Patents considered evil | Hacker News Reader

Patents considered evil

ipocracy.org

95 pointsjcbrand28 comments

It's interesting to note that one of the first points this article makes is that the term "intellectual property" spreads confusion and makes it sound like patents are something like copyrights or something like ship hull design rights.

We've heard this before from His GNUliness:

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#IntellectualProperty

Yes, we've heard it before and it's still silly. The term serves only to distinguish intangibles from physical objects. It does not imply that all of those intangibles are equivalent any more than "physical property" implies that boats are the same thing as staplers. This is a non-issue. It's a useful term.

It's useful in some contexts but overly broad in others. The differences between a boat and a stapler are readily apparent; the differences between a copyright and a patent, much less so. Imprecise language takes advantage of that.

Language shapes thought; people have a different opinion on the estate tax when you call it a "death tax". IP may be a useful shorthand, but it carries with it a different set of implicit assumptions than "creator's monopoly".

Well, a lot of people get very confused with this stuff, especially between design copyright vs patents. And it isn't as though Stallman is exactly original in this complaint, so it makes little sense to look on him as being the main proponent of this view. For instance, Thomas Jefferson made many remarks along similar lines.

"It typically costs from 25,000 Euro (in the cheapest courts in Europe) to $250,000 (in the UK or USA) to defend or enforce a patent in court." Try $3 million per side through trial in US court. http://www.patentinsurance.com/iprisk/aipla-survey/

Anyone in the startup world can tell you an idea is not worth that much, what matters is execution. Patents are supposed to reward the lazy dreamers over the hard working entrepreneurs, though in reality they reward the giant corp with the best legal strategy.

Patents (at least as understood by the US founding fathers who put them in the Constitution, YMMV in other countries) are supposed to be a means by which we all benefit from knowledge that would otherwise be kept a trade secret by their inventors. The nearly two decade long protection is the price we pay for that knowledge.

Of course, looking at it this way, it is absolutely insane that things like "bounce scrolling" are patent protected. Even in situations where some piece of software functionality is 100% new (which basically never happens anyway), if I can watch a video on YouTube of someone interacting with the product and then write a 20 line function that simulates the behavior I saw without ever having seen the original code, nor even having touched the original product myself and that 20 line function can be a patent violation, the patent system is already 100% completely fucked up relative to what it was designed to do originally.

Love this quote:

"We do not generally ask the State to intervene to ensure that artists will paint, musicians play, chefs prepare meals, fashion designers create the new seasons. The vast bulk of our economy innovates well without 20-year monopolies. By contrast, the areas that are heavily patented, such as telecoms and pharmaceutics, resist change, are run by cartels, and extort consumers with grossly inflated prices."

There's also a discussion about this on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/z2lp2/patents_con...

The term "intellectual property" was coined to replace "exclusive privilege", which became politically incorrect during the French revolution

Interesting to note! Although I find "intellectual property" to be an oxymoron.

how so?

This letter from Thomas Jefferson explains the problem. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.... (Note a "taper" is a candle.)

Thanks. I enjoyed reading it.

Intellectual Property may be an oxymoron when applied to ownership of public knowledge or invention. But isn't it valid when the knowledge or invention is private?

Patents are a trade with society: lose the protection of your private idea and we'll give you legal protection and financial reward for a limited period.

It sounds like a reasonable idea for a (capitalist) society to embrace.

Now why exactly you would want to make that trade is where things seem to get very sticky. Especially if the patent system is abused, unbalanced, unfair.

"It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance."

Sadly few people understand this these days. Libertarians rightly defend social liberty, but they actually betray this liberty by wrong-headedly believing that everything should be treated as private property. They are correct that one's own person or the fruits of one's own labor should not be claimable by anyone or any government (this is tantamount to slavery), but they falsely believe that land or even ideas can be the fruit of their labor and their labor only.

I hope that this will be the next revolution in political economy, that Georgism/Geolibertarianism makes a comeback.

If you clear land for farming, don't you think you have a natural right to the use of that land? If a neighbor dumps toxic waste there, haven't they violated your property rights?

Consider a more complex situation. In the early part of this century, companies heavily polluted the New Jersey waterfront. They saved some money by dumping chemicals into landfills instead of disposing of them properly. Now, half a century later, the current generation is spending tremendous sums of money to clean up that land. Even after partial rehabilitation, the value of that land is depressed considering its proximity to highly-desirable Manhattan.

Entertaining the notion that "natural rights" exit,[1] did those companies, through their purchase of that waterfront land which was not very valuable at the time, acquire a natural right to not just use that land for their immediate purposes, but to extract the value of that land for themselves, arbitrarily far into the future? That's exactly what our system of private property allows people to do, and it's almost certainly not economically efficient in the intergenerational sense.

The other complex cases are things like land in the west. None of that land would be inhabited without the tremendous efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1800's to irrigate that land. Nobody who owns land in say Arizona can claim that they have a "natural right" to all of the proceeds of that land. Their activity on that land is a vast inter-generational joint-venture. A private company in the government's position at the time could have taken a huge equity stake in any activity in the west, one that would thanks to the law of property inure to this day. Though anybody who originally bought that land would be long-dead today, all his or her successors would have taken subject to that equity stake.

[1] Of course there is no such thing as "natural right" at least not to anyone who doesn't believe in a deity.

More subtle Question: If you clear the land, can I cross it? (for navigation)

If he lets you.

How will he get on or off the land ever again? Are their natural 'rights of way'?

Edited: for clarity

I was being facetious, but this is actually an excellent point.

001sky is not making a frivolous point. If all land were private, most of population of the planet wouldn't even have a place to stand, much less to cross. Most populist libertarians are for privatizing almost all public land.

Putting things another way, some people seem to be under the odd misapprehension that "privately owning a piece of land" is tantamount to sovereignty over it. When in actual, complicated reality what one really buys when one "buys land" is a more limited set of rights to possession, use, development, etc. of the land that have been wrapped up in a title. And thus there exist limitations to what one can do with "private property" as exemplified by the fact that other people can get an easement to use one's land for access to their own or might own the minerals under your house.

> It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject...

This is a perfect example of an appeal to anonymous authority (or what Wikipedia calls weasel words). Simply saying that smart people agree on something is far from a constructive argument for that thing.

@sp332 You posted the Jefferson link, so I figured you understood it.

Treating land as part of "the commons" doesn't preclude the idea that you can have temporary ownership, aka a lease.

The problem is that land is not infinite. Going with your example, if someone clears 100,000 acres, have they not deprived others of the natural use of the land? If a small percentage of the population owns most of the land and cuts down all the trees (for their sole profit), how is that no worse than you dumping toxic waste on "my" land?

Oddly libertarians consider free market principles as sacred, yet they do not realize that being able to pay a finite sum of money for an infinite amount of something (that is what owning land in perpetuity means) runs totally counter to free market principles. Just as there is a time value of money, there is a time value of capital. Owning land in perpetuity amounts to a free lunch to the landlord. They can charge rent and they and their line of heirs can live for free. Property tax and inheritance tax mitigates this problem (only partially at current levels), but populist libertarians are adamantly against these.

Please read up some on Georgism and Geoliberarianism. Understand why Jefferson is saying what he is saying.

The way property generally works is first-come, first-served. Let's say I find a gold vein, and mine it and refine it and cast it into ingots. That would give me 100% of the ownership of that gold. If you walk by the same area and "discover" my ingots, in the exact same way that I found that same gold in the ground before, you get 0% claim of ownership over that gold.

It's the same with patents, trademarks, and other IP. Whoever makes the first claim gets the rights.

The web site hosting the Harper's article "Secrets by the Thousands" linked in "Patents considered evil" posts questionable ideas if you look at their root site. Also, linked from their version of "Secrets" is another article titled "The Great Patents Heist" that comes from The Barnes Review, a Holocaust-denying publication. While "Secrets" is behind a pay wall on the Harper's website (http://www.harpers.org/archive/1946/10/0032777), I'd suggest using a direct link to Harper's (or get permission from Harper's to post "Secrets" yourself) rather than use that site as a citation.

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