tag archive: patents

Threatening their opponents with the endless purgatory of litigation, over which some might prefer death itself, they assert claim to any thought which might have entered another cranium within the collective body of the corporations they serve. They act as though these ideas appeared in splendid detachment from all previous human thought. And they pretend that thinking about a product is somehow as good as manufacturing, distributing, and selling it.

I just finished reading Masters of Doom by David Kushner, a book about John Carmack and John Romero. When the story is well told, I love books like this about people who have done great things.

I don’t play games much these days, but I loved Doom and Quake, and have admired Carmack in particular for his apparent programming virtuosity, his views on patents, and his support of free software. (I also thought Romero was pretty cool, and gained a greater appreciation for his work from reading the book.)

On patents, there was this from his days at Softdisk:

Al had never seen a side scrolling like this for the PC. “Wow,” he told Carmack, “you should patent this technology.”

Carmack turned red. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he snapped, “I’ll quit.” Al assumed Carmack was trying to protect …

Just so, 126 years later:

U.S. Supreme Court

Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883)

Decided March 5, 1883

MR. JUSTICE BRADLEY delivered the opinion of the Court.

It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the …

That’s right! I’m officially “patent pending.” Coming soon to a patent office near you:

“Method and Apparatus for Creating a Work of Fiction with the Aid of a Computing Device”

That’s the name my patent attorney came up with. Please, before you start squawking about ridiculous software patents, let me explain. I’m not a fan of software patents, either. (Or at least: I wasn’t, before this experience.)

I’ve been concerned for a while now about the stifling effects of software and business method patents on innovation. I’ve mentioned here from time to time my desire to write fiction, but this ambition has often been hindered by legal fear. What if I unknowingly infringed on someone’s intellectual property with my methods for creating that fiction? Particularly since I intended to use a computer for said creation, and computers are quite technical and almost magical …

Just as it was impossible for those hunter-gatherers to see where things were going with glass technology, it is also impossible for us to know what we’re working towards. But we will improve our solutions, and I think build things faster and better if everyone is free to use the ideas they have on their own, that they get directly from observing others’ work, and those that they synthesize from their own and others’ ideas. (And of course it’s that last which is mostly happening. Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum.)

Why hamstring progress so that a few people, replaceable by any number of other people in our time, can benefit unfairly from monopoly? Especially now, with so many more smart people, and so much more knowledge available to all. Ideas and software should must be free, or I’m afraid we’ll continue to see the same clumsy and slow development as in ages past. Relatively speaking, that is. Things are moving fast right now, sure, but I think it would be all too easy to stagnate under protectionist and corrupt laws, to the point where a thousand years from now our descendants will look at us as dark age simpletons, and marvel that we couldn’t get this right.

Way back in 1939, in his first published science fiction short story:

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

–Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line”

I haven’t read the story, but that seems to apply very well today whether it’s Disney buying Congressmen and longer copyright terms, or Microsoft and many …

Bill Gates says that patents stifle innovation and competition:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. [...] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

–Bill Gates, 1991

(Sure, you’ve probably seen this one, but it’s good to keep in mind.)

But it’s ok! As long as Microsoft holds the patents, I’m sure they’ll keep our best interests at heart. Especially if they don’t have to worry about all those pesky competitors.

I mean, really, the brazen impudence of these …

Jeremy Allison is fast becoming one of my heroes. Not only for the great technical work he has done with Samba, but also for his principled support of free software. He quit Novell in protest after they signed their patent pact with the devil, and he and the Samba team gave an early vote of support to GPL v3 by moving Samba to the new license soon after its release.

He also regularly contributes thoughtful essays to Tux Deluxe. I just found The Innovation Game in my feed reader, which has some positive points about innovation in free software, but also deals with a depressing subject, Microsoft and software patents:

So who could possibly be against this wealth of the commons? People wishing to own innovative ideas, that’s …

Here to explain phase three is another installment in my series of well-used quotes much-employed in free software discussions:

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.

–Mahatma Gandhi

[...]

And free software will win in the end.

For today’s lecture, some libertarian thoughts on the problem of intellectual property from Stephan Kinsella.

I’m regularly exposed to libertarian ideas at places like Marginal Revolution and EconLog. I like a lot of the ideas, but I wouldn’t describe myself as libertarian.

Kinsella wrote a paper called “Against Intellectual Property.” I’m slowly making my way through it. TV and the Internet have reduced my attention span down to a nub, so I often find it challenging to digest scholarly pieces like this. Especially when the footnotes consume on average half of the page.

In “Against Intellectual Property,” he talks about the first-possessor rule of property ownership. Since I can’t be bothered …