Intellectual Property and Privacy

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"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

[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.

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