🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2 Feb 91 05:37:46 GMT, tron1@tronsbox.xei.com (Kenneth Jamieson) said:

tron1> You guys are under the VERY mistaken impression that what I
tron1> think, what I wrote, and what I discover belong to you by some
tron1> divine right.

According to traditional patent doctrine, what you "discover" belongs to
God, as it was already there and created by Him, and no mortal can claim
to own it.

One could even argue that "inventions" are really God's gift, and as
such cannot be owned by anybody, but actually the inventor has a moral
duty to share the gift of God with everybody else.

This just to give you a taste of the different approaches to the
intellectual property problem.

tron1> You have no such right.

Rights, including ownership, exist only in your mind.

tron1> If I have a idea, I >OWN< it .. or doesn't the concept of
tron1> ownership get through to you at all ?????

Doesn't the concept that everything you do is based on the works of
other people that have been around for at times hundreds of years enter
your mind at all? Are you sure that all you do is exclusively the result
of your own efforts and that never every anything you "invented" was
based on other people's work? It's easy to claim you >OWN< your ideas,
but other people's on which you have based your work are, ehm, not quite
the same thing.

The development of science is in practice a cooperative effort in which
*nobody* can claim that they invented anything completely on their own,
but for extremely minor incremental thingies, and the fact that
virtually simultaneous invention by several people is the norm rather
than the exception seems to confirm this.

In practice in many industries patents in some sense don't matter,
because it has been long found out that nobody can do anything without
somebody's else patents, so that extensive, nominal fee cross-licensing
is the norm.

So everything is like the FSF would like it, everybody de facto sharing?
No, because the real effect is that only the big players in effect are
never bothered by patents. Industry wide patent cross licensing is used
in practice as a way to protect cosy oligopolies from new entrants in
the market.

If you want, look at the FSF this way: their ideal is to have for
software a situation like the one which has served mathematics so well
for hundreds of years (since the times when algorithms for long
multiplication were trade secrets and Newton kept calculus secret for a
couple dozen years), one in which everybody in the field cross licenses
everybody else to their "inventions", so that everybody is better off in
the long run.

Think carefully about what would happen to mathematical research if
mathematicians could patent axioms and theorems, and claim a monopoly on
those they "invented". Mathematics is like programming a science where
everything is interrelated...

I find the narrow use of patents to protect industrial designs of
manufacturable devices and processes and copyrights to protect the
expression and pero]formance of ideas a fairly reasonable if imperfect
compromise, even if I would rather have their benefit to the owner be a
compulsory fee rather than a temporary monopoly.

	The fixed fee idea is that anybody could use a patented design
	or reproduce a copyrighted work, but a fixed fee (say a
	percentage of price) would have to be paid to the inventor for
	a certain number of years.

	This would have give the inventors an incentive to concentrate
	efforts on research for inventions that gave better returns than
	the fixed fee, as the higher the difference, the more numerous the
	manufacturers or publishers that would use the patented or
	copyrighted matter, thus generating more revenue for the
	inventor. A neat way to encourage commercially useful research.

In any case, the narrower the definition of patent and copyright the
better, because the original contributions in any design or expression
are very narrow too.
--
Piercarlo Grandi                   | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk