Every Shadow of a Shade of an Idea...

Just so, 126 years later:

U.S. Supreme Court
Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883)
Decided March 5, 1883
MR. JUSTICE BRADLEY delivered the opinion of the Court.
It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to [...]

Filed: My 'Fiction Writing' Provisional Patent!

That's right! I'm officially "patent pending." Coming soon to a patent office near you:
"Method and Apparatus for Creating a Work of Fiction with the Aid of a Computing Device"
That's the name my patent attorney came up with. Please, before you start squawking about ridiculous software patents, let me explain. I'm not a fan of software [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

'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 [...]

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 [...]

Thomas Jefferson on Patents and Freedom of Ideas

Started reading Unbounded Freedom and ran in to a great excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813 about the nature of ideas. It's not the first time I've run across it, and like my Ben Franklin quote it has seen a lot of use in patent discussions, but it's [...]

Getting Images to Display in a FeedBurner Feed and Some Hasty Thoughts on Free Software

I'm trying out FeedBurner for managing my feeds and for email subscriptions. (See: New! In the right sidebar under the syndication links.) It was pretty easy to start using with the help of this WordPress FeedBurner plugin for redirecting the RSS and Atom feeds to FeedBurner. My initial impression of their service [...]