How's this for an alternative version of patents: there ought to be a fairly small maximum number of patents allowed (1000? 10000?). This small database should make it easier to determine whether or not a particular invention is infringing on an existing patent.
Let whoever (people/companies/non-government entities) bid on ownership of each submitted patent, and the top bidder will get to own the patent (with all the privileges granted thereof - including selling the ownership of the patent to others).
This will cause the bidders to determine the "value" of each patent as they perform their "due diligence" for each patent. (In other words, you don't have to depend on the expertise of patent examiners to set the price of each patent.) Once a bid has been submitted (through escrow?), it can't be retracted & will be returned only if it is not the maximum bid.
The winning bidder pays the money _directly_ to the submitter of the patent idea. This will allow smart people who have a lot of ideas, but who might not be able to take advantage of their own ideas, to receive an amount which has been determined (by a market process) to be the "value" of their idea. With this kind of jackpot payoff, there should be a lot of people submitting good ideas into the patent process (with the hopes of becoming instantly rich).
As patents expire, or are torpedoed due to obviousness or prior art (which will either require either patent examiners or perhaps organized review-boards of industry experts), that will free up patent "slots" in the allowed # of patents, and new submissions can be bidded on to fill those slots.
Patent submissions which did NOT make it into any of the allowed patent slots wil end up being released immediately into the public domain - so submitters have a vested interest in making sure their submission is a high enough quality to have a good chance of winning the bidding.
The government may call a company's cards instead of "playing bluff" like the rest of us, but the government's actions on the product changes nothing about what the product is itself.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. "Intellectual property" is not a product in any real sense of the word. It can be treated as a "product" only because the governments are enforcing laws which make control of "intellectual property" somewhat like a real thing.
If a government does not enforce such laws, then there is no way a company which depends on "intellectual property" for its business model can "take its ball & go home" - at the very best, all it can do is "leave the ball & go home", and refuse to participate in the market anymore (not exactly the best situation for a company).
Contrast that with a company which provides a REAL good or service - they could simply stop providing those goods or services to the offending market, and they will cause real hardship for people who depend on those goods & services no matter WHAT the laws of the foreign government says.
As I stated before, "intellectual property" is not a real product, as much as "intellectual property" proponents like to pretend it is.
I think this would limit the usefulness of patents for small inventors.
Frankly speaking, from the viewpoint of benefit-for-society, you don't usually WANT the small inventors to have the patents. They don't usually have the resources to bring the good ideas that might be patented to the market in a short-term cost-effective way, where society can benefit from those ideas. But you _do_ want the small inventors to be rewarded for bringing their ideas to society, and my idea of auctioning the patents & letting the submitters receive the payoff will do that.
The kind who can't afford to have an army of temps watching for patent slots to open up.
You wouldn't need such a thing. As part of the auction process, the government would just publish (in whatever ways are most effective) how many slots are open, and the text of all of the submitted patents which are going to be available for bidding. The small inventors can submit their patents during any year where they think they can get into the top N slots, and the big companies can pay for the armies of engineers to pore over the submitted patents & figure out how much those patents might be worth.
As far as your "patent tax" idea is concerned, it seems much more complicated than my "auction patent slots" idea, harder to determine whether you are violating anyone's patent, and the benefit to society (and the patent submitters & owners) is much less clearly defined.
That's probably because you don't create works of intellectual property for a living.
I am not the person you responded to, but I write code for a living. This is generally considered to be an "intellectual property"-creating job.
I get paid for the service of creating code. I don't expect to get paid over and over every time someone uses my code - I expect to get paid only for the one-time effort that I put forth to create the code. I want to keep getting paid, I keep providing service - just like every other hardworking craftperson on the planet.
People should expect to be compensated when they provide desired goods or services. To expect anything more is just an expression of greed.
"Intellectual property" laws are just a way to make people pay more for a product than a free market would decide that it was worth.
This would do diddly-squat to hurt Europe. That's the problem with a business model based on "intellectual property": if a government doesn't support your business model, then there is very little you can do to "punish" them.
All Europe would have to do is pass a few laws putting ALL of Microsoft's "intellectual property" into the public domain, including any future updates that Microsoft makes in other countries (and make it legal for anyone in Europe to get cracked/stolen versions of those updates). There'd be a ton of European companies providing support for European users of Windows, and all of the European companies would suddenly have a windfall of cash since they wouldn't have to pay Microsoft any licensing fees.
A company which depends on "intellectual property" for a product instead of providing a real good or service is pretty much SOL if they go against the government.
How's this for an alternative version of patents: there ought to be a fairly small maximum number of patents allowed (1000? 10000?). This small database should make it easier to determine whether or not a particular invention is infringing on an existing patent.
Let whoever (people/companies/non-government entities) bid on ownership of each submitted patent, and the top bidder will get to own the patent (with all the privileges granted thereof - including selling the ownership of the patent to others).
This will cause the bidders to determine the "value" of each patent as they perform their "due diligence" for each patent. (In other words, you don't have to depend on the expertise of patent examiners to set the price of each patent.) Once a bid has been submitted (through escrow?), it can't be retracted & will be returned only if it is not the maximum bid.
The winning bidder pays the money _directly_ to the submitter of the patent idea. This will allow smart people who have a lot of ideas, but who might not be able to take advantage of their own ideas, to receive an amount which has been determined (by a market process) to be the "value" of their idea. With this kind of jackpot payoff, there should be a lot of people submitting good ideas into the patent process (with the hopes of becoming instantly rich).
As patents expire, or are torpedoed due to obviousness or prior art (which will either require either patent examiners or perhaps organized review-boards of industry experts), that will free up patent "slots" in the allowed # of patents, and new submissions can be bidded on to fill those slots.
Patent submissions which did NOT make it into any of the allowed patent slots wil end up being released immediately into the public domain - so submitters have a vested interest in making sure their submission is a high enough quality to have a good chance of winning the bidding.
Worked this system out myself, although I'm sure some patent/economics expert somewhere has already thought of something like it:-)
Be a little clearer about what you mean when you say "If that's all they did".
By private property rights, I also include the right to make copies of my own private property & hand them out to as many total strangers as I can afford to. "Intellectual property" laws violate that right.
I want clear proof of the net societal benefit that is derived from "intellectual property" laws which justify the violation of my private property rights.
As someone mentioned in another reply to your message, all this would do is show the world exactly how ephemeral the concept of "intellectual property" is.
Business models based on intellectual property _completely_ depend on enforcement of the local governments. If Microsoft "took their ball and went home", the local governments could simply declare ALL of Microsoft's "intellectual property" as public domain, and have an immediate industry spring up providing support for Microsoft customers to European customers.
Hell, Europe could make it perfectly legal for European citizens to get copies of whatever updates that Microsoft was putting out, reverse engineer & crack any DRM that Microsoft put into them, and rerelease them to the public without fear of retribution.
Contrast that to a business model based on selling REAL goods or services, and it's pretty easy to see how artificial a business model based intellectual property really is.
Society (and institutions which are supposedly chartered to provide for the public good) is/are not required to subsidize, support, or even get out of the way of private enterprises.
No they don't. Society has no direct obligation to provide a "fair" business environment for anyone.
If private enterprise can't provide desired services at a value level desired by the members of a society, then they don't have the "right", moral or otherwise, to force society to subsidize their inadequacy.
If a society determines that it is more cost-effective for the society to create its own public infrastructure than it is to let private enterprise gouge them for those services, then those private enterprises serve no public purpose & should either find something else to do, or should go away.
Stopping theft is fine with me, but I'd like to hear a good societal justification about why it is necessary to violate peoples' private property rights by preventing them from making copies of their own property.
Well, if their service is free and works well (not necessarily perfectly), you now have a tool which should let you translate that entire book in about a week (assuming most of the week will be spent checking the translation & preserving the "flavor" of the source).
How many people that you really want flying an airplane would be able to handle the execution of dozens or (on large planes) hudreds of people? How many eight year old girls would it have to have their throats cut before you or anyone else opened the door?
Not possible anymore. Unless the # of hijackers outnumber the passengers, they _will_ be dogpiled before they can kill very many people. Average people are pissed off enough/scared to risk great personal injury to stop someone from hijacking a plane.
I don't care how good somebody is at hand-to-hand combat, or even if they smuggle in a pistol - if they're at the bottom of a ton of human meat, they ain't moving. And there's not a lot of space on a plane for them to dodge. (And if they cause too much hurt to the people at the bottom of that pile, I doubt the rest of the passengers would let them live for very long.)
The only real option that terrorists have with air travel right now is to destroy the plane - which _is_ a horrible result, but not as bad as crashing it into a building.
My scenario doesn't take into account the hijacking of a cargo plane with just crew, or a plane with very few passengers, of course. Or somebody chartering a plane. I suspect the government already has plans in that situation to shoot such a plane down.
I've seen the justifications for both sides so many times by now, that it feels like just mentioning the keywords is enough to lay out all the arguments - as far as I was concerned, actually listing those justifications would have been a pretty worthless exercise.
At this point, a "new" talking point is an incredible novelty and the only reason that these things are rehashed is to make sure that the other side doesn't get the last word in.
What's the issue? Grandparent uses bogus examples, parent pointed it out. Just because parent is using colloquiallisms doesn't make the logic any less valid.
Riiiiight...you are obviously privy to the deep geo-political calculations of the Bush administration.
I guess the blatant war profiteering and right-wing nutcase ideology was just a distraction to keep people from realizing how forward-thinking they really were.
Well, if you build a space station, then by definition it could be itself considered a "celestial body" (as is any satellite), and therefore that treaty says we have agreed not to militarize it.
I believe that was the original spirit of this treaty as well, although as usual, people who firmly believe in Machiavellan leadership, will try and worm their way around such things.
they commited a crime against society - theft - murder - etc.
...smoked a joint & got caught, pissed off the wrong cop/judge, made out with a senator's daughter, got farmed, couldn't pay back their college loans & the law wouldn't let them declare bankruptcy, etc. Obviously, their crimes are just as bad as those thieves & murderers you threw up as your rationale for eliminating their personal rights.
For the tinfoil-wearing crowd, let's throw out one more reason for eliminating personal rights of prisoners: didn't toe the party line after fascists have completely taken over the government.
Well, strictly speaking, patents are designed to be a tool to squash competition.
The rationale of patent-proponents is that this will encourage people to invent more things which will be available for public use, although this hoped-for side-effect of squashing competition hasn't really been proven.
Frankly, there would be a LOT more public benefit if the patent system were eliminated, and the resultant money which is currently wasted on licensing & legal fees were directed toward basic & applied research to be released into the public domain instead.
All that would happen is that you would get an extra criminal charge against you, and if you had actually revealed anything embarrassing to the government, the lawyer would be taken into custody & held incommunicado.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely - and we'll start seeing regular real-life examples of that the closer the U.S. governments gets to being a complete police state.
On the other hand, in the short-term, it might be a good idea to join the Soviet Communist Party^W^W^W work for the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
Copied from one my previous submissions:
How's this for an alternative version of patents: there ought to be a fairly small maximum number of patents allowed (1000? 10000?). This small database should make it easier to determine whether or not a particular invention is infringing on an existing patent.
Let whoever (people/companies/non-government entities) bid on ownership of each submitted patent, and the top bidder will get to own the patent (with all the privileges granted thereof - including selling the ownership of the patent to others).
This will cause the bidders to determine the "value" of each patent as they perform their "due diligence" for each patent. (In other words, you don't have to depend on the expertise of patent examiners to set the price of each patent.) Once a bid has been submitted (through escrow?), it can't be retracted & will be returned only if it is not the maximum bid.
The winning bidder pays the money _directly_ to the submitter of the patent idea. This will allow smart people who have a lot of ideas, but who might not be able to take advantage of their own ideas, to receive an amount which has been determined (by a market process) to be the "value" of their idea. With this kind of jackpot payoff, there should be a lot of people submitting good ideas into the patent process (with the hopes of becoming instantly rich).
As patents expire, or are torpedoed due to obviousness or prior art (which will either require either patent examiners or perhaps organized review-boards of industry experts), that will free up patent "slots" in the allowed # of patents, and new submissions can be bidded on to fill those slots.
Patent submissions which did NOT make it into any of the allowed patent slots wil end up being released immediately into the public domain - so submitters have a vested interest in making sure their submission is a high enough quality to have a good chance of winning the bidding.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. "Intellectual property" is not a product in any real sense of the word. It can be treated as a "product" only because the governments are enforcing laws which make control of "intellectual property" somewhat like a real thing.
If a government does not enforce such laws, then there is no way a company which depends on "intellectual property" for its business model can "take its ball & go home" - at the very best, all it can do is "leave the ball & go home", and refuse to participate in the market anymore (not exactly the best situation for a company).
Contrast that with a company which provides a REAL good or service - they could simply stop providing those goods or services to the offending market, and they will cause real hardship for people who depend on those goods & services no matter WHAT the laws of the foreign government says.
As I stated before, "intellectual property" is not a real product, as much as "intellectual property" proponents like to pretend it is.
Frankly speaking, from the viewpoint of benefit-for-society, you don't usually WANT the small inventors to have the patents. They don't usually have the resources to bring the good ideas that might be patented to the market in a short-term cost-effective way, where society can benefit from those ideas. But you _do_ want the small inventors to be rewarded for bringing their ideas to society, and my idea of auctioning the patents & letting the submitters receive the payoff will do that.
You wouldn't need such a thing. As part of the auction process, the government would just publish (in whatever ways are most effective) how many slots are open, and the text of all of the submitted patents which are going to be available for bidding. The small inventors can submit their patents during any year where they think they can get into the top N slots, and the big companies can pay for the armies of engineers to pore over the submitted patents & figure out how much those patents might be worth.
As far as your "patent tax" idea is concerned, it seems much more complicated than my "auction patent slots" idea, harder to determine whether you are violating anyone's patent, and the benefit to society (and the patent submitters & owners) is much less clearly defined.
I am not the person you responded to, but I write code for a living. This is generally considered to be an "intellectual property"-creating job.
I get paid for the service of creating code. I don't expect to get paid over and over every time someone uses my code - I expect to get paid only for the one-time effort that I put forth to create the code. I want to keep getting paid, I keep providing service - just like every other hardworking craftperson on the planet.
People should expect to be compensated when they provide desired goods or services. To expect anything more is just an expression of greed.
"Intellectual property" laws are just a way to make people pay more for a product than a free market would decide that it was worth.
This would do diddly-squat to hurt Europe. That's the problem with a business model based on "intellectual property": if a government doesn't support your business model, then there is very little you can do to "punish" them.
All Europe would have to do is pass a few laws putting ALL of Microsoft's "intellectual property" into the public domain, including any future updates that Microsoft makes in other countries (and make it legal for anyone in Europe to get cracked/stolen versions of those updates). There'd be a ton of European companies providing support for European users of Windows, and all of the European companies would suddenly have a windfall of cash since they wouldn't have to pay Microsoft any licensing fees.
A company which depends on "intellectual property" for a product instead of providing a real good or service is pretty much SOL if they go against the government.
How's this for an alternative version of patents: there ought to be a fairly small maximum number of patents allowed (1000? 10000?). This small database should make it easier to determine whether or not a particular invention is infringing on an existing patent.
:-)
Let whoever (people/companies/non-government entities) bid on ownership of each submitted patent, and the top bidder will get to own the patent (with all the privileges granted thereof - including selling the ownership of the patent to others).
This will cause the bidders to determine the "value" of each patent as they perform their "due diligence" for each patent. (In other words, you don't have to depend on the expertise of patent examiners to set the price of each patent.) Once a bid has been submitted (through escrow?), it can't be retracted & will be returned only if it is not the maximum bid.
The winning bidder pays the money _directly_ to the submitter of the patent idea. This will allow smart people who have a lot of ideas, but who might not be able to take advantage of their own ideas, to receive an amount which has been determined (by a market process) to be the "value" of their idea. With this kind of jackpot payoff, there should be a lot of people submitting good ideas into the patent process (with the hopes of becoming instantly rich).
As patents expire, or are torpedoed due to obviousness or prior art (which will either require either patent examiners or perhaps organized review-boards of industry experts), that will free up patent "slots" in the allowed # of patents, and new submissions can be bidded on to fill those slots.
Patent submissions which did NOT make it into any of the allowed patent slots wil end up being released immediately into the public domain - so submitters have a vested interest in making sure their submission is a high enough quality to have a good chance of winning the bidding.
Worked this system out myself, although I'm sure some patent/economics expert somewhere has already thought of something like it
Or whistleblower content, against organizations (either government/corporate/political/underground) with a tendency to retributive behavior.
Be a little clearer about what you mean when you say "If that's all they did".
By private property rights, I also include the right to make copies of my own private property & hand them out to as many total strangers as I can afford to. "Intellectual property" laws violate that right.
I want clear proof of the net societal benefit that is derived from "intellectual property" laws which justify the violation of my private property rights.
As someone mentioned in another reply to your message, all this would do is show the world exactly how ephemeral the concept of "intellectual property" is.
Business models based on intellectual property _completely_ depend on enforcement of the local governments. If Microsoft "took their ball and went home", the local governments could simply declare ALL of Microsoft's "intellectual property" as public domain, and have an immediate industry spring up providing support for Microsoft customers to European customers.
Hell, Europe could make it perfectly legal for European citizens to get copies of whatever updates that Microsoft was putting out, reverse engineer & crack any DRM that Microsoft put into them, and rerelease them to the public without fear of retribution.
Contrast that to a business model based on selling REAL goods or services, and it's pretty easy to see how artificial a business model based intellectual property really is.
TRY being the key word.
Society (and institutions which are supposedly chartered to provide for the public good) is/are not required to subsidize, support, or even get out of the way of private enterprises.
No they don't. Society has no direct obligation to provide a "fair" business environment for anyone.
If private enterprise can't provide desired services at a value level desired by the members of a society, then they don't have the "right", moral or otherwise, to force society to subsidize their inadequacy.
If a society determines that it is more cost-effective for the society to create its own public infrastructure than it is to let private enterprise gouge them for those services, then those private enterprises serve no public purpose & should either find something else to do, or should go away.
Stopping theft is fine with me, but I'd like to hear a good societal justification about why it is necessary to violate peoples' private property rights by preventing them from making copies of their own property.
Actually, electric can openers can be a health hazard (since they're harder to keep clean). Dunno if the other stuff you listed is a health hazard :-)
I don't see either major U.S. party being particularly market-oriented.
Well, if their service is free and works well (not necessarily perfectly), you now have a tool which should let you translate that entire book in about a week (assuming most of the week will be spent checking the translation & preserving the "flavor" of the source).
Not possible anymore. Unless the # of hijackers outnumber the passengers, they _will_ be dogpiled before they can kill very many people. Average people are pissed off enough/scared to risk great personal injury to stop someone from hijacking a plane.
I don't care how good somebody is at hand-to-hand combat, or even if they smuggle in a pistol - if they're at the bottom of a ton of human meat, they ain't moving. And there's not a lot of space on a plane for them to dodge. (And if they cause too much hurt to the people at the bottom of that pile, I doubt the rest of the passengers would let them live for very long.)
The only real option that terrorists have with air travel right now is to destroy the plane - which _is_ a horrible result, but not as bad as crashing it into a building.
My scenario doesn't take into account the hijacking of a cargo plane with just crew, or a plane with very few passengers, of course. Or somebody chartering a plane. I suspect the government already has plans in that situation to shoot such a plane down.
I've seen the justifications for both sides so many times by now, that it feels like just mentioning the keywords is enough to lay out all the arguments - as far as I was concerned, actually listing those justifications would have been a pretty worthless exercise.
At this point, a "new" talking point is an incredible novelty and the only reason that these things are rehashed is to make sure that the other side doesn't get the last word in.
What's the issue? Grandparent uses bogus examples, parent pointed it out. Just because parent is using colloquiallisms doesn't make the logic any less valid.
Riiiiight...you are obviously privy to the deep geo-political calculations of the Bush administration.
I guess the blatant war profiteering and right-wing nutcase ideology was just a distraction to keep people from realizing how forward-thinking they really were.
Well, if you build a space station, then by definition it could be itself considered a "celestial body" (as is any satellite), and therefore that treaty says we have agreed not to militarize it.
I believe that was the original spirit of this treaty as well, although as usual, people who firmly believe in Machiavellan leadership, will try and worm their way around such things.
...smoked a joint & got caught, pissed off the wrong cop/judge, made out with a senator's daughter, got farmed, couldn't pay back their college loans & the law wouldn't let them declare bankruptcy, etc. Obviously, their crimes are just as bad as those thieves & murderers you threw up as your rationale for eliminating their personal rights.
For the tinfoil-wearing crowd, let's throw out one more reason for eliminating personal rights of prisoners: didn't toe the party line after fascists have completely taken over the government.
Well, strictly speaking, patents are designed to be a tool to squash competition.
The rationale of patent-proponents is that this will encourage people to invent more things which will be available for public use, although this hoped-for side-effect of squashing competition hasn't really been proven.
Frankly, there would be a LOT more public benefit if the patent system were eliminated, and the resultant money which is currently wasted on licensing & legal fees were directed toward basic & applied research to be released into the public domain instead.
I doubt they'd put diamond on the surface of razor blades - that would make them last too long, and people wouldn't have to keep buying them.
You're not seeing the "Given enough money" part.
All that would happen is that you would get an extra criminal charge against you, and if you had actually revealed anything embarrassing to the government, the lawyer would be taken into custody & held incommunicado.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely - and we'll start seeing regular real-life examples of that the closer the U.S. governments gets to being a complete police state.
On the other hand, in the short-term, it might be a good idea to join the Soviet Communist Party^W^W^W work for the federal government.