Why IP Laws Are Blocking Innovation 348
DrJimbo passes along this quote from Groklaw:
"The White House is asking us to give them ideas on what is blocking innovation in America. I thought I'd give them an honest answer. Here it is: Current intellectual property laws are blocking innovation. President Obama just set a goal of wireless access for everyone in the US, saying it will spark innovation. But that's only true if people are allowed to actually do innovative things once they are online. You have to choose. You can prop up old business models with overbearing intellectual property laws that hit innovators on the head whenever they stick their heads up from the ground; or you can have innovation. You can't have both. And right now, the balance is away from innovation."
Fanaticism is losing sight of the original goal (Score:5, Informative)
Stephan Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" (Score:2, Informative)
Stephan Kinsella, an IP lawyer, has written an essay basically demolishing the philosophical and empirical reasons for supporting IP:
http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
Highly recommended reading!
Re:IP Law Results (Score:5, Informative)
Prime examples:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html [freepatentsonline.com]
What is claimed is:
1. A method of inducing aerobic exercise in an unrestrained cat comprising the steps of:
(a) directing an intense coherent beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus to produce a bright highly-focused pattern of light at the intersection of the beam and an opaque surface, said pattern being of visual interest to a cat; and
(b) selectively redirecting said beam out of the cat's immediate reach to induce said cat to run and chase said beam and pattern of light around an exercise area.
2. The method of claim 1 wherein said bright pattern of light is small in area relative to a paw of the cat.
3. The method of claim 1 wherein said beam remains invisible between said laser and said opaque surface until impinging on said opaque surface.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein step (b) includes sweeping said beam at an angular speed to cause said pattern to move along said opaque surface at a speed in the range of five to twenty-five feet per second.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6368227.html [freepatentsonline.com]
1. A method of swinging on a swing, the method comprising the steps of: a) suspending a seat for supporting a user between only two chains that are hung from a tree branch; b) positioning a user on the seat so that the user is facing a direction perpendicular to the tree branch; c) having the user pull alternately on one chain to induce movement of the user and the swing toward one side, and then on the other chain to induce movement of the user and the swing toward the other side; and d) repeating step c) to create side-to-side swinging motion, relative to the user, that is parallel to the tree branch.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the method is practiced independently by the user to create the side-to-side motion from an initial dead stop.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises the step of: e) inducing a component of forward and back motion into the swinging motion, resulting in a swinging path that is generally shaped as an oval.
4. The method of claim 3, wherein the magnitude of the component of forward and back motion is less than the component of side-to-side motion.
Re:Remember the vast innovation in the baroque per (Score:5, Informative)
you needed a the support of the Church or a wealthy patron to make a living as an artist.
How is that different from today, where the wealthy patron is a mainstream publisher? Try to do it yourself and risk getting sued for plagiarism.
Re:Suggestions (Score:4, Informative)
The purpose of IP laws isn't specifically to foster innovation and you're right, innovation occurred before IP laws.
The purpose of IP laws is to foster the sharing of information. In the old days, if you had a really clever idea, you kept it to yourself because that's how you could make money out of it. Sure sometimes really clever people could work out what you'd done, but that's why you formed a guild and beat the crap out of anyone operating in your sector who wasn't a member.
The problem with this of course is that important information doesn't always get to the right people. A guild is highly unlikely to contain many experts from other fields who might take an idea in a new direction and if the only people who know something die it can be lost. See Damascus steel for an example. IP law basically says to innovators, you can have all the benefits you had when you kept everything secret while at the same time letting everyone know what it is you discovered so that it can be built upon and preserved.
If we eliminated IP law, innovation would continue, but information sharing would largely disappear. New discoveries would simply be kept secret.
That's not to say that the current IP system isn't broken and isn't stifling innovation. The system is so complex and so uncertain at the moment that it's pretty much impossible to tell whether something you're developing is covered by a patent or not, or whether there's prior art or not, or whether either of those things actually matters. The system desperately needs to be reformed, but eliminating it won't make information free, it'll just make it secret.
Re:Remember the vast innovation in the baroque per (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe IP is just yet another tool that large, established concerns can use to raise entry barriers for new competitors.
Coincidentally, I just read an article today -- Rethinking IP [mises.org] -- that suggests doing away with the concept of IP, entirely:
"We must start by taking a close look at the traditional libertarian assumption that IP is, in fact, a legitimate type of property right. And it turns out that advocates of the free market have made a mistake all along. Patent and copyright, to take the two worst manifestations of IP, are nothing but state monopolies that violate property rights. IP is antithetical to capitalism and the free market."
Re:Getting it wrong (Score:4, Informative)
When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation.
That statement assumes a great deal that is not true. It is terribly loaded. Competition harms a business' profitability. Should we therefore ban competition? Of course not! We recognize that competition (within limits-- don't want rival businesses murdering each other's employees) is what made the West great. But lately there's been confusion on this point, a tendency to ascribe our success to capitalism rather than competition. In the 19th century robber barons showed us that capitalism alone isn't sufficient, for the most profitable thing they could do, as many of them shrewdly saw, was eliminate all the competition. And that's not only the competition from rival producers, but employers as well, so that workers will have little choice but to take employment at the only company in town, at a very low pay rate of course. Therefore we now have some protections from all this in the form of labor and antitrust laws.
But creating monopolies is what current IP law does. You write as if the only way to profit from an innovation is to grant the innovator a monopoly on it. Then you scream about evil pirates whenever anyone intentionally or inadvertently infringes. And how they're undermining the system, and will ruin it if they aren't stopped! Well, the system is already dead. It just looks alive in the same way a zombie looks alive. Consider that piracy is unstoppable. Our attempts to quash it are ludicrous. Even if the Internet was shut down and we gave up the immense value it has brought us all, piracy would still be unstoppable. Why cannot we just pay the innovators? And stop wasting all this effort on futile enforcement and DRM that at best serves only to enrich IP lawyers? And at worst causes almost all innovation to grind to a halt? I'll hit back with another loaded statement: Do you want the West to fall behind China? All because anything other than patents and copyrights somehow isn't fair enough, and the poor starving innovators and artists might not get their due? But you see, the current system fails miserably at getting them their due now. And we know the "starving artists" line is a joke, what with the industry's long history of ripping off artists worse than pirates ever allegedly did, and so prevalent is it that we have this term, "Hollywood Accounting".
But don't be mislead into thinking that cleaning up the corruption will make the current system work well. Even if there was no unfair bargaining, and the patent office massively tightened up the standards, and terms were drastically shortened, even then, the system would still do a poor job. And that's because of a fundamental difficulty, stated so well in the very term "Intellectual Property". It tries to treat the intangible as "property" that can be held, sold, and traded like material goods. It almost totally fails to account for the biggest difference, that ideas are infinitely copyable, by simply declaring that by legislative fiat, copying is not allowed without permission! It treats ideas like they are mining claims. And so we have thousands of people out there staking and trying to defend claims. Too easy to spend more time fighting over claims than innovating, and many of our businesses have been doing that. And the disease has spread into our universities. It's worse than mining claims because at least boundaries of mining claims can be clearly established. Ideas cannot be so neatly bounded, and so it's never easy to decide when claim jumping has occurred.
Your comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia is too simplistic. You overlook that Wikipedia's expenses are way, way lower. Wikipedia does not pay contributors, and does not pay all the expenses associated with paper editions, things like printing and distribution. Wikipedia is a HUGE win for the public. More information than Britannica can ever hope to cram into a paper edition, at a fraction of the cos
Re:Its intellectual feudalism. (Score:3, Informative)
If you meet a man, and that man reminds you of an old friend, it doesn't follow that he is definitely your old friend's brother.
Re:And the worst offender is... (Score:4, Informative)
Where it went really wrong is when some moron in the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*. What exactly do you think is going to happen? Yep, any border case that can't be negatively resolved in 5 minutes of patent search gets approved.
I work for the patent office.
The efficiency metrics that the PTO uses to evaluate Examiners boils down to 1) how many applications they process (regardless of whether they are allowed or rejected) and 2) what percentage of their allowances and/or rejections are mistakes, with a "mistake" being either improperly rejecting or improperly allowing a patent.
In short, your assertion that "the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*" is total bullshit.