Intellectual Property...thoughts?

[x88x]

I was just thinking about this because of something that the giant robot guy said, and I thought I'd throw this out there.

What is your opinion on the concept of Intellectual Property (IP)?

The way I see it (and apparently the US government agrees with me on this), there are two general categories of IP; IP that results in goods or services in the physical world (ex, manufacturing techniques, product designs, chemical formulas, etc) and IP that results in goods or services only in the digital/information world (ex, books, music, etc). The reason I say the US government agrees with me (at least roughly) is that we have two different ways of protecting these two types of IP; namely, patents and copyrights, respectively. Software is a hazy area that sometimes falls under one group and sometimes under another.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am only talking about the first type of IP. I'm not asking what your position on the legality of IP is or the state of the current patent system, what I'm asking is what your opinion on this type of information in general is.

Personally, I don't believe in IP. I know, I know, let me explain. My stance on it is summed up very well in my sig, which I will quote here just in case I ever change it:

That we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
--Benjamin Franklin

Basically, I believe that any and all innovation should be shared freely and openly. Further, I believe that with very few exceptions, all information and knowledge should be freely and openly available (those few exceptions being cases where releasing that information directly puts peoples lives at risk, such as publishing troop movements to a publicly accessible site). This is why I am such a big believer in the Wikimedia project, and why they are one of the few organizations I actually financially support.

I believe in the rights of the innovator to decide what to do with their innovation, and I respect their rights to proprietarize and defend their innovations, but I do not believe that this is in the best interest of the race as a whole.

As such, any innovations that I make, inventions that I create, software that I develop, or books that I write (and so on) will be protected, but will be protected under such licenses as the GNU GPL and the Creative Commons license.

I believe that in addition to being a better long-range option, this is also still an economically viable option as well. There do exist quite successful businesses that base themselves around open-source products. Red Hat is a prime example of this. On a smaller scale but a more physical realm, Arduino is another great example. I believe that openness of information in innovative fields would increase collaboration between competitors and instead of hindering innovation, actually bolster it. In product manufacturing, I believe that it would drive companies raise their build quality and customer support to higher standards. Instead of attracting customers by being the only game in town, they would have to attract consumers by providing a higher quality product and better service.


Thoughts? Discussion?

[dr.walrus]

IP is, right or wrong, impossible to avoid in our economic system. Without it, many software houses would be out of a job; without intellectual property, you can't sell software. One person buys it, and without IP protection, they can simply copy it and hand it out...

[RogueOpportunist]

I've always been conflicted on this issue, on one hand I would love to embrace the "everything for free and love is all we need" type philosophies but on the other hand, I'm a realist, R&D costs money and wouldn't happen unless there was profit to be made, profit which without patents becomes nearly impossible to make.

I think the larger problem clouding these types of discussions is corporate greed and irresponsibility, when you have pharmaceutical companies patenting genomes and turning our own biological material into tangible "product" preventing anyone else from using "their" material in any other studies, research or products unless they get paid; that I object to (and apparently so does my government since those types of international patents are not upheld in Canada)... If some people had their way air would be patented as intellectual property because your brain needs it to create the ideas that then become intellectual property... That six degrees of separation kind of law making I whole-heartedly object to.

On the flip side you have the technology industry, let's say for a moment that patents did not exist and that the leapfrog competition between AMD and Intel never happened because each individual company's respective trade information was available to the other so instead of trying to "best" each other they simply didn't do anything. R&D costs billions of dollars, billions of dollars that would be spent developing technologies your competition would be free to use without having to pay you a cent... Without patents technological advancement would grind to a halt because there would be next to no motivation for any one company to front the cash it takes to move the ball forward.

As far as copyright is concerned, it kind depends on what you consider copyright, I'm more a fan of the creative commons/GPL stuff, software licensing is a grey area for me though, on the one hand I think that like hardware technology software companies have the right to profit off their own research but at the same time this concept of "I don't pay to buy the software, I pay for the right to use the software" type legality is nonsense, especially when these "license agreements" are so heavily distorted by their legal departments that you're almost giving power of attorney every time you click accept... In the "hardware" world there are consumer protection agencies that prevent companies from selling snake oil... In the software world, some days it seems that all they sell is snake oil.

The music/media industry need to burn in hell, don't get me wrong I'm all for supporting artists but when the artist gets 5 cents off a 20$ CD it's no longer an issue of support, it's just pure corporate greed... The way I see it don't buy the CD, if you like the artist put that 20$ towards a concert ticket... That's how the artist gets paid anyways.

I guess the whole debate is just a mirror for life, it's not the basic ideas behind having the "rules" that make the "rules" wrong, it's when the underbelly of our society figure out how to distort those "rules" for their own personal gain that things go wrong... It's not wrong for someone to want to protect their ideas for a period of time so they can get them to market and make some money... But that's about where my justification ends... When the "rules" are written so that when I do something it ruins my life while corporation's profit off the exact same activity I have no choice but to declare those "rules" as invalid, oppressive and obviously written by a criminal enterprise.

I guess the only real question left for the individual to answer is what sets precedent in your life? The paper laws someone else tells you to abide, or the moral laws you tell yourself to abide? Because the two are not one and the same and often come into conflict... I side with morality, be it for business or personal activities I do what I feel is right and support what I feel is right, if what is being done extorts, abuses or in any way harms other people that just isn't right and in the patent/copyright world you see lawyers using these things to hurt people all the time... I guess from my side you could say I am not against the patent, I am against the legal department.


In regards to the Redhat thing, Redhat makes their money and funds their "company" through closed sourced software, the only part of their company that is open sourced is the basic OS... which let's be honest, is only open sourced because Redhat plays a very small part in its development and the Redhat OS is just a conglomeration of softwares developed by other people... Anyone with a little knowledge can make a distro, it's really not hard at all... Redhat is a prime example of a company that uses "open source" as a marketing tactic and have been marketing themselves as an open source supporter while making almost all of their contributions to the OS closed source, historically speaking Redhat has a pretty tarnished reputation in the Linux community, they've even been caught altering GPL'd software and re-releasing it in a closed-source form... Redhat abandoned their support of an open source OS platform in 2003, now they just release an unsupported basic distro for "free" in attempt to maintain some link to the open source linux community (mainly because they have to due to licensing) while charging for their real enterprise product... If you want a better example of open source Ubuntu would be it.

I just wanted to address the Redhat thing because this IMO is a prime example of a company that exploits people for its own personal gain.

[x88x]

Like I said, software is a hazy area that I think belongs more in the copyright realm than patent...unfortunately (last I checked anyways) laws and legislation in the US still have yet to decide what software really is and how it should be handled as IP. I think that a lot of software companies could embrace open-sourcing their stuff and still make a hefty profit, but I agree it would not work everywhere.

The reason I mentioned Redhat is because they are one of the most prominent and successful companies who have embraced open-sourcing their stuff. I don't want to turn this into a war over Redhat, Rogue, but I think you need to check your facts on them. They make their money primarily through support, training, and integration services, and most if not all of the software that they create is open-source. They also have a long history of purchasing closed-source software from other software companies and open-sourcing them. They did not 'abandon' the open-source OS 2003; they split their efforts into two different OSs, one targeted towards the community and focusing on rapid development and innovation (Fedora) and one focusing on long-term reliability, stability, and integration (RHEL). And, incidentally, they do have the source code for everything included in RHEL freely available on their ftp server. This is how CentOS came to be; they took the RHEL code, stripped out the Redhat icons/etc, and rebuilt it into their own branch. And as for their 'link' to the open source Linux community, in addition to all their other open-source projects, as of August 2009, they were the single largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel, providing 12.3% of all changes (PDF). Oh, and the reason I didn't mention Canonical is because last I checked they have yet to post a profit, whereas Redhat posted a net profit of $87.25 million in 2010. Don't get me wrong, I love Canonical, I think they do a lot of great work, and I wish them the best of success, but last I heard they were just hoping to break even in 2010...which does not exactly make them a great example of a profitable software company based on open-source software....since, you know, for something to be profitable, it must have profits.

I also disagree with the premise that innovation would halt without patents. That assumes that monetary gain is the only motivation for companies like this to develop technologies. Sure, it's a very large motivator, but I don't think they would exist in the first place, much less create innovative products, if that was their only motivator. Besides, the technologies that cost the most to develop usually also cost the most to manufacture anyway, so I'm not convinced that it would even majorly affect profits....anyways, that's for business people to figure out, not me.

EDIT:
Oh, and I forgot to mention. Since you mentioned "what you consider copyright", Rogue. The GNU GPL, Copyleft, Creative Commons, etc are, iirc, all actually just specially worded copyright licenses that grant certain freedoms and set certain restrictions that are not present in standard copyright licenses.

[RogueOpportunist]

Yeah my bad on the Redhat thing, I was thinking in the past but writing in the present without updating my facts first, Redhat has indeed turned 180 from the closed source direction they had themselves headed in a few years ago... However, to date you still have to go CentOS if you want anything RHEL has to offer because despite being "open source" there is no free version of RHEL, this is where in my haste in writing an arbitrary forum post I started imposing my own terminology on what would be called "open source" since Redhat have forced the community to repackage everything from the source instead of just offering it freely and if it was just the support and service you are paying for they would charge for the support and service, not the OS... But the moral compass debate over Redhat could go on forever... Let's just say they're less evil than Microsoft and leave it at that.

[x88x]

Let's just say they're less evil than Microsoft and leave it at that.

Heheh, fair enough. I will say, I rather despise working with RHEL though....for precisely the reasons it's good for corporate environments..before they release any official packages for it, they make damn sure they will work reliably until the heat death of the universe...but because of that it takes an obscene amount of time for any packages to get through that process.

[AmEv]

Redhat?
What's that?

[knowledgegranted]

There is something that you are all missing, and when I decided to file for my patents, it's something I unfortunately realized. If things aren't done using the patent system, no one will publish their work for anyone to see. They will hide it, creating "trade secrets" because they can't make any money off of it for the reason that they can't collect royalties.

I also disagree with the premise that innovation would halt without patents. That assumes that monetary gain is the only motivation for companies like this to develop technologies. Sure, it's a very large motivator, but I don't think they would exist in the first place, much less create innovative products, if that was their only motivator. Besides, the technologies that cost the most to develop usually also cost the most to manufacture anyway, so I'm not convinced that it would even majorly affect profits....anyways, that's for business people to figure out, not me.

Innovation would most definitely halt because now nothing would be published publicly.



Believe me guys, I wish we could all publish work and use it freely, but that system just would not be usable.

[x88x]

Believe me guys, I wish we could all publish work and use it freely, but that system just would not be usable.

Then be the change you wish you could see and make it work. Plenty of companies already publish the results of their research to the public domain, whether through open-source software, scholarly journals, or whatever. It is possible to be profitable and still do this. What route is taken is, of course, up to the person taking it, but just because a large part of the world works one way today does not mean that it is the only way that can work. Just because it is the prevailing trend to operate in a certain way does not mean that we cannot try to promote a different way. A, in my opinion, better way. Break the mold; have the courage to live your ideals; and maybe, just maybe, we can make a difference.

Really, I think the problem is not so much with patents in and of themselves (though I still don't believe in them personally), but with the long term that patents apply (20 years, currently) and the way that they are used today. Originally they were intended to foster innovation by providing an incentive to the innovator of exclusive rights to their creation for a set period of time. Since then, it has been perverted from its original purpose and, imo, now hinders innovation far more than it fosters it. Especially in the technology fields, I believe collaboration is vital in order to advance as well as possible. How many times have vast sums of money been spent re-developing a technology that had already been developed by a competitor? How much time, money, and talent has been lost because of pointless lawsuits because the results of one company's R&D was just a little too similar to another company's product?

One area that has really driven this home to me recently is the area of battery technology. One of the most promising American battery companies (A123 Systems) was unable to pursue making their product and building their business for several years because of a patent lawsuit filed by the University of Oklahoma, who wasn't even doing anything with it. Conversely, some of the biggest breakthroughs in stability, and by far the largest production and market penetration, of modern battery chemistries has come out of China...where for the most part, patents are just ignored if they exist at all.

In my opinion, the current patent system has reached a point where is causes more harm than good; one of the reasons I choose not to use it.

Incidentally, speaking of giant robot guy (well, something he said was the impetus for me starting this thread anyways), convenient timing, but I just stumbled across this video he did, which expresses a good point of view on the results of the current patent system and corporate culture. Even though I think he and I have a bit (though not completely) different ideas on what the best solution to the problem is, I agree with a lot of the points he makes.

[knowledgegranted]

Then be the change you wish you could see and make it work. Plenty of companies already publish the results of their research to the public domain, whether through open-source software, scholarly journals, or whatever. It is possible to be profitable and still do this. What route is taken is, of course, up to the person taking it, but just because a large part of the world works one way today does not mean that it is the only way that can work. Just because it is the prevailing trend to operate in a certain way does not mean that we cannot try to promote a different way. A, in my opinion, better way. Break the mold; have the courage to live your ideals; and maybe, just maybe, we can make a difference.

Really, I think the problem is not so much with patents in and of themselves (though I still don't believe in them personally), but with the long term that patents apply (20 years, currently) and the way that they are used today. Originally they were intended to foster innovation by providing an incentive to the innovator of exclusive rights to their creation for a set period of time. Since then, it has been perverted from its original purpose and, imo, now hinders innovation far more than it fosters it. Especially in the technology fields, I believe collaboration is vital in order to advance as well as possible. How many times have vast sums of money been spent re-developing a technology that had already been developed by a competitor? How much time, money, and talent has been lost because of pointless lawsuits because the results of one company's R&D was just a little too similar to another company's product?

One area that has really driven this home to me recently is the area of battery technology. One of the most promising American battery companies (A123 Systems) was unable to pursue making their product and building their business for several years because of a patent lawsuit filed by the University of Oklahoma, who wasn't even doing anything with it. Conversely, some of the biggest breakthroughs in stability, and by far the largest production and market penetration, of modern battery chemistries has come out of China...where for the most part, patents are just ignored if they exist at all.

In my opinion, the current patent system has reached a point where is causes more harm than good; one of the reasons I choose not to use it.

Incidentally, speaking of giant robot guy (well, something he said was the impetus for me starting this thread anyways), convenient timing, but I just stumbled across this video he did, which expresses a good point of view on the results of the current patent system and corporate culture. Even though I think he and I have a bit (though not completely) different ideas on what the best solution to the problem is, I agree with a lot of the points he makes.

Where greed exists, none of this will ever happen. Power in the money, the money in the power (Coolio), is the most single true line that applies to everything in this world. On alot of points, I agree with you, and I would like the system to become like that, however when greed exists, this will not.