.
Judges back then were chosen based on merits. Judges today are chosen based on who they know.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The reason we have such crap patents right now is the bumbling fumbling stumbling Congress.
In 1982, in order to address various problems with the patent rulings being inconsistent they established the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
This court is a Frankenstein's monster. It has created a whole new body of law by allowing such insanity as business process patents. This law has created an atmosphere so favorable to applicants and their assigns that every life-form that can croak out an 'idea' in front of a patent attorney has a chance to become an inventor.
Of course the result of this is the patent office is deluged with applications. THE HAVE NO CHANCE to process all these applications in a moderate fashion. So they are forced to take the attitude 'approve the application and let the Courts sort it out'.
That only encourages the greedy to make more garbage applications.
The Patent Office fee system was a clumsy and ineffective attempt to apply brakes to this runaway train by increasing the cost of applying and maintaining patents. You might as well try to piss upwind into a hurricane.
Right now the US Patent System is a great hindrance to innovation and economic growth in America. Will it get fixed? There is a good chance it will, because stuff like patent trolling is hurting even the big companies.