patents category archive

Thoughts on Invention, Innovation, and Patents from ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’

Originally published 17 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

I’m working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I’ve ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I’d probably make better progress if it showed up in blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, and this one presents many new ways to look at things. It also gets me thinking about the current sorry state of the patent system, with these excerpts:

All this is not to deny that Watt, Edison, the Wright brothers, Morse, and Whitney made big

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Robert Heinlein Describes the Situation

Way back in 1939, in his first published science fiction short story:

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

–Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line”

I haven’t read the story, but that seems to apply very well today whether it’s Disney buying Congressmen and longer copyright terms, or Microsoft and many …

Don’t forget…

Bill Gates says that patents stifle innovation and competition:

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. […] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

–Bill Gates, 1991

(Sure, you’ve probably seen this one, but it’s good to keep in mind.)

But it’s ok! As long as Microsoft holds the patents, I’m sure they’ll keep our best interests at heart. Especially if they don’t have to worry about all those pesky competitors.

I mean, really, the brazen impudence of these …

Jeremy Allison on Innovation and Patents

Jeremy Allison is fast becoming one of my heroes. Not only for the great technical work he has done with Samba, but also for his principled support of free software. He quit Novell in protest after they signed their patent pact with the devil, and he and the Samba team gave an early vote of support to GPL v3 by moving Samba to the new license soon after its release.

He also regularly contributes thoughtful essays to Tux Deluxe. I just found The Innovation Game in my feed reader, which has some positive points about innovation in free software, but also deals with a depressing subject, Microsoft and software patents:

So who could possibly be against this wealth of the commons? People wishing to own innovative ideas, that’s

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‘Then They Fight You’

Busy week here with a funeral in Thief River Falls and a sick baby upon returning home, so please forgive one of those less-value-added posts where I just point to someone else who has more interesting things to offer.

Tim Lee over at The Technology Liberation Front often has great things to say for software freedom and against software patents. Writing yesterday about the Microsoft/Novell deal and subsequent Steve Ballmer chest-thumping:

I think this is a case where language has become a serious impediment to clear thinking about these issues. When Ballmer says that Linux “uses our patented intellectual property,” he almost certainly does not mean that Linux is in any way derived from Microsoft products, or that the people making Linux have somehow been free-riding off of

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Stephan Kinsella, ‘Against Intellectual Property’

For today’s lecture, some libertarian thoughts on the problem of intellectual property from Stephan Kinsella.

I’m regularly exposed to libertarian ideas at places like Marginal Revolution and EconLog. I like a lot of the ideas, but I wouldn’t describe myself as libertarian.

Kinsella wrote a paper called “Against Intellectual Property.” I’m slowly making my way through it. TV and the Internet have reduced my attention span down to a nub, so I often find it challenging to digest scholarly pieces like this. Especially when the footnotes consume on average half of the page.

In “Against Intellectual Property,” he talks about the first-possessor rule of property ownership. Since I can’t be bothered …