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Amen. As Thomas Jefferson (correctly) described patents, they're a part of positive law, not natural law. In other words, their only justification is pragmatic,

Amen. As Thomas Jefferson (correctly) described patents, they're a part of positive law, not natural law. In other words, their only justification is pragmatic, not moral. You can't "own" an idea the way that you can own a couch or a car. We allow for (temporary) patent protection because it's supposed to encourage innovation and help our economy. If it doesn't - and it's clearly reached the point where it hinders rather than helps innovation - then we need to change things.

manachar 11y ago
To be clear, because some forget this part of patent law, the encouragement towards innovation was to encourage people to share and build on a communal set of ideas. The temporary monopoly on ideas was the carrot to get people to register their ideas in a central location (patent office) rather than lock ideas behind closed doors and secrecy. Too many people think the carrot of the temporary monopoly was the point of the patent office. In other words, we know that the community of ideas gets better with more sharing and building off of other people's ideas. As a society we decided to make laws to encourage this sharing. As a result, technological progress was immense. Sadly, the current situation seems to strongly suggest that we may need to find better ways to encourage sharing (Open Source has been great for much of software).
- joepie91_ 11y ago
  Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Look at the direction of TPP, which mandates stronger copyright but has optional public rights: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-does-tpp-repeatedly-require-stronger-copyright-when-it-comes-to-public-rights-makes-it-voluntary.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-d... "...the copyright section includes thirteen "shall provide" and just the one measly "shall endeavour." And if you add in the enforcement section you get another thirty eight "shall provide" and just a single "shall endeavour" buried in a footnote unrelated to the key points in the document. So, for those of you playing along at home, the message being sent by the TPP is pretty damn clear: when it comes to ratcheting up copyright and setting the ground rules for enforcement everything is required and every country must take part. Yet, when it comes to protecting the rights of the public and making sure copyright is more balanced to take into account the public... well, then it's optional."
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Copyright has failed in an altogether different manner. The trouble with copyright is what has been erected to enforce it: Laws against circumventing DRM that encourage monopolization of copyright-adjacent markets, absurd statutory damages, internet censorship, easily abused takedown schemes. And the term is far too long. But if "copyright" is only the ability of an author to sue copyright infringers in court for actual damages, it's basically harmless. If you don't like proprietary software then you can excise it from your life by simply not using it, and actually doing that is continually becoming more practical as free software improves. The trouble with software patents is that you can't do that. There is no option to build your own system because independent creation is not a defense. And that failure is inherent in the nature of what a patent is. You can't fix it without eliminating software patents entirely.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    Copyright has succeeded a thousand times more than its failed. It's pretty great for the most part. It enables a vast, vast number of jobs and new creations. It could certainly be better. But I'd much rather have what copyright as it exists today than for it to not exist at all. And don't forget that GPL is only enforceable due to copyright law.
    - Asbostos 11y ago
      Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that would push some GPL software into the public domain, thus damaging the GPL ecosystem by allowing commercial competitors to use the same code.
      - usrusr 11y ago
        Pardon me if I have trouble seeing a terrible loss for the GNU ecosystem if releases from 1995 were transferred to the public domain.
        Asbostos 11y ago
        There are some very old but hard-to-do-yourself things like compilers, early versions of Linux, etc. Sure it won't be massive, but in the long term it'd slow the ever-growing collection of GPL work, as the old stuff leaks out the back end.
        belorn 11y ago
        We are talking about works which then has had no patches for 20 years. Even compiles of dead languages do get minor patches over time, if nothing else then to fix memory leaks, crashes, infinitive loops and compatibility with new os kernels. You would for example have to enable low memory address exception in the kernel to run many 20 year old programs, since many programs back then assumed they would start at address space zero, which modern kernel forbids for security reasons.
  - Asbostos 11y ago
    A big difference that can make it reasonable to have long or even infinite copyright terms is that copyright works are the creations of people's minds, not discoveries about nature. Somebody else creating something doesn't prevent you from creating your own thing that's just as good, or even the same thing if you can show you did it independently. But somebody else patenting a method for compressing video does prevent you from independently creating and selling your own video compression method if it happens to work the same way. Maybe that's the best way to compress video and the world would be denied it as long as the patent remains valid. So nobody really needs to use other people's copyright works. Unlike patented ideas, you can always create your own instead. Or course, sometimes it's expensive and feels like a waste of effort reproducing what's already been done, but it's still not a restriction on doing your own thing the way patents are. The way I see property ownership is that it's like a store of human labor. When you do work, you might get money from it, you might get a physical object from it (I made a table, now I own that table), or you might get a copyright work from it. All of these things can hold the value of the work you did and can be used to trade for other things. I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that in a fair world, the people who did that work can keep the stored value they created as long as the market is willing to trade things for it. In the case of computer software, some value is lost whenever somebody uses your work, since you're not able to sell it to them anymore. Value is also lost if the the demand falls (obsolete software) but that's the risk of investing your labor in something with an uncertain lifetime, just as the value of a table is lost if fashions change and people want steel tables instead of wood. Some copyright work has value and that's why people want to copy it, so they can gain that value for themselves at the expense of the copyright holder. But wouldn't it be more fair to make your own, instead of siphoning value out of other people's work without compensating them?
- nullc 11y ago
  It's also less effective because of double-dipping intellectual proprietary systems. Of a single part of a software product a company can enjoy trade-secret protection, copyright, and patent protection... then they multiply the force many fold with burdensome one sided 'license agreements'. This is possible because the bar for disclosure in patents has basically been put at zero. If the patent teaches the invention in question to a single hypothetical omnipotent expert in the art, then it meets the disclosure bar. In many fields patents are obfuscated beyond belief and it is pointless to read them: You'll learn nothing. Simultaneously, parties keep their source code secret-- but distributed binaries which are obfuscated forms of the source that effectively hide their design, and they use the force of anti-circumvention provisions of copyright law to threaten people who would reverse engineer the software (perhaps to extract some information about the 99.9% of non-patented ideas in it). And yet they enjoy a long lasting copyright protection, the same as other works which are made transparent through their publication. The patent system on its own is unbalanced, especially for software good which have a much lower resource requirements for their exploration... but when coupled with the other schemes that were hardly envisioned to overlap, the result creates incredible costs, stifles innovation, and is generally bad for society.
happyscrappy 11y ago
Tesla(edit:SpaceX) is not bothering to file patents because it is just a blueprint for countries like China who quickly build knockoffs on someone else's R+D dime.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  You are confusing Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX is not filing for patents.
  - thefreeman 11y ago
    Didn't tesla open all their patents as well? http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-yo...
- ken47 11y ago
  Do you have any source for this grand claim?
adultSwim 11y ago
Are we saying you can no longer commercially develop a video codec? If it's so good for the industry, the patent holders could just choose to make it free. Everyone else could choose to :gasp: pay. I actually agree with your point. I just want to make it clear what that means. When it comes to patents, to me a compression algorithm is the closest thing in software to a mechanic device. At that level could patent equivalent ideas as hardware. Are we saying no more patents on mechanical inventions or hardware? For a long time I've thought that the patent office letting crummy patents through as being a separate issue than having patents at all. It also never made sense to separate out software patents from anything else.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  The "crummy patents" and "having patents at all" are very much intertwined. The problem is the bit about obviousness to someone skilled in the art. Even though I am a programmer, I know nothing at all about video codecs, so nothing seems obvious at all. But to someone skilled at making codecs, it's a different matter. I remember very clearly when Ogg Theora was being developed the difficulty they had in choosing a technique that would work and was not already patented. It's not like they were looking up algorithms in a big book and saying "I wonder if that one is patented". They were coming up with techniques independently and then having to search to see if it was patented. At what point is something obvious to a person skilled in the art? What should be patentable? Should you be able to get a patent across a whole field of techniques because you managed to implement one example of that technique? The overall approach might be obvious to someone skilled in the art, but the devil is in the details. If someone can patent the overall approach because they have implemented an example of that approach, then it shuts down everybody else. If you have a company that goes around buying up (or making strategic partnerships with companies that own) patents that cover all conceivable approaches, then they can completely lock down any new developments for a couple of decades. This is the reality of codec development right now. Is this what we want? Is it good for the industry and society in general? Imagine as a programmer being told, "No matter what idea you have, it is already patented. You are not allowed to program without paying someone a fee. If they decide not to sell to you, then you can't program at all". That's the world of a codec developer. It's something that I personally do not want.
rhino369 11y ago
Natural law doesn't exist. It's essentially a religious belief Jefferson had.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Natural law does exist. The difference between natural law and laws of a civilisation? I'll let Feynman hint at it... "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled". To give the context, this was said in relation to the Challenger Shuttle explosion.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Evidence showing the existence of natural law?
    - Retra 11y ago
      Natural (physical) laws are presumed to exist. Natural (social, moral) laws don't. (At least not in a readily usable form.)
    - deelowe 11y ago
      Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at... well, naturally. Killing is bad, so is stealing, etc... These are natural laws. Anyone capable of rational thought can see how these things would ultimately be bad for any society. The others are laws that a nation creates as a result of specifics surrounding itself. Patents are one such example. These exist solely to spur the sharing of ideas by encouraging inventors to document and share them in detail so that they can later be used by society once the patent expires. A temporary monopoly is granted on an idea to encourage this sharing. This way, ideas aren't lost to eternity simply b/c the inventor didn't have the means to fabricate them. This concept is purely a construct of western nations and culture. It's unlikely an isolated society would arrive at a similar construct naturally.
      - Asbostos 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
harryh 11y ago
Hate to break it to you, but your treasured natural laws are just as man made is the positive law that you dislike. We allow for (temporary) ownership of property because it's supposed to encourage benefits to society of various varieties. If it doesn't - and it's starting to become clear that, say, inequality in the US is becoming too high - then we need to change things.

manachar 11y ago

To be clear, because some forget this part of patent law, the encouragement towards innovation was to encourage people to share and build on a communal set of ideas. The temporary monopoly on ideas was the carrot to get people to register their ideas in a central location (patent office) rather than lock ideas behind closed doors and secrecy. Too many people think the carrot of the temporary monopoly was the point of the patent office. In other words, we know that the community of ideas gets better with more sharing and building off of other people's ideas. As a society we decided to make laws to encourage this sharing. As a result, technological progress was immense. Sadly, the current situation seems to strongly suggest that we may need to find better ways to encourage sharing (Open Source has been great for much of software).

joepie91_ 11y ago
Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Both patents and copyright are failed experiments. They weren't meant to 'benefit creators' or 'guarantee an income', and they cannot take that role in a healthy society.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Look at the direction of TPP, which mandates stronger copyright but has optional public rights: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-does-tpp-repeatedly-require-stronger-copyright-when-it-comes-to-public-rights-makes-it-voluntary.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150805/15521431864/why-d... "...the copyright section includes thirteen "shall provide" and just the one measly "shall endeavour." And if you add in the enforcement section you get another thirty eight "shall provide" and just a single "shall endeavour" buried in a footnote unrelated to the key points in the document. So, for those of you playing along at home, the message being sent by the TPP is pretty damn clear: when it comes to ratcheting up copyright and setting the ground rules for enforcement everything is required and every country must take part. Yet, when it comes to protecting the rights of the public and making sure copyright is more balanced to take into account the public... well, then it's optional."
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > Copyright was built with a similar purpose - enriching the public domain - and has failed in a similar manner. Copyright has failed in an altogether different manner. The trouble with copyright is what has been erected to enforce it: Laws against circumventing DRM that encourage monopolization of copyright-adjacent markets, absurd statutory damages, internet censorship, easily abused takedown schemes. And the term is far too long. But if "copyright" is only the ability of an author to sue copyright infringers in court for actual damages, it's basically harmless. If you don't like proprietary software then you can excise it from your life by simply not using it, and actually doing that is continually becoming more practical as free software improves. The trouble with software patents is that you can't do that. There is no option to build your own system because independent creation is not a defense. And that failure is inherent in the nature of what a patent is. You can't fix it without eliminating software patents entirely.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  Copyright has succeeded a thousand times more than its failed. It's pretty great for the most part. It enables a vast, vast number of jobs and new creations. It could certainly be better. But I'd much rather have what copyright as it exists today than for it to not exist at all. And don't forget that GPL is only enforceable due to copyright law.
  - Asbostos 11y ago
    Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that would push some GPL software into the public domain, thus damaging the GPL ecosystem by allowing commercial competitors to use the same code.
    - usrusr 11y ago
      Pardon me if I have trouble seeing a terrible loss for the GNU ecosystem if releases from 1995 were transferred to the public domain.
      - Asbostos 11y ago
        There are some very old but hard-to-do-yourself things like compilers, early versions of Linux, etc. Sure it won't be massive, but in the long term it'd slow the ever-growing collection of GPL work, as the old stuff leaks out the back end.
        belorn 11y ago
        We are talking about works which then has had no patches for 20 years. Even compiles of dead languages do get minor patches over time, if nothing else then to fix memory leaks, crashes, infinitive loops and compatibility with new os kernels. You would for example have to enable low memory address exception in the kernel to run many 20 year old programs, since many programs back then assumed they would start at address space zero, which modern kernel forbids for security reasons.
- Asbostos 11y ago
  A big difference that can make it reasonable to have long or even infinite copyright terms is that copyright works are the creations of people's minds, not discoveries about nature. Somebody else creating something doesn't prevent you from creating your own thing that's just as good, or even the same thing if you can show you did it independently. But somebody else patenting a method for compressing video does prevent you from independently creating and selling your own video compression method if it happens to work the same way. Maybe that's the best way to compress video and the world would be denied it as long as the patent remains valid. So nobody really needs to use other people's copyright works. Unlike patented ideas, you can always create your own instead. Or course, sometimes it's expensive and feels like a waste of effort reproducing what's already been done, but it's still not a restriction on doing your own thing the way patents are. The way I see property ownership is that it's like a store of human labor. When you do work, you might get money from it, you might get a physical object from it (I made a table, now I own that table), or you might get a copyright work from it. All of these things can hold the value of the work you did and can be used to trade for other things. I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that in a fair world, the people who did that work can keep the stored value they created as long as the market is willing to trade things for it. In the case of computer software, some value is lost whenever somebody uses your work, since you're not able to sell it to them anymore. Value is also lost if the the demand falls (obsolete software) but that's the risk of investing your labor in something with an uncertain lifetime, just as the value of a table is lost if fashions change and people want steel tables instead of wood. Some copyright work has value and that's why people want to copy it, so they can gain that value for themselves at the expense of the copyright holder. But wouldn't it be more fair to make your own, instead of siphoning value out of other people's work without compensating them?
nullc 11y ago
It's also less effective because of double-dipping intellectual proprietary systems. Of a single part of a software product a company can enjoy trade-secret protection, copyright, and patent protection... then they multiply the force many fold with burdensome one sided 'license agreements'. This is possible because the bar for disclosure in patents has basically been put at zero. If the patent teaches the invention in question to a single hypothetical omnipotent expert in the art, then it meets the disclosure bar. In many fields patents are obfuscated beyond belief and it is pointless to read them: You'll learn nothing. Simultaneously, parties keep their source code secret-- but distributed binaries which are obfuscated forms of the source that effectively hide their design, and they use the force of anti-circumvention provisions of copyright law to threaten people who would reverse engineer the software (perhaps to extract some information about the 99.9% of non-patented ideas in it). And yet they enjoy a long lasting copyright protection, the same as other works which are made transparent through their publication. The patent system on its own is unbalanced, especially for software good which have a much lower resource requirements for their exploration... but when coupled with the other schemes that were hardly envisioned to overlap, the result creates incredible costs, stifles innovation, and is generally bad for society.

happyscrappy 11y ago

Tesla(edit:SpaceX) is not bothering to file patents because it is just a blueprint for countries like China who quickly build knockoffs on someone else's R+D dime.

greglindahl 11y ago
You are confusing Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX is not filing for patents.
- thefreeman 11y ago
  Didn't tesla open all their patents as well? http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-yo...
ken47 11y ago
Do you have any source for this grand claim?

adultSwim 11y ago

Are we saying you can no longer commercially develop a video codec? If it's so good for the industry, the patent holders could just choose to make it free. Everyone else could choose to :gasp: pay. I actually agree with your point. I just want to make it clear what that means. When it comes to patents, to me a compression algorithm is the closest thing in software to a mechanic device. At that level could patent equivalent ideas as hardware. Are we saying no more patents on mechanical inventions or hardware? For a long time I've thought that the patent office letting crummy patents through as being a separate issue than having patents at all. It also never made sense to separate out software patents from anything else.

mikekchar 11y ago
The "crummy patents" and "having patents at all" are very much intertwined. The problem is the bit about obviousness to someone skilled in the art. Even though I am a programmer, I know nothing at all about video codecs, so nothing seems obvious at all. But to someone skilled at making codecs, it's a different matter. I remember very clearly when Ogg Theora was being developed the difficulty they had in choosing a technique that would work and was not already patented. It's not like they were looking up algorithms in a big book and saying "I wonder if that one is patented". They were coming up with techniques independently and then having to search to see if it was patented. At what point is something obvious to a person skilled in the art? What should be patentable? Should you be able to get a patent across a whole field of techniques because you managed to implement one example of that technique? The overall approach might be obvious to someone skilled in the art, but the devil is in the details. If someone can patent the overall approach because they have implemented an example of that approach, then it shuts down everybody else. If you have a company that goes around buying up (or making strategic partnerships with companies that own) patents that cover all conceivable approaches, then they can completely lock down any new developments for a couple of decades. This is the reality of codec development right now. Is this what we want? Is it good for the industry and society in general? Imagine as a programmer being told, "No matter what idea you have, it is already patented. You are not allowed to program without paying someone a fee. If they decide not to sell to you, then you can't program at all". That's the world of a codec developer. It's something that I personally do not want.

rhino369 11y ago

Natural law doesn't exist. It's essentially a religious belief Jefferson had.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
Natural law does exist. The difference between natural law and laws of a civilisation? I'll let Feynman hint at it... "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled". To give the context, this was said in relation to the Challenger Shuttle explosion.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Evidence showing the existence of natural law?
  - Retra 11y ago
    Natural (physical) laws are presumed to exist. Natural (social, moral) laws don't. (At least not in a readily usable form.)
  - deelowe 11y ago
    Natural laws are laws that any rational nation would arrive at... well, naturally. Killing is bad, so is stealing, etc... These are natural laws. Anyone capable of rational thought can see how these things would ultimately be bad for any society. The others are laws that a nation creates as a result of specifics surrounding itself. Patents are one such example. These exist solely to spur the sharing of ideas by encouraging inventors to document and share them in detail so that they can later be used by society once the patent expires. A temporary monopoly is granted on an idea to encourage this sharing. This way, ideas aren't lost to eternity simply b/c the inventor didn't have the means to fabricate them. This concept is purely a construct of western nations and culture. It's unlikely an isolated society would arrive at a similar construct naturally.
    - Asbostos 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

harryh 11y ago

Hate to break it to you, but your treasured natural laws are just as man made is the positive law that you dislike. We allow for (temporary) ownership of property because it's supposed to encourage benefits to society of various varieties. If it doesn't - and it's starting to become clear that, say, inequality in the US is becoming too high - then we need to change things.