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

[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.