Inventor stumped by 43-year patent delay
chicagotribune.com
chicagotribune.com
Property is a way to deal with scarcity. Two people cannot simultaneously wear a shirt, for example, so one of them "owns" the shirt. Two people cannot both drive a car to different locations at the same time, so one person "owns" the car. Of course, you can lend your shirt or car to someone else, but the final say as to how those two resources are used belongs to the owner.
The product of intellectual labor, using this scarcity condition, cannot be considered someone's property. The only tangential relationship IP has to property is that one person uses force, namely, the government, to prevent others from using "their" idea for economic gain. This scarcity is artificial because absent that threat of force, everyone would be able to use the idea freely. Physical goods are subject to scarcity as a consequence of physical law; a car acn't be in my driveway and your driveway at the same time. (This argument applies directly to patents and copyrights, but also to trademarks in that a word or phrase can't be used to market something for economic gain.)
Besides the moral argument, which I know some people don't care about (it is subjective, of course), there is a utilitarian argument. Some act as if, without IP law, no one would be willing to create new ideas; it's as if the only incentive for creation is economic gain from a government-granted monopoly on an idea. Just take a look at the news to see that IP law is more commonly associated with patent trolls and corporate legal battles than protecting Joe Inventor's new idea.
At the very least, I wish people would stop comparing downloading movies and music from the internet as stealing. If I steal your car, you can't use it. If I "steal" a song from the record label by copying the exact sequence of bytes that represent a song from my buddy's hard drive to my hard drive, we can both still listen to the song. I understand that some people support the song creator's claim to the song as "property," in the form of IP. However, even then, there has to be a middle ground between copying against the wishes of the song's creator, and theft in the eyes of the law.
But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. 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. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it.
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
— Thomas Jefferson, 1813-08-13
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-03...
Also relevant, of course: how often an idea doesn't come to just one person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
Why, yes - yes I most definitely would.
1. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110709/10490515032/cultu...
Games released via Steam have shown evidence that when a singleplayer game is unavailable as a torrent for free, then people will pay for it. The counterargument to this is that most people who torrent wouldn't pay for it anyway. But I assert that there is a third class of people: those who first check to see if it's available for free, and if not, pay for it. Whether these people constitute a significant portion of revenue is an open question, but it's hard to classify their actions from a moral standpoint as something other than stealing.
The closest classification other than "stealing" would probably be "sampling." I've often been frustrated at an inability to try out a certain kind of dev tool before buying it outright, and their free version is usually missing features which I really need to test. But there needs to be a large-scale study as to whether people really behave this way normally, or if they just take what they can get for free. Unfortunately it's difficult to find an unbiased source of funding for such a study, so the resulting research paper would probably be slanted in one moral direction or the other instead of presenting the raw data.
It's not an easy question to answer. I think technological capabilities will decide how companies will behave, because those who don't accept reality will go out of business.
What about the fourth classification of people who search for a way to buy something and who torrent it when it's not available?
Don't forget the weird restrictions placed on regional DVDs by the industry, and the laws that prevent me from converting my player to a multiregion device.
It's not hard. A critical aspect of property theft is the deprivation of property experienced by the victim. IP "theft" lacks this aspect entirely. Using the term in this way makes you no better than the CEO of Turner Broadcasting who claims that not watching advertisements constitutes "stealing" of TV.
Call it "sampling" or "counterfeiting" if you want, but "theft" is misapplication of a term with an otherwise well-established definition.
[1] - Note that there is currently a concerted effort by many to connect IP infringement to "terrorism".
One has a legal definition implying loss of a tangible good, the other a rather different definition implying you haven't paid to use a thing.
Both are correct grammatically, but they aren't the same thing in the end.
I check if it's available on Steam, or some other non-horrible online service. If it is, I buy it. Otherwise... well, you can probably guess.
Once copyright was a deal in which my tax money was used to protect a limited monopoly, and in return I could use the art after the monopoly expired. Now it is corrupted so that once the time has expired, the written language is not commonly understandable. The recorded music and video will have fully deteriorated in their stored medium. The games and software won't run.
It is thus hard to classify their actions from a moral standpoint as something other than stealing. They steal my money to support a stolen copyright deal, and I do not accept it. The deal should be ignored and the thieves should be held responsible for their actions.
When? Where? To my knowledge, no such study or data in favor of that thesis exist. For music I know of a counter-study to such statements: http://www.scribd.com/doc/131005609/JRC79605, which concludes with
According to our results, a 10% increase inclicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites
and
Essentially these papers show that illegal music downloads have little or no effect on legal digital sales.
You want to know if clicks on illegal sources have an effect on legal sources.
Not if clicks on legal sources have an effect on illegal sources.
Yes, it's important.
No, they're not the same.
But that is not what the study is about?
It is easy. In those cases the owner hasn't been deprived of anything but potential profit. If there was a competing game some of the potential pirates might buy that instead, they might watch TV or read a book instead of playing a game. It is just competition.
I find it ridiculous that under current law it is illegal to make unauthorised copies of games, but perfectly legal to make a clone/reimplementation. Both can deprive the original author of potential profit.
Of course this is why some of the big players in the IP industry have been muttering about "patents" on creative works.
More context:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/20/business/for-texas-instrum...
http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/who-invented-the-mi...
This pretty much goes for every innovation..
And even worse is that many patents actually severely hinder the spread of the concerned innovation. As an example in cryptography see the Offset Codebook Mode for authenticated encryption. Even though the authors have now granted free use for open source software it has remained an extreme niche solution. Or see NTRUEncrypt, probably one of the best shots for post-quantum public key cryptography.
[1] I don't like term intellectual property, because in it lies the quiet acceptance of the idea in general, that thoughts and knowledge can be owned. Calling it IM - intellectual monopoly - is more to the point. We should not forget that a huge part of the fight for the public opinion is won or lost by the concepts our language provide us with and limit us to.
Patents protect "ideas". It is much more likely that someone may come up with the same or similar idea completely independently, than someone would come with up the same exact computer program or book. Patent protection is very broad. Especially in the US due to the Doctrine of Equivalents.
Soo... I am for copyright protection and not patent.
Every broke idiot with a pen would write up every idea under the sun.
Companies, with resources to actually bring those ideas to life, would have to pay way more to be able to do so, driving up the cost of innovation in markets.
Also, presumably, a company would just pay a broke guy to submit the patent on their behalf, and pay them a small fee. Leading to a horrific industry of 'broke guy recruiters'.
Lone inventors are actually the primary group harming innovation here, not large companies (contrary to what your politics and gut might wish for). They patent some broad thing they have no intention of making, and sell those 'inventions' on for a quick buck to holding companies who make their money from suing people.
Patents need to not exist any more. For all the noise companies make about patents being important, if you took them away tomorrow, the world would be exactly the same. Nothing would change.