open source

[stone]

I've been worried that the patenting culture in biotech seems to descend into companies being created to create patents that are sold and then not made much use of because of all the various patents needed to do anything useful being held by different competitors. Hence nothing ever gets done. I was really struck to read that the auto industry effectively abandoned the patent system in the early 1900s for just such a reason:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

In the early years of automobile development, a group of capital monopolists owned the rights to a 2-cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B. Selden.[7] By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed.[7] The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US auto manufacturers: although each company would develop technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers.[7] By the time the US entered World War 2, 92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared between these manufacturers, without any exchange of money (or lawsuits).[7]

To an outsider, the computor industry seems to do a fantastic job of actually getting products made that actually work and benefit people. The computor industry does have a lot of proprietary technology doesn't it? I know a lot of people who post on here work in that industry. What do you think makes it all work so well (or doesn't it)?

http://biobricks.org/ is I guess a bit like the biotech version of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association. Do you think this is sensible? Also, if technologies are developed with government or charity money, does that make patents less appropriate? Within Universities, the orgy of licensing red tape  seems mostly to be empire building by the licensing departments rather than being based on any rational commercial considerations. Some Univesities have sold off future rights to own any technology developed within a University. That seems to set in stone an intractable web of competing licenses.

[MediumTex]

Patenting plants sort of bothers me.

Outlawing certain plants completely is also a strange thing to do.

[stone]

Patenting plants sort of bothers me.

Outlawing certain plants completely is also a strange thing to do.

What about patenting human genes? Earlier this week I was chatting to someone from a university lab that patented anaplastic lymphoma kinase. The boss of that lab gets royalties from drugs other people subsequently developed to inhibit that gene product to treat lymphoma.

I have less problem with a final end product such as a crop plant being patented than I do with patents on some nebulous observation of a natural entity such as a gene or whatever. Basically "intellectual property" seems to me harder to get my head around than a "real" product such as a crop plant.

[stone]

I must admit to me the over riding consideration is not what is right or wrong but rather what actually leads to beneficial technologies actually being developed and implementated. If patenting everything led to that or patenting nothing led to that; I would favor whatever worked.

[Jake]

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend the short book by Stephan Kinsella called "Against Intellectual Property", available for free on the Mises institute. It is written by an IP lawyer who is a keen defender of normal property rights but makes the case that Intellectual Property is completely unjustified and unprincipled. It totally blew my mind when I read it. http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

I haven't read it yet but I understand that another book called "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by some economists goes into a lot of examples of the abuse of IP in biotech, agribusiness and big pharma. It also argues that IP should be completely abolished. Also available for free http://www.dklevine.com/general/intelle ... tfinal.htm

[Storm]

In the world of the near future, when we are able to make anything with nano-bots that rearrange molecules for us, the intellectual property wars will be intense.  Imagine a Star Trek type universe where a replicator can make any food that it has a blueprint for.  Now, imagine Monsanto has copyrighted all plants, vegetables, and animals that are edible, and only wealthy people who can afford to pay a licensing fee can replicate food.

Now, imagine what piracy will be like.  You could literally go on the Internet and download blueprints to feed your family.  Or, you could pay Monsanto a licensing fee for the privilege of feeding your family...  It's a scary thought.

The general idea is that as society becomes sufficiently advanced that resource scarcity is no longer an issue, the only thing that will allow corporations to make a profit will be selling intellectual property.  If we allow copyright and patent law to go hog wild, society as a whole will suffer as the very building blocks of life are copyrighted and patented into oblivion.

[Storm]

Patenting software is also a very bad trend.  Companies were awarded patents for silly things that are used every day.  To name a few in recent history:  Apple patented "swipe to unlock"  Granted, it was an innovative technology in 2007, but are we seriously going to allow Apple to steamroll any other company that wants to implement such a device?  This would be like a doorknob manufacturer patenting "turn to open" and putting all the other doorknob manufacturers out of business.

Just so you don't think I'm biased, Motorola mobility has patented the ability to push email to a mobile device in Europe.  They just forced Apple to disable push email on all iPhones in Germany.  "You sue me for push email, I'll sue you for swipe to unlock."  Seriously guys, it's 2012, we've been able to push email to mobile devices since the 90s.  Grow up already and get rid of your silly software patents.

I truly think all software patents should be abolished.  Large companies like Apple, Google, and Motorola can afford a warchest of patents, like a nuclear stockpile, to keep each other at bay with mutually assured destruction, however, small entrepreneurs get absolutely steamrolled by the big players.  Can you imagine a couple guys in a garage right now with an innovative idea on how to improve email on mobile devices?  The conversation will last 30 seconds:  "Well, Motorola patented it so we might as well just forget about it."

This is a world where innovation is stifled and large oligopolies rule with an iron fist, and I want no part of it.  Software patents must die.

[stone]

Storm, so in your opinion the computor industry works so well despite rather than because of all the patenting?

[Tortoise]

IP in the software industry is a relatively recent phenomenon. Here's a relevant passage from the Boldrin & Levine book that Jake provided a link to:

We read about Amazon suing Barnes and Noble for patent infringement – and being sued by IBM for the same – and we do not know whether to laugh or to cry. We find Microsoft hinting that they will sue us for patent infringement if we use GNU/Linux instead of Windows. It seems as if no industry is as hemmed in with intellectual monopoly as the software industry. But it was not always like this. It turns out that over the last two decades, the software industry has “benefited”? from massive changes in the law, legislated by that duly elected body, the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, prior to the 1981 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Diamond vs Diehr, it was not possible to patent software at all and the current craze to patent every click of the mouse originates in the subsequent extension of patents to software products in the 1994 Federal Circuit Court ruling In re Alapat.

[...]

Not only did patents play no role in software innovation, copyrights played only a limited role. While computer programs were often copyrighted, in the early years of the PC industry, copyright was seldom respected or enforced. Consumers would purchase programs and use them on a variety of computers in violation of license agreements. People bought and sold computer programs and created new ones by using bits and pieces, modules and ideas from existing programs. While copyright may have limited the widespread copying of software by other publishers, it was not enforced in the draconian way it is today.

The software industry is a leading illustration [that] intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation, but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it. In a young dynamic industry full of ideas and creativity, intellectual monopoly does not play a useful role. It is when ideas run out and new competitors come in with fresher ideas, that those bereft of them turn to government intervention – and intellectual “property”? – to protect their lucrative old ways of doing business.

Source: http://www.dklevine.com/papers/imbookfinal02.pdf, pp. 17-19

[Storm]

Storm, so in your opinion the computor industry works so well despite rather than because of all the patenting?

Absolutely.  Can you imagine if Xerox Parc had patented the graphical user interface, mouse used as a pointing device, WYSIWYG editing?  We would not even have Windows or Mac OS X today.  The way we interact with computers would probably still be on text only screens with a keyboard.

The rapid innovation in the computer industry has happened in spite of software patents.  Now I'm afraid software patents are rapidly leading to the point where every trivial thing like sending a text message is patented by someone, so god forbid you need to write an application that sends a text message.

Imagine in the 19th century if a textile factory had patented "method for sewing a stitch in clothing to attach two pieces of cloth together."  It would be insane - every other textile factory would have to pay a licensing fee or be shut down.  Yet, that is what software patents allow large corporations to do every day.  Trivial software routines are patentable as business processes.  This needs to stop, for obvious reasons.

[alvinroast]

While in college I considered going into IP law. One course on intellectual property and observation of what was going on in the world around me convinced me to abandon that. It would be an incredibly frustrating field to be in. At the time I couldn't have imagined a company like Monsanto effectively buying off the government to gain power over the food supply on a global scale.

[stone]

A couple of years ago I was griping about how biotech had totally hamstrung itself by having an web of patents. I was mouthing off about how the industrial revolution would never have happened under a similar framework. The person who I was talking to then sent me this email:

From Wikepedia:

"Eventually Hargreaves applied for a patent on the jenny in July 1770. By this time a number of spinners in Lancashire were already using copies of the machine, and Hargreaves sent notice that he was taking legal action against them. The manufacturers met, and offered Hargreaves £3000."

"Also in 1815, George Stephenson and Ralph Dodds patented an improved method of driving (turning) locomotive wheels using pins attached to the spokes to act as cranks."

"The Bessemer process revolutionized steel manufacture by decreasing its cost, from £40 per long ton to £6-7 per long ton during its introduction, along with greatly increasing the scale and speed of production of this vital raw material.....Bessemer licenced the patent for his process to five ironmasters, for a total of £27,000"

I rest my case!

I remembered the email but before digging it up just now, I looked up the actual wikipeadia entry about the spinning jenny. Talk about selective quoting :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_jenny

By this time a number of spinners in Lancashire were using copies of the machine, and Hargreaves sent notice that he was taking legal action against them. The manufacturers met, and offered Hargreaves £3000. He at first demanded £7000, and stood out for £4000, but the case eventually fell apart when it was learned he had sold several in the past.[12

[stone]

Was the difference between the 19thCentury and now, that then inventors were pragmatic and rough and ready and would have ineptly done their own patenting paperwork and would cut usable deals with anyone who wanted to make use of the technology? Now a gaggle of patent attorneys would be imployed at immense cost to create an unusable licence restriction. In the quote above about the Bessemer process, clearly it was promptly licenced to five independent ironmasters.

Perhaps if Xerox had had patent restrictions on  the graphical user interface, mouse used as a pointing device, WYSIWYG editing etc BUT had sold licences to Apple and Microsoft, then we would still have had Windows etc AND would have had Xerox continuing to this day as a "think outside the box" idea generating company

What was the patenting situation around natural gas fracking? That clearly has been a recent success story. Also do computor chip makers such as Intel and ARM have lots of patenting? They seem to do a good job don't they?

[MachineGhost]

What was the patenting situation around natural gas fracking? That clearly has been a recent success story. Also do computor chip makers such as Intel and ARM have lots of patenting? They seem to do a good job don't they?

I don't know, but the one guy labored for decades to crack the mystery of fracking.  Nowadays, the patentable stuff is the proprietary fluid used to pump into the shale, like from Carbo Ceramics.

What really amazes me is the continual respect society in the West has for sanctity of contract so that licensing is actually an economically viable model.  How that works in the real world vs rampant piracy on the Internet has always befuddled me.  I believe intellectual property is property, but arranging the state of electrons on one device to match the state of electrons on another device is not copying or downloading, its mirroring.  That is not technically theft.

MG

[stone]

This link has first hand accounts of how the scientists who invented mono-clonal antibodies "failed" to patent the technique. That led to much hand wringing in the UK.
Elsewhere in the piece it has interesting stuff about how the two inventors (who got a joint Nobel prize) each thought the idea was their personal idea but each was too polite to contradict the other when the other claimed it. Basically the concept came about as a "taking words out of each others mouths" synergistic discussion. To me the irony is that looking wider, "intellectual property" so often springs from a transglobal synergistic discussion between a whole community of scientists (or hiphop producers or whatever). That makes it so tricky to commoditize it IMO.
http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/research/ ... /44823.pdf

There had been here the memory of the discovery of penicillin and the subsequent apparent failure of Britain to cash in on it. I am not talking about the realities of the contributions of the British scientists and of the many American scientists and engineers, but a very important national mythology. At school my Latin teacher would break off from telling us about Latin to attacking the incompetents who had failed to make this country rich through penicillin. It seemed that monoclonal antibodies was a rerun.

I have been at the MRC for three years and have to deal with these things and this history permeates what we do today very much, but one of the dimensions has been this thing which is sometimes explicit, usually rather more hinted at, that somehow orother they would have done better had it been in the States, had it been somewhere else. My point is also not original, but it is usually overlooked. Dr Bud made reference to what I would call gene-splicing, recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibodies and there we have two very fundamental molecular biology advances which have proved subsequently to be of great commercial worth. One, the monoclonal antibodies, and the message is not patented, the other gene-splicing, patented, the so-called Cohen and Boyer patent.13 If you actually start looking at things, and this is again a point you make, was it structural, was it cultural, I would make the judgement that there is a cultural element but I would argue that there is factual evidence that there are structural disadvantages in this country and I thinthat this is a thing that needs to be looked at. Within US patent law there is this period of 12 months, the so called grace period, which is allowed between the first publication on the topic and the latest date at which a patent application can be
filed, which allows consideration and it allows discussion, it allows discussion above and beyond the inventors. In non-US patent law, which applies to us, there
is no opportunity for any public disclosure, and indeed people are often amazed how readily something can be called a public disclosure, going and giving a lecture
and speculating on some idea, and can be used against you. If we actually examine the Cohen and Boyer patent which existed at this time and I have a first-hand account, the key publication was made in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Science in November 1973,14 and the first debate about whether patenting
should even be considered was in May 1974, and the prompting of that was as
much as anything else in relationship to speculation in the Wall Street Journal. At
the time, and this is an area where the Americans might be said to have been ahead
of us, there was somebody in Stanford University who had responsibility to do
these things, and we obviously had NRDC, but in all fairness I suspect having
somebody reasonably local is helpful. So there was a responsible individual who
was actually prompted to do this not by his local Nature but by reading the Wall
Street Journal and the first thing he ran into was that the inventor did not want to
patent, he thought it was wrong, we have heard the arguments. But that is in the
States, not here, and also there was no precedent for such a patent, no one quite
knew what you could claim, which is a point that César has touched on, but the
reality was that some arm-twisting was done and a patent was filed, but a
considerable time after the original publication. I would take the view that the
subsequent exploitation was done very prudently and by the end of 1981 there
were 73 companies as licensees and now there are 200. The licensing income to
Stanford University, and indeed there was an additional equal share to the
University of California in San Francisco, exceeds $50 million to each, but perhaps
far more fundamentally in this notion of national culture was the stimulus to
company and job creation in the States. If you actually stop and look at things, and
one can say something absolutely dogmatically, had the same patent law prevailed
in the US as prevails in the country, there would not have been the Cohen and
Boyer patent, so this adverse comparison would not have existed. Now, we can
speculate, and César has given me his answer, whether had we had the benefits of
US patent law, would we have filed the patent or not? César, I think, feels
probably not, but that is a speculation. The other is that there would not have a
been a Cohen and Boyer patent. That is factual. Just going back to my position at
the moment, because I, within MRC, have responsibility not to make sure these
things never happen, because that is unrealistic, but to minimize the probability.
The fact is that this piece of structural advantage still exists in the States and I have
to ask myself what will be the next example of something where we miss an
opportunity in comparison with the States simply because we don’t have a
common sense of criteria which surround us. This is a very technical point, it
seemed the right time. It is part of the fair discussion of this debate.15

[stone]

Jake, thanks for the fascinating link. One thing that struck me though is that the author doesn't seem to grasp that time is something that has scarcity for every individual. So if someone spends ten years writing a series of books, they have forfeited something just as tangible as if they had sold the family farm. Saying that copying those books without attribution causes no conflict because there is no scarcity seems a bit iffy to me. Compare an author charging royalties from selling a book to a fisherman selling fish he caught in the sea. Both are simply demanding payment for their prior labour. Personally I don't think there is a clearcut distinction between the two examples. The fish are no use to the fisherman if he can't sell them. He already has more than he could eat. Why are the fish more deserving of payment than additional copies of the book?

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend the short book by Stephan Kinsella called "Against Intellectual Property", available for free on the Mises institute. It is written by an IP lawyer who is a keen defender of normal property rights but makes the case that Intellectual Property is completely unjustified and unprincipled. It totally blew my mind when I read it. http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

The whole libertarian "inherited homestead" concept of property also seems to have a whiff of bullshit about it to me. We all have a common ancestor don't we? I do think there are big problems with the IP culture we have but I think it is much more muddy in reality than the absolute argument Kinsella makes.

[stone]

I think the real problem with biotech IP (and perhaps computor software ?) is that rather than being like a typical  novel or movie, it is almost always more like those electronic music tracks that are built from samples and itteratively remixed layer upon layer by a successive convoluted web of originators. I think that type of music also gets bedevilled by copyright issues. I can remember hearing a drum and bass producer saying that he always sampled drums from BBC Radio3 (a classical music station) because they never persued sample copyright disputes unlike typical popular music publishers. I think the person who does the Ford car TV advert music in the UK has an open source attitude towards people sampling from him.

[Storm]

Was the difference between the 19thCentury and now, that then inventors were pragmatic and rough and ready and would have ineptly done their own patenting paperwork and would cut usable deals with anyone who wanted to make use of the technology? Now a gaggle of patent attorneys would be imployed at immense cost to create an unusable licence restriction. In the quote above about the Bessemer process, clearly it was promptly licenced to five independent ironmasters.

Perhaps if Xerox had had patent restrictions on  the graphical user interface, mouse used as a pointing device, WYSIWYG editing etc BUT had sold licences to Apple and Microsoft, then we would still have had Windows etc AND would have had Xerox continuing to this day as a "think outside the box" idea generating company

I think the main difference between the 19th century and now is that in the 19th century, it was rich industrial barons working with each other.  If you had the resources to build a textile plant and stock it with "Jenny's" you were already a wealthy industrialist and could afford to pay a licensing fee.

Computers and technology have lowered the barriers of entry to any teenager that can afford a $200 computer, or borrow one at school.  This has been an extremely positive step for society as a whole, in that every year we see new innovations that would have never been possible without someone daring to start a business with only hard work and man hours invested.  The entire "App" marketplace, where we have apps that can do everything from remotely start our car, to deposit checks without visiting the bank, etc, is being driven by the innovation that anyone with a good idea and a little programming knowledge can bring it to the marketplace.  Patents threaten to erect artificial barriers to entry.

If you are patenting a hardware device or a manufactured drug that you spent years researching, I say that is a valid use of patents.  If, on the other hand, you are patenting an obvious software invention that has much prior art, that should never be allowed.

Also, software patents have spawned a whole industry of patent trolls - companies that don't make any products or services, and simply have a business model of acquiring as many crazy patents as possible and suing other companies for every dollar they make.

[Lone Wolf]

To an outsider, the computor industry seems to do a fantastic job of actually getting products made that actually work and benefit people. The computor industry does have a lot of proprietary technology doesn't it? I know a lot of people who post on here work in that industry. What do you think makes it all work so well (or doesn't it)?

The computer industry does a great job of voluntarily sharing knowledge and ideas.  As a profession, software developers take great pride in our rapidly-expanding "communal knowledge base".  Any participant in this free exchange of ideas will find that they get much more than they give.  It's a wonderful thing to take part in.

In software, ideas are important and I understand why people want to be paid for having thought something up.  But the hours and hours of design, coding, testing, and just plain hard work matter far, far more.  The whole "dreaming stuff up" business is nice, but the implementation is where the rubber meets the road.

Like Storm mentioned, software patents are a threat in that they so often represent an attempt to "grab a piece" of knowledge others were already aware of (and thus "owned".)  This hampers freedom within the profession and interrupts the virtuous cycle of knowledge sharing within the community.  The solution is to simply issue no further software patents and let the software world run its course without this concept.

Copyright has served as a much better model for software.  If you think something like Facebook is a neat idea, try to build a better one.  So long as you don't someone else's source code (without their consent), you're clear to just "do your thing".  And even copyright can be voluntarily surrendered or softened (as in the case of open source software.)

[stone]

I'm very ignorant of how software works. When you say that you are free to copy a concept but not the source code, does that mean that you read the code and then rewrite it "in your own words" or just write it from scratch but aiming to do the same thing or what? Sorry if this is such a dumb question that it doesn't make any sense.

Biotech is tangled up with awful -cover all bases- patents.

[gizmo_rat]

^ Write it from scratch but aiming to do the same thing... but better, otherwise you're wasting your time.

[Lone Wolf]

I'm very ignorant of how software works. When you say that you are free to copy a concept but not the source code, does that mean that you read the code and then rewrite it "in your own words" or just write it from scratch but aiming to do the same thing or what? Sorry if this is such a dumb question that it doesn't make any sense.

Biotech is tangled up with awful -cover all bases- patents.

Not a dumb question at all.  It's a good one.  You're more or less going for the "from scratch" approach.

Generally, you don't want your engineers to have ever been exposed to the source code of any competitor's product.  From a copyright standpoint, it's completely fine for an engineer to know what a competitor offers (and, within reason, how it might have been done) so long as no reverse-engineering or source code perusal is involved.

This can be taken even further by keeping engineers separate from the binary executables of a competing product.  It's a common defensive practice for engineers to never even directly use or install a competitor's product.  Throughout my career, I can think of no examples where I even put finger to keyboard on a machine that was running a competitor's product.

This simple practice assures you that you will not run afoul of copyright.  There is no such simple practice that allows you to navigate the minefield of software patents with 100% safety.  You never know when your latest mildly clever idea might be just another bridge with a patent troll lurking underneath it.

One interesting way to see how far this all goes is to walk right up to the edge of how far copyright protection extends: "clean room design".  This is where team A reverse-engineers a software product and writes a detailed specification describing how a similar system would work.  This document is then provided to wholly separate team B, who then implements it based strictly on the contents of the document.

Biotech is tangled up with awful -cover all bases- patents.

I'm always hesitant to overextend the lessons I've learned in my own profession but I think that there's a real danger of greatly "overdoing things" with IP protection in biotech and hampering the natural sharing of knowledge.  The nature of knowledge sharing is that it creates a virtuous cycle where all participants benefit.  When you voluntarily share your knowledge with me, you grow no poorer but I grow richer.  If I respond in kind, we are both better off.  It's important not to interfere with this process.

[Storm]

To an outsider, the computor industry seems to do a fantastic job of actually getting products made that actually work and benefit people. The computor industry does have a lot of proprietary technology doesn't it? I know a lot of people who post on here work in that industry. What do you think makes it all work so well (or doesn't it)?

The computer industry does a great job of voluntarily sharing knowledge and ideas.  As a profession, software developers take great pride in our rapidly-expanding "communal knowledge base".  Any participant in this free exchange of ideas will find that they get much more than they give.  It's a wonderful thing to take part in.

In software, ideas are important and I understand why people want to be paid for having thought something up.  But the hours and hours of design, coding, testing, and just plain hard work matter far, far more.  The whole "dreaming stuff up" business is nice, but the implementation is where the rubber meets the road.

Like Storm mentioned, software patents are a threat in that they so often represent an attempt to "grab a piece" of knowledge others were already aware of (and thus "owned".)  This hampers freedom within the profession and interrupts the virtuous cycle of knowledge sharing within the community.  The solution is to simply issue no further software patents and let the software world run its course without this concept.

Copyright has served as a much better model for software.  If you think something like Facebook is a neat idea, try to build a better one.  So long as you don't someone else's source code (without their consent), you're clear to just "do your thing".  And even copyright can be voluntarily surrendered or softened (as in the case of open source software.)

Some very good thoughts here, LW, and your opinions match mine pretty well.  I believe that copyright serves the only function needed for software IP protection.

Most people tend to believe that a musician can copyright recordings of his musical performances.  Because many techniques used in musical performance are the same, we allow copyright of individual recordings, but we don't allow patents for a method of playing an instrument.  Having software patents would be like the equivalent of giving Eric Clapton the patent for "method of strumming a guitar chord," and then allowing him to sue every other musician on the planet that strummed a guitar chord and used it in a copyrighted work.

Also, another key that LW mentioned is that in computer software, we all build on the knowledge of others in our field.  Great computer scientists have come before us and thought up methods for doing most things on computers.  We simply implement their ideas in a new way.  If every product had to be designed in a clean room by engineers that had never witnessed another product, innovation would slow to a crawl.

[Lone Wolf]

Most people tend to believe that a musician can copyright recordings of his musical performances.  Because many techniques used in musical performance are the same, we allow copyright of individual recordings, but we don't allow patents for a method of playing an instrument.  Having software patents would be like the equivalent of giving Eric Clapton the patent for "method of strumming a guitar chord," and then allowing him to sue every other musician on the planet that strummed a guitar chord and used it in a copyrighted work.

That's exactly right.  Even grimmer is the thought of Clapton never getting the chance to discover his musical talent because he had no chance of navigating the minefield of Music Patents.  Imagine: Eric Clapton, telemarketer.

Also, another key that LW mentioned is that in computer software, we all build on the knowledge of others in our field.  Great computer scientists have come before us and thought up methods for doing most things on computers.  We simply implement their ideas in a new way.  If every product had to be designed in a clean room by engineers that had never witnessed another product, innovation would slow to a crawl.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants like Ada Lovelace and Donald Knuth.  If anyone ever patented "add a level of indirection" or "perform caching", my tool belt would be virtually empty. 

Storm will already know about this, but for any non-software people, a great example of the knowledge-sharing process I'm describing is Stack Overflow.  This is an invaluable site where programmers get together to ask questions when they're stumped and then answer them for one another.  It's a sort of collaborative process of everyone trying to get everyone else "un-stuck" on difficult problems.  The questions and the answers they generated are then out there, permanent(ish) and searchable for anyone that might be stuck on a similar problem in the future.

This is far from the only example of the ethos but I think that it gives a great view on what works within our profession.

[KevinW]

http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intelle ... tfinal.htm

Thanks for the links, Jake, I'll take a look.

I have also concluded that the concept of intellectual property is unjust and we'd be better off if all those laws were abolished.  This comes from my own experience with open source software, reading on free market economics, and contemplation. I look forward to reading these professional economists' arguments for this position.

I recently explained my position on the ERE forum so I'll just copy/paste that here:

---

I mostly agree with Locke's definition of property. You own your body, time, and the things you make using your body and time. But I draw the line there. So to @Surio's point, I don't think physical space, natural resources, or note frequencies can have owners. But to @Chad's point, finished goods like chairs or operas can.

However, the precept that an author owns their work needs to be squared with the precept that the reader owns their own mind. I own my own body and that includes my brain and its contents. But IP law prevents that. I know the lyrics to "Let it Be," but if I want to sing that in public I need to negotiate with Sony Music first. Somehow Sony came to own that part of my brain, and now they want me to pay them rent on it. Huh?

So in my utopia there would be no copyright or patents. But we have to live in the real world.

If you created the item, whether you grew it in your field, wrote a book, made a film, sang a song, built a home, etc. and someone else takes against your will...it is stealing.

Even though I don't agree with labeling this "stealing," I do agree that present law gives a creator the right to set the terms of use for their creation. I'm not an anarchist so I feel this law must be followed until it is changed. So if a piece of media has an "all rights reserved" copyright notice, it's illegal and thus unacceptable to unilaterally claim a right that was reserved by the author, such as the right to copy the work.

However I object to filling my brain and life with things that carry these restrictions, so as much as possible, I avoid them.