And they still lost... what?
Every time I read about our patent system the blood drains from my face, how do we fix such a broken system?
- That we have good and effective Intellectual Property laws. It seems one of the big lessons of the Industrial revolution was the right property laws. The principles behind patents and copyright law make sense in this regard. Its the specifics that have problems.
- The analogy to physical property is worth following more deeply - countries such as in S America, ie Chilie, are trying to undergo property law revolutions, and often local knowledge is clear - everyone "knows" that Juan lives in that building and has done since he was born, and maintains it for his family. Therefore it is "his" house. Our IP laws generally need to come to some agreement on a similar situation - where there is clear contentious dispute, local (ie expert) knowledge is needed.
- This is more or less what is happening here - someone is claiming Juan's house was actually their house. A jury was asked to decide with clear expert local knowledge. So the process is what we want. Its just in this example we choose a bunch of idiots for the jury.
- Software should be copyright. This will cause difficulties in "porting" software, and in doing the same algorithm in php and then perl.
summary: IP rights is more likely to be a good thing than a bad thing, just like property rights. However bad implementations of property law have seemingly held back countries like Brazil / Chile, and we do not really know what IP law should look like to be most suited. I prefer allowing local knowledge to be primary in cases of dispute.
(http://www.ted.com/talks/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of...)
According to the reasoning behind IP, if I chop some wood I should have to ask the person who invented fire if I can make a fire. IP is the idea that you own my uses of that wood, and get to tell me whether I can build a fire or not. You can then have a bunch of thugs take my wood if I even dare try to build a fire with it. Or if I do build a fire and use it to cook food, then the thugs also demand food.
The important part is that building my fire doesn't exclude you from building fires. In no way does my knowledge of how to build a fire prevent you from using that knowledge to build fires.
> That we have good and effective Intellectual Property laws. It seems one of the big lessons of the Industrial revolution was the right property laws. The principles behind patents and copyright law make sense in this regard. Its the specifics that have problems.
No, the principles don't make sense. IP is not based on the same principles as property. It doesn't even share the same legal history. Copyright law originated from the church attempting to regulate and control the printing presses. Copyright shares more legal history with censorship than anything else. Early copyright laws in England were even referred to (correctly) as "monopolies."
> The analogy to physical property is worth following more deeply
There is no analogy. Ideas aren't physical things. My use of "your" idea doesn't exclude your use of that idea. There is no conflict of property.
> Software should be copyright.
No, I have the right to use information as long as that use does not exclude others from using it.
Intellectual property increases freedom by creating a form of property that individuals can create without needing to own a scarce resource. People can become property owners simply through usefully employing power of their intellects.
If you dislike this form of property, then you must articulate an alternative way to divest power from those who hold other forms of property, otherwise you are merely a defender of landowners, governments, corporate monopolists and other vested interests.
I don't follow. Why do my arguments against intellectual property depend on some your unstated arguments against owning any property at all?
I'm left to assume you support the decision in this court case, because it's perfectly consistent with the reasoning behind copyright and patents.
A corrupt court making a poor decision has nothing to do with the reasoning behind copyright and patents.
It can and does exclude me from certain uses of that idea. For example, if my intended use of that idea involves profiting from selling a good/service incorporating that idea, but my target customers decide not to buy from me specifically because you are using that idea. Sure, I can still use the idea in many other ways, same as you can use your land for many other things even whilst my sheep are grazing on it, and what was your wood for other things even after if I've burnt it to ash, but your use of my idea has reduced its value to me. All property is monopoly rights over something, and yes, all forms of property rights can be abused; that in itself is not an argument for their elimination.
Especially because a fire inventor being deprived of profit is not what is happening. What is happening is someone uses a broken system to register their idea of cooking rabbits after watching other people cook different animals. He is then given exclusive rights to cook rabbits, and he goes directly to extort shells and shiny rocks from the guy two caves down who has been cooking and trading rabbits for years now.
If we cannot have patents without "scan-to-email" extortionists we should not have patents. Creating an incentive to do no B2C business because it is more profitable to sue other companies for using obvious ideas is contrary to the intended purpose of the patent system anyway. Either get patent examiners that can do it properly, make it dirt cheap to challenge a patent, or shut it all down.
If Juan and I each claim the house then our furniture and our bodies would be in each other's way if we used it at the same time.
If you use my algorithm (add each value in order and check against a checksum provided from another account) to balance your check book, it won't keep me from balancing mine.
Comparisons to the industrial revolution and medical devices are likewise bogus analogies because it takes time and resources to turn designs into physical products. I can use my algorithm and profit from it as soon as I've worked it out. And, as RMS would point out, we write software to do things. Make money off doing the thing, not trying to sell an idea.
Software patents are relatively new in the world. So far, they have only led to damage.
I personally disagree strongly with IP in the first place. Of course, this leads to a divisive opposition against the current regime between those who still want IP and those who don't, but it is something I feel strongly enough about I am not willing to concede on. Things are awful right now, and having "better" IP would reduce the likelihood of an open information society because people would be even more complicit if the laws weren't so laughably bad right now.
I think that Diffie et al did actually invent something in mathematics. They were able to publish in an environment where their claim to invention would be respected and they could reasonably expect to profit from it (in career terms).
This is the nice, fluffy level where everyone publishes for the common good. I am all for that. I just don't think that works for a world where the majority of value is exepcted to arise from not physical labour but the application of intelligence (to physical labour)
As a simple example - I build a concrete "squirting" robot that like a dot matrix puts dabs of concrete down on the ground, and with some darn clever software it can build a house or a office block.
I think I should have to choice whether to release that code as free, or if I make all building companies pay me royalties. How we enforce that I do not know, but I do know that I would rather live in a world that has the problem of working out how to share out the value created by robots that build everything, than potentially strangle it in its crib.
IP isn't about whether you own the robot you built, it's about whether you own similar robots other people built.
But you come at it from the perspective that you just clonk down our culture and psyche around information into a world without IP and everything goes to shit.
In reality, businesses evolve and adapt. Rather than consider r&d a capital investment in future revenue, your r&d budget is a public service - something you would want either cultural pressure to coerce out of businesses (I'm also a libertarian, and IP is just raw governmental power) but you could also argue from the socialist perspective the idea of using violent coercion of the state to transfer wealth into r&d.
Either way, you are not researching to create profit. And I would argue you don't need to anymore. The things people want are things people will pay money to see developed. Not pay for in the end product, but pay the researchers up front. Instead of sitting back and hoping a cure for Parkinsons gets funded by a medical megacorp looking to profit off the IP, you throw money at Parkinsons thinktanks, and can appraise them on an individual basis for their merits, and put money where your mouth is for the things you care about.
And then the rest can be voluntary. For the most part today many of our modern revolutions are voluntary - everything from standardized Internet protocols to tcp/ip were all developed not as for profit ideas but as standards to elevate humanity, and we reaped huge benefits from them.
Because all that money spent today on R&D, and today on the patent lawsuits and lawyers, and today on policing every corner of society to ban thoughts and numbers, could be spent funding the research you want.
Because it is a value proposition in whatever regime you have, but I am of the opinion that those who value research into certain fields would throw money at it regardless of profit motive because they want the end product, not the potential capital gain. I'd even argue that is a more effective way to develop innovation, because if your goal is the invention and not the profit afterwards, you have much greater clarity of vision to meet your goals.
Historically, the "throw money at it" approach to solving problems has not been particularly successful. We're not just talking about a single disease, we're talking about thousands upon thousands of illnesses. Markets are the most efficient mechanism we have yet discovered for the productive allocation of resources. Unless you can show how you'd bring that power to bear on practical medical research in the absence of IP, you're stuck telling a story about how this time, some bureaucracy will get the job done. I'm shocked any libertarian really believes that.
I can go into more detail if you'd like.
OTOH, the existence of patents gives people a reason to keep their ongoing research secret, and so maybe moves us closer to the world they were designed for. Patents exist for the purpose of alleviating problems which mostly only exist in a world that has patents.