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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 i

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.

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.