Intellectual Property and Privacy
Nov. 19th, 2005 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 12:47 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 04:17 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 04:19 pm (UTC)More Patent stuff from Bill Gates...
Date: 2005-11-19 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 08:41 pm (UTC)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)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 08:41 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 11:20 pm (UTC)*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. ;-).
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 10:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 12:19 pm (UTC)Sigh. I wish we could do Suspects Visit PEI right now, except for the fact PEI is a hellish frozen wasteland.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 01:15 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 01:35 pm (UTC)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... ;-(
no subject
Date: 2005-12-06 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-06 05:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-06 05:01 am (UTC)