Re: OT: Clipping images from patent documents

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:37:51 -0800, JeffM wrote:

For patents, it was assumed that the inventor would still be able
to make and sell their "apparatus" without explaining how it worked.

One of us doesn't understand how patents work
--or isn't using the right words.

Patents offered the inventor a trade: legal protection[ism] against the
possibility of a competitor reverse-engineering and re-creating their
invention, in return for disclosure.

This seems to contradict your last statement.

Not at all. Perhaps the first statement requires clarification. An
inventor has a choice between a patent and trade secrecy. Each prevents
competition in different ways.

With a patent, even if a competitor figures out how to reproduce the
invention, he is legally prohibited from doing so, but for a limited time.

With trade secrecy, a competitor isn't prohibited from reproducing the
invention, but the technical difficulty in doing so may provide an
adequate barrier to competition, there isn't any time limit, and there is
no need for the inventor to disclose details which may help their
competitors in other ways (e.g. in finding an alternative which isn't
covered by the patent).

IOW, with patents, the assumption was that inventions would occur with or
without them; patents merely offer an incentive to disclose. OTOH,
copyright is supposed to provide the incentive to actually have the work
created in the first place.

But an author (composer, artist, etc) inevitably discloses the entirety of
their creation simply by publishing it. The only way that offering legal
protection can provide any additional public benefit is by increasing the
profitability of such ventures in the hope that it will result in more
works being published.

Well put. There is no temporal element in that, however.

A longer copyright provides a longer period without competition, and
thus an increase in expected total revenue.

Otherwise, there would be a disincentive for a publisher
to offer an advance against royalties to an aging or ill author
who may well die before the work makes it to market.

You are holding onto the 18th Century meme of scarcity.
In the Internet Age, the established companies
want to extend that meme to ARTIFICIAL scarcity.
Today, you can self-publish with ease.
...and you've ALWAYS been able to hire *your own* promo guy.

IP law has gotten to be about middlemen--who are obsolete.

Creating artificial scarcity is the whole point of copyright law.

No. Let me quote the Constitution again:
:The Congress shall have Power [. . .]
:To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,
:by securing for ***limited*** Times to Authors and Inventors
:the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

I see no contradiction here. Granting exclusive rights to the authors
creates artificial scarcity.

In turn, this ensures a level of profit above that which would exist in a
competitive market, which compensates for the fixed costs and makes
creation economically viable.

What you are expousing could be done with trade secrets.

There is no possibility of trade secrecy in a book.

IP law is about ENRICHING THE CULTURE;
profit is a happy byproduct.

Profit provides the incentive for authors to create the original works
which will eventually pass into the public domain.

The works for which copyright law is designed invariably have negligible
marginal cost relative to the fixed cost. In the absence of legal
protection, the original creator bears the bulk of the fixed costs yet
gains no advantage over potential competitors.

And the "internet age" only exacerbates the situation.

We've gotten back to the *false scarity* thing.

Before, there was at least *some* marginal cost involved
in printing and distribution.
Nowadays, the marginal cost is typically zero.

Now we're on similar wavelengths. I don't know all the details
of how to deal with the *zero marginal cost* issue,

There is only one way which will work in the general case, and that is to
provide an incentive to create, i.e. a benefit which you get if you create
but don't get if you don't create.

At one point, the creators of original works typically had wealthy
sponsors. This covered the fixed costs, eliminating the need to generate
revenue from copies or performance.

Works of fine art (painting, sculpture) had an inherent protection in the
level of skill required to make copies. From an economic viewpoint, the
great masters were essentially craftsmen rather than artists, in that
their revenue derived from a combination of "sweat of the brow" and a
natural scarcity of sufficiently talented competitors.

The notion of "intellectual" property was designed for fields where the
effort is almost entirely, well, intellectual; where the effort involved
in creating the intangible basis is substantial compared to the effort
involved in creating physical copies.

but we ignore it at our peril.
The technique RIAA/MPAA/BSA uses of *sue your customers*
doesn't seem to be effective.
The *piss off your _paying_ customers with DRM* thing
is also stupid.

Not only stupid, but it's mostly aimed at corrupting copyright rather than
merely maintaing or enforcing it. DRM is used less to prevent unlawful
acts than to prevent lawful ones, e.g. resale or to create private
derivative works (format shifting, advert skipping, etc).

In the absence of copyright, it would be unrealistic
to assume that you can sell more than a single copy of any original
work.

I'm not advocating *no copyrights*.
I'm saying copyright terms are an abomination and
I'll say here that I fear the *extension* meme spreading to patents.

Again, WRT the *zero marginal cost* issue,
I don't know what the answer is
but burying our heads in the sand isn't working.
I don't know of a law enforcement mechanism
that can work at the speed of BitTorrent.

Whatever the problems may be with legal mechanisms, the problems arising
from the use of technical mechanisms are far worse, IMHO.

It's getting to the point that you almost have to purchase
(rather, license) copyrighted works (i.e. computer software)
in order to even function in society. And
if it wasn't for Free Software, there wouldn't be any "almost".

BitTorrent & GPL will kill shrink-wrap payware. In the face of those,
payware for a market that isn't VERY vertical just makes no sense.
The software business model of the future will be selling SUPPORT.

Competition[1] is useful but I think we need more collaboration
(e.g. GPL). Software patents are especially evil.

FWIW, my main gripes with software patents are:

1. Most of them are far from "novel". I have less of an issue with patents
granted for "genuine" inventions, even if those inventions don't require a
physical manifestion. However there is still ...

2. The above issue of IP becoming an integral part of the fabric of
society.

In regard to #2, the situation is worse for patents than copyright. Making
a verbatim copy of MS-Office is illegal, but writing a functionally
equivalent suite isn't. But patents prohibit re-creating the end result by
any means.

The most toxic situation arises when copyright and (especially) patents
meet file formats or communication protocols, as the only way to achieve
functional equivalence is through exact duplication. Even a rigid
mathematical isomorphism or homomorphism woudl be insufficient.

2. The minimum duration needs to be sufficient to support works which
could take a lot of effort for a fairly modest return, e.g. dry academic
writings which take years of research yet which will only be bought by
libraries and the occasional professor.

The original term of copyright was 7 years
with an essentially automatc extension of 7 more years.
If you can't produce [your] next magnum opus within 7 years,
you should find another line of work.

It's not about the time taken to create,
but the time taken to achieve a return on it.

We're going to have to disagree on that.
"One-hit wonders" should be doing real work,
not sitting on their butts collecting royalties from a 1957 diddy.
At least with patents, you have to continue to *manufacture*.
Performers should be making a living **performing**.
Writers should be writing DAILY.

I'm not concerned about the author of a surprise hit having the "right" to
get rich.

I am concerned that future works are going to end up being limited to
those which can be written in a weekend or, for anything which costs real
money to produce, are sufficiently mainstream to guarantee selling a
billion copies in the first week.

The only justification of extending IP protection beyond death
that seems arguable to me is in the case of minor dependents.

That would significantly hinder creation by those
who do not have the means to support themselves while creating.

Right--because before IP laws there were no part-time creators. 8-|

IP laws have been around a long time. Before then, the creators were
either "of independent means" (nobility, clergy), or had wealthy sponsors
for whom an artist's annual salary was a pittance. That world no longer
exists.

Also, while "artistic" creation hasn't necessarily gotten any more
involved, scientific and technical writing has. At one time, significant
scientific discoveries were regularly made by lone scientists working in
their personal laboratories. That is seldom the case nowadays. An
increasing amount of research is done by teams at multiple institutions in
multiple nations.

Although copyright isn't directly applicable to the research itself, the
process of taking the results and passing them on to students or the
general public often involves writing books. And those books won't fall
into either of the "done in a weekend" or "billion-seller" categories.


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