Yet it falls into the neat, plausible and wrong category of ideas. In reality that isn't what happens, and it is based upon the assumption that ideas are unique and only occur once, when we know that ideas are ten a penny, and it is implementations in practice that we are short of - something that is exacerbated when you have to negotiate the patent troll arena.
Trade secrets are not a threat to the advancement of society because they will be rediscovered. Stopping implementations is a threat because that's actually what we want to have cheaper goods and services - which advances society.
The X causes Y arguments behind intellectual property laws are classic truth by repeated assertion.
The future of intellectual property though, seems quite in doubt. I'll not re-elaborate the points made in the original article, and instead I'll state what I believe the future will actually look like:
The future of getting paid is going to be in "payment for genesis" not "payment for control". This means a return to patronage and a return to paying for things which can only ever be inherently temporary, such as a live performance of music.
In the long-long term, as we're going to see piracy rise once more in the face of ever-fractured streaming services we'll probably see the world of "payment for control" be further and further cannibalized, eventually seeing a greater and greater shift by artists (across most all media) towards funding sources that (right now) look like Patreon and its ilk. We're already seeing these changes, and I think the future will only see these accelerate.
So there used to be mostly bad reasons for IP. It was always the haves repressing the havenots.
Not the one I read, but another source with a similar story: https://torrentfreak.com/nothing-new-under-the-copyright-ecl...
- the source code can be kept a trade secret and enjoy copyright protection at the same time
- the object code used to be unable to be hidden (+), but it derived copyright from being a derived work (via compilation) of the source
- the technology can be covered by patents. Since the object code is incomprehensible, there is no assurance that competitors will be able to figure out which patents it implements, so they become like legal landmines deterring innovation.
(+) With the advent of microservices, often no more.
I used to find this compelling, then I found out that standard practice is to avoid reading patents, because 1) they're not written to instruct, but drafted to claim broad implications and exclude prior art, and 2) exposure to patented material increases liability if you are found to be infringing.
Are there any examples of any inventor using published patents to learn from, rather than just patent searches to help drafting their own patents?
> improve it, at which point the patent no longer applies.
This is generally wrong - the original patent still applies. You can get a separate patent on your improvements, but until the original patent expires, you can't use the foundational invention without licensing the original patent.
I really have read some other patents in the field. It turned out that some US universities like to patent maths before they publish it in papers or at conferences. I learned nothing new that the academic papers didn't already cover. The only result was that, fearful of committing wilful infringement, we avoided using anything resembling that entire area in any software associated with our invention. The lawyer advised me not to do that (read other patents) any more.
Must they? From what I have heard, a number of technologies have not been patented, simply because the potential liability from keeping it as a trade secret was less than the liability of the process being made public
There are many many monopolies and oligopolies over products that are enforced without patents or use of intellectual property laws.
Oil was an example of a oligopoly enforced by geography. OPEC.
The f35 is a publicly and internationally distributed product for which a monopoly by lockheed is obtained by unparalleled and uncopyable technical aptitude crystallized into the product itself. This as well as astronomically high costs, and trade secrets help make sure very few entities can copy the product.
The only incentive for highly complex products to exhist in the market place is the ability to monopolize the product to a certain extent. What is the point of selling the product if anyone can make it?
The point is that there are barriers of entry that every business uses to stay relevant. A patent is simply one barrier in a toolset of economic barriers.
Make no mistake, the monopoly google holds over search has fundamentally the same economic effect as a patent. Same with monopolies held by facebook, uber and apple all held without patents.
You forget “Benefit from state power to enforce it.” It is a subsidy from the taxpayer to private corporations, even if the patent holders participate a good share: lawyer fees at their expense, but judge salaries aren’t, and it keeps even the supreme courts busy - far from negligible. Guaranteeing patent owners that their implementation will never be used anywhere, and that the state offers this guarantee, is quite a nice gift, which could benefit everyone if people from all walks of life held patents.
If say, patents are mostly held by major corporations, then it is a subsidy from all taxpayers. Whereas trade secrets do not benefit from public enforcement. It is ok to protect everyone’s things because everyone has some, but the state still forbids holding a million dollars on the street because it would be too costly to protect. So we can say no to protecting virtual things when they are too costly for the public and when it distorts the market in favour of big corporations.
Yeah they patented some parts of DNA and there was a huge debate over it but that patent is almost expired now so the whole debate eventually becomes irrelevant.
It's worth it.
The problem you bring up is not a problem with the concept of IP. It is the problem of the exploitation of loop holes by lawyers and entities with enough money to pay these lawyers. It’s in the same class of problems as tax loopholes. You can’t ban the concept of tax simply because there are loopholes.
Not saying loopholes aren’t an issue. I’m just saying Mickey Mouse is an argument against loopholes, he is not an argument against the intent and purpose of Ip law in the US.
Copyright was also compelling in the technological milieu in which it was invented. Without it, the profit earned on a piece of writing goes entirely to the publisher, which is exploitative. I'm of the opinion that zero-cost copying has punctured this pretty thoroughly, and that the ludicrous extension of the term of copyright has further undermined the justice of the practice.
If given a choice between the IP laws we have, and no IP laws at all, I'd take the latter. But these arguments for patents and copyright aren't some clever thing I came up with: they're the basic justification for that area of law, and they always have been. The author is simply being disingenuous.