Interestingly enough, there's at least one group of farmers who aren't so keen on it today. Looks like the Hoosiers keep arguing about adopting daylight savings time, but some "farmers fear their cows will come home at the wrong time." http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/s cene_sangor_mayjun05.msp
Evidently, there are also some questions of political identity going along with adopting DST: "Others simply dislike Eastern time and all that it represents. 'We're in the Midwest, not in the Mideast,' said Gary Cook, a former state legislator who is now Plymouth's mayor. On the floor of the Indiana House recently when the measure was being debated, similar sentiments were aired: 'In my part of the state, they know we've got more in common with Evansville and Chicago, Illinois,' Representative Dave Crooks declared, 'than we do with Bangor, Maine; Boston, Massachusetts; and New York City.' His fellow legislators burst into cheers."
> make the IP only hoarding companies much more expensive to maintain
I agree. The root of the problem is that the maintenance costs on patents are only loosely tied to their economic value. This makes all sorts of perverse tactics (submarine patents, blocking patents, huge patent portfolios for the sole purpose of horse-trading) economically viable. So why not target the economic basis of these perverse techniques by tying patent maintenance costs to their economic value? One way to do this is an ad valorum tax on patents. Not only would this address the hoarding problem, it would help fund the basis science and research being cannibalized in the enclosure of the information commons.
Re: karma, I've been lurking here a long time, but this is my first comment / post, which may explain the 0 karma. Thanks for reading and replying in spite of that!
Re: The issue of financial gain -- if the system provided no financial gain, then what was the point of trying to patent it? I'm not trying at all to attack, but you need to consider what are the goals of the patent system and, seperately, how people view it. If you don't plan to financially gain from an invention, then what's the point of closing off access to others? There's of course an issue of a merit badge or pride in having a patent, but that's not the patent system's primary purpose. The patent system is predicated on the assumption (correct or not) that people won't publish the results of their creativity without having control over the financial benefits accruing from it.
If you want a merit badge, there are many other ways to get that: submit the system to ACM or some industry group for an award, open-source it and gain reputation, etc. But locking people out of the improvement without planning on doing something with it yourself is, arguably, a degenerate use of the patent system:
"To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it." -- Thoreau, "Walking"
Exactly -- There's no direct economic tie between the size of the patent and its maintenance costs. (Litigation is the primary maintenance cost today, and it's one with a very high variance relative to the underlying patent.) If there was some way to guarantee that a more expansive patent would cost you more throughout its lifetime, we might see a reining in of "whole world" patents and better usage of those which are granted. One way to do this and fund the basic research necessary for future competitiveness: keep the patent system exactly as it is today, but tax patents based on their purported value and apply that tax to basic R&D.
A bit of shameless self-promotion, but Legal Affairs just published an article to this effect at http://legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/argum ent_rosenblum_mayjun05.msp. A subscription is currently required (or you can buy a paper version on a newsstand), but after it's moved to the archives, it should be freely accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, there's at least one group of farmers who aren't so keen on it today. Looks like the Hoosiers keep arguing about adopting daylight savings time, but some "farmers fear their cows will come home at the wrong time." http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/s cene_sangor_mayjun05.msp
Evidently, there are also some questions of political identity going along with adopting DST: "Others simply dislike Eastern time and all that it represents. 'We're in the Midwest, not in the Mideast,' said Gary Cook, a former state legislator who is now Plymouth's mayor. On the floor of the Indiana House recently when the measure was being debated, similar sentiments were aired: 'In my part of the state, they know we've got more in common with Evansville and Chicago, Illinois,' Representative Dave Crooks declared, 'than we do with Bangor, Maine; Boston, Massachusetts; and New York City.' His fellow legislators burst into cheers."
I agree. The root of the problem is that the maintenance costs on patents are only loosely tied to their economic value. This makes all sorts of perverse tactics (submarine patents, blocking patents, huge patent portfolios for the sole purpose of horse-trading) economically viable. So why not target the economic basis of these perverse techniques by tying patent maintenance costs to their economic value? One way to do this is an ad valorum tax on patents. Not only would this address the hoarding problem, it would help fund the basis science and research being cannibalized in the enclosure of the information commons.
Shameless self-promotion -- I've written on this at http://legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/argum ent_rosenblum_mayjun05.msp
Re: karma, I've been lurking here a long time, but this is my first comment / post, which may explain the 0 karma. Thanks for reading and replying in spite of that!
Re: The issue of financial gain -- if the system provided no financial gain, then what was the point of trying to patent it? I'm not trying at all to attack, but you need to consider what are the goals of the patent system and, seperately, how people view it. If you don't plan to financially gain from an invention, then what's the point of closing off access to others? There's of course an issue of a merit badge or pride in having a patent, but that's not the patent system's primary purpose. The patent system is predicated on the assumption (correct or not) that people won't publish the results of their creativity without having control over the financial benefits accruing from it.
If you want a merit badge, there are many other ways to get that: submit the system to ACM or some industry group for an award, open-source it and gain reputation, etc. But locking people out of the improvement without planning on doing something with it yourself is, arguably, a degenerate use of the patent system:
"To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it." -- Thoreau, "Walking"
Exactly -- There's no direct economic tie between the size of the patent and its maintenance costs. (Litigation is the primary maintenance cost today, and it's one with a very high variance relative to the underlying patent.) If there was some way to guarantee that a more expansive patent would cost you more throughout its lifetime, we might see a reining in of "whole world" patents and better usage of those which are granted. One way to do this and fund the basic research necessary for future competitiveness: keep the patent system exactly as it is today, but tax patents based on their purported value and apply that tax to basic R&D.
m ent_rosenblum_mayjun05.msp. A subscription is currently required (or you can buy a paper version on a newsstand), but after it's moved to the archives, it should be freely accessible.
A bit of shameless self-promotion, but Legal Affairs just published an article to this effect at http://legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/argu