Intellectual Property and Privacy

[c9]

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."

-- John Carmack, head of id software, home of Doom

Two interesting reads can be found here.

1. Richard Stallman was stopped by UN Security for his advocacy of tinfoil hats. Well, not really. He covered his RFID badge with foil, and encouraged others to do to. UN Security decided that made him a threat. In 2003 the UN promised to not use RFID this year because of complaints then. Instead, they simply hid it.

RFID is radio-frequency identification, and it means that someone can read your ID without you even taking it out of your pocket. It's used for electronic toll passes, among other things. Sounds convenient, but imagine if that person following you down the street late at night suddenly knew where you lived? What if you simply window-shopped in Old Navy, and the next week you started getting spam emails and flyers from them? There are many privacy dangers there.

2. Bruce Perens' speech on the dangers of software patents. Software patents let companies claim they invented things like opening a menu, or clicking a button to buy something on a website. Once they have a patent, current law says they can charge you for having a similar feature on your website, or force you to stop using it. This means that companies can take other companies to court if they don't like their competition, and simply spend enough on lawyers to win. This is already happening, right here in Canada too. Research in Motion is under attack by a tiny company called NTP. NTP has almost no assets other than a patent on something that RIM's Blackberries do.

Not everyone sees issues with this. Read Perens' speech about how Open Source (free) software is helping under-developed countries catch up technologically, and how software patents could utterly destroy the power of open source. Sorry sub-Saharan Africa, you have to pay $149 USD for Windows XP before you're allowed to have a computer. What, that's two years' salary? That's a shame.

Update: Check out this ecommerce site that infringes 20 patents.

Comments

[c9.livejournal.com]

I agree that it is an interesting conversation to have. I wonder where Ben is?? A couple thoughts

1. What exactly is "a cut" of OpenOffice.org? Seriously.

2. While shopping carts and menus are extreme, they are already patented and seen as valid. Precedent.

3. You're absolutely right that using Microsoft as an example for severely undeveloped countries is misleading, as they are among the best-behaved in that regard. I made up that number, and don't know the correct prices. But I dare you to find out exactly how well-behaved they are, even at the top of the generosity list. Then compare that to average wages, public debt, and various other numbers.

4. Patents were originally designed to protect physical devices, as they cost a bundle to create. Then they were extended to protect procedures and methods, despite the fact that mere knowledge did not cost a bundle. I agree in principle that a true innovation deserves the opportunity to be protected in some way, possibly through patents (maybe a different system should be used; probably too late for that anyway). But I disagree that "the exact same design" is similarly protection-worthy. That's a trademark and copyright issue.

5. One thing I fear is the Mickey Mouse effect. Every time (*every* time) Mickey Mouse is about to go into public domain due to his age, the US copyright laws are extended. Sometimes called Sonny Bono laws, IIRC. While patents are time-limited, the exceedingly corporate nature of government worldwide now (extremely evident in the US, but present in Canada and Europe too) means that those time limits are a fiction, should steveb decide they need to be. An oversimplification, but I don't think an incorrect one.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Open Polar Bear can't use training materials I created, because they are *copyrighted*. Once they fall into the public domain, then they're fine.

But if I invented a new way to run a class, in essence came up with a new agenda for Word 2000 L1, I don't feel that I should be able to prevent others from discovering that better agenda on their own. Maybe people who attend my courses can't start teaching their own courses with my same agenda (both literally, as the table of contents and agenda are copyrighted, and figuratively, as I have them sign a no-compete agreement), but if someone discovers the same way I did, I don't think I have the right to prevent them from using that knowledge.

I'm not 100% against, it's an area I don't know well enough to be certain. But to be honest, I have yet to see a single argument that scales well. Yes, IP protection protects your salary. But when scaled to 1,000,000,000 users, IP protection hurts entire countries.

More Patent stuff from Bill Gates...

[c9.livejournal.com]

Taken from http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/dangers/index.html:

Patents turn software publishing into the privilege of a few. Of course, everyone can still develop software. However, in a world with countless software patents, only large corporations are equipped to deal with the incremental costs and legal risks. Even they will increasingly take a negative view on software patents if patent inflation rages on.

The biggest problem is that patents are valid for 20 years. In a slow-paced industry, that may be acceptable. For computer software, that means anything which was considered a groundbreaking invention in the days of the Commodore 64 should still enjoy patent protection today. Even the greatest visionaries of the IT industry have never been able to predict the next 20 years. Just a 2-year horizon is a major challenge in the software market. However, the "patent mafia" claims that patent examiners were capable of deciding today what type of software concepts should be monopolized for 20 years to come. So much hubris is ridiculous and frightening at the same time.

"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."
Bill Gates (1991)

[c9.livejournal.com]

You're right, I should have phrased that better. But be careful, since your patent doesn't protect "Office," it protects "method of selecting an optional binary choice on a menu by clicking a mouse button once." Different kettle of fish.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

I'm here! I'm here! Sorry I'm late... let's see... where to start...

Are patents the only reason I innovate? No.

Patents are a reason not to innovate. If I wrote a program that might interfere with a patent, a) how would I know without an expensive patent search, and b) how could I pay legal costs in case someone came after me with a patent after I published my software? Unless you're a big corporation with lots of money, you're afraid to innovate in a software-patent-run world.

If I saw the exact same design appear in Open Office some day, would I want a bit of a cut for it? Probably.

How do you take a cut of a free (as in beer) software package? Further more, what if the feature was in a free (as in libre or beer) package first? Then your patent would be invalid (prior art) but since you have all the lawyers, you win. How is that a) fair, b) fostering innovation (except, again, unless you have the lawyers)?

Patents were originally designed to protect physical devices, as they cost a bundle to create. Then they were extended to protect procedures and methods, despite the fact that mere knowledge did not cost a bundle.

Actually, patents always covered "inventions, processes, and procedures", but for a limited time. The payoff to filing for a patent was the ability to have a government-sactioned and protected monopoly on something for a period of time, but the cost was that you had to disclose your methodolgy publicly. This meant that someone could base a new product on your patent, change it sufficently, and compete with you, or license your product and compete directly. This fosters innovation.

The problem with software patents is that they patent a concept rather than a process. I wouldn't have a problem with software patents if they protected a static piece of source code, but that is, as you point out, something that should be handled with copyright. Extending patents to cover software is an abuse of the patent process.

One thing I fear is the Mickey Mouse effect. Every time (*every* time) Mickey Mouse is about to go into public domain due to his age, the US copyright laws are extended.

Now you're mixing copyright with patents, which is tricky. Copyright is another mechanism designed to give content, rather than mechanism or process, a limited-time monopoly. Again, the emphasis is on limited-time, and the copyright law extentions hurt innovation by protecting the very very large rights holders at the expense of small holders or (worse) creators themselves. And because copyright is automatically applied to everything since the 70's, and it's an opt-out system (and good luck trying to opt-out!) rather than opt-in, nothing has entered the public domain since the '20s. Think about this for a second. It means that huge swaths of content that are no longer commercially feasible are still protected by copyright... even if you can't find the copyright holder, you can't copy something originally published in the '30s... even if no one is selling it!

Every time someone chooses Open Office over Office, I lose (a teeny bit of) cash.

You're saying that there are only two choices... Open Office or Microsoft Office, and that if someone doesn't use OO, they'll pay for MSO. I'm suggesting that if they're using OO in the first place, they never would have paid for MSO. They'd have used Notepad, or a typewriter instead. Or they might not be able to use MSO because they don't run a supported operating system. Your argument is as specious as the RIAA saying that every song that gets downloaded off the internet is a missed sale. Chances are most of the people who downloaded those songs would've taped them off the radio or done without the song entirely.

(continued)

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Open Polar Bear, offering free/low cost training using the materials *you* created, taking customers away from Polar Bear and income away from you?

I'm going to assume you meant that Open Polar Bear was using independently created training materials that covered the same material as Cam's -- that's a lot closer to the Open Source/MS reality than saying that Open Source is using materials MS created, which is demonstrably false. Even if you wanted to say that Open Source is using concepts created by Microsoft, then you'd have to argue that MS invented the graphical operating system (they didn't), or the word processor (they didn't) or the spreadsheet (they didn't!).

Competing for customers for a segment of a market is called free market competition, the device that made Microsoft the powerhouse it is today -- and now that it's king of the hill, it wants to protect itself by making it impossible for anyone else to compete using the same practises it did to get where it is. That is inherently anti-competitive. If software patents and IP law had been the way it is now in the early 80's, Microsoft wouldn't have been legally able to write Word or Excel, or even Windows.

I want to be clear that I'm not singling out Microsoft -- any publicly owned software company would have to act the same way in MS's position because that's simply the nature of a public company.

The long and the short of is that software patents kill innovation and Copyright law kills creativity. The deck is stacked against the little guy and the company with the most money and/or lawyers always wins. That might be an acceptable situation for some people, but not for me.

[cap-hill-latte.livejournal.com]

[deleting my comments as a) I'll freely admit that I only really know a tiny bit about this space and can't really make intelligent arguments b) thinking about this some more I realized that talking about my opinions of software patent law walks a fine line*]

*Feel free to turn this into a discussion about laws protecting what I may or may not say about my employer in a public forum v. over a bottle of wine at Blue Water. ;-).

[c9.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we need to continue it during Suspects Visit PEI 2006. :)

[cap-hill-latte.livejournal.com]

Speaking of PEI. I've decided that I'm going to try to schedule all of next year’s travel outside of school quarters. I probably won’t take anything in the summer quarter, but have a class in the spring, and may start up again in the fall. So scheduling PEI after June 2 and before September 27th would work best for me. :-).

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Good idea! I have a DVD of "Who Owns Culture?" that we can watch; that'll spur some lively (friendly) debate :-)

Sigh. I wish we could do Suspects Visit PEI right now, except for the fact PEI is a hellish frozen wasteland.

[c9.livejournal.com]

You know that DVDs are illegal in PEI, right? They might let through a Betamax tape...

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Weird! I just got the email notification about this post this morning.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you look at my friends list you'll see some system notification names. They posted that during the move from Seattle to San Francisco (or maybe vice versa) they had an IP address go missing off one machine, so now all the old notifications are being cleared out.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

Things are looking more promising for SV-PEI 2006 edition for us every day. Jo originally wanted to visit friends in Switzerland this summer but now that there is a chance I might change my career and go in a different direction after I finish my masters, we might need to save the $$ for when I am not working or making a lot less.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

I have been following the US passport updates that are coming (since there is a chance we might get the same kind of thing here). They are going to be using RFID in the passports. Luckily there was mass complaint about it, so they are now going to include a tinfoil hat for the password (shielded cover), and more importantly the data on the RFID will be encrypted so nobody can snoop the transfer over the air. So that is an improvement over the original design.

But the scary thing is that it can still be used for tracking people since each RFID tag has a unique serial #. Even though a person cannot intercept the contents of your passport informatino, they will know you are person X and follow you around with RFID readers.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Yeah, just like doubleclick cookies. Privacy was nice, way back when.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

Ah the goold old days...

I guess depending on how the serial #s work, there might be a certain batch that are assigned to say American passports. If people know the range of serial #s (like MAC address) then even though you can't find out *who* the person is, you might be able to find out that a bus is some country is carrying 24 american citizens from a distance. I'm sure you can figure out how that might be useful to some people... ;-(

[c9.livejournal.com]

That is an *excellent* example. That should be used by RFID privacy advocates. "Rocket launchers could read RFID!"