Licenses, patents and ideas
October 17th, 2007
I’ll try to make things short by quoting Richard Stallman:
Control over the use of one’s ideas really constitutes control over other people’s lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
Watching these patent wars between Novell, Red Hat versus IP Innovation just makes me wondering: how hard will it be to distribute ideas in the world where everything is patented?
We will never live in a world where everything is patented. Patent system as it is now doesn’t work, and there are many examples to prove it. For instance, there are several patents given out to different people and companies for wheel, fire, and eating food. The whole thing is just a matter of time.
Leo, which matter of time? Matter of time till the patents dissapear?
If it happens, how people will leave those patents they’ve done?
Andrey,
we’ll drop this whole patent thing, as we did with so many other things that stopped making any sense (money in gold, calling each other “comrades”, wearing hats, etc).
Leonid,
Sounds like utopia, but It’s interesting!
Andrey,
a lot of things sounded as utopia in their time… never-the-less they happened. It’s difficult to stop progress. It’s almost impossible to stop progress just by creating a bunch of laws (Kopernik is on fire, anybody?). It’s definitely impossible to stop progress which is backed up by lots of money making. Patents, being a purely bureaucratic issue, slow down the money making process…
Andrey,
quite a few smart people expressed their opinions against patenting system. One of them is a famous lawyer, who is a huge open source supporter – Lawrence Lessig. Here is one of his opinions:
http://www.lessig.org/content/standard/0,1902,4296,00.html
There are more around the web…
Here is another link to add to the discussion:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/2036215&from=rss
Leonid,
I’ve enjoyed the first article, because the second one examples typical bureaucratic stuff we can find in any administrative sector of the state
However, it’s one of the easiest ways of getting paid for your ideas not mentioning lots of time behind the idea patenting.
Andrey,
Actually, it’s not. Two things that make it much harder are:
1. You have to show a working prototype and prove that it is the first of its kind to get the patent.
2. Legal charges stop most of the “regular people” from making money out of it.
Patents aren’t for making money. They are mostly for protecting intellectual property. But they don’t do a good job of protecting it, so they will die out or evolve into something completely different eventually.
As I said, something as common as a “wheel” has been patented more than once. People managed to phrase it differently and trick the patent giving office (like “a device to help carry heavy loads around” vs. “an essential part of the device for entertainment and fun”. But none of them made any money out of it, or managed to hold on the exclusivity on wheel production.