Posted on 10/26/2011 7:30:09 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said that “all art is theft”. The assertion may be controversial, but the intention is clear – the creative process, which relies on the evolution of techniques, observation and criticism, is an assimilation of that which has gone before, and all creativity, whether artistic, technological or scientific, walks a thin line between innovation and originality, plagiarism and parody. Even the idea that art is theft is a common place among artistic communities. Andy Warhol took this concept a few stages further. During a 1966 interview he told his interviewer; “Why don’t you ask my assistant Gerard Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my paintings.”
Linus Torvalds himself noted in another context, when rebutting arguments against open source by Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s senior vice president in May 2001, “I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton? [Newton] is not only famous for having basically set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the original theory of gravitation, which is what most people remember, along with the apple tree story), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: ‘If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.’”
Newton’s remark was intended as a derogatory comment in the margins of a letter to his diminutive contemporary, the scientist Robert Hooke, and was not an original observation, but tells a wider truth, that the creative process and the discovery of ideas is very seldom the product of one man’s work in isolation, but an accumulation of what has gone before.
Much of modern intellectual thought has defined itself by questioning the rites of authorship, authenticity and identity. This paradox lies at the heart of the debate about ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ and the ‘ownership’ of ideas – a debate in which the Linux and free software movement has found itself embroiled, directly through the patents crisis and the convolutions of copyright law, and less directly through its relationship with the Net.
Free software has been successful way beyond the expectations of its proponents and its detractors, appealing to a far wider audience than might have been predicted, but as Richard Stallman is quick to remind us, there is still some way to go: “The only reason we have a wholly free operating system,” he has said, “is because of the movement that said ‘we want an operating system that is wholly free, not 90 per cent free.’ If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.”
By its very nature free software challenges modern conventions of ownership, and its continuing existence and the blossoming of ideas that free software represents, is directly threatened by the extension and proliferation of trivial and contestable patents over the last two or three decades.
Software uses language as a means of interacting with the millions of on and off switches that comprise a computer. The sets of instructions that are contained in a computer language, or any other computer program, rely on basic structures that are common to all computer languages, and have evolved over half a century of shared development.
The most famous expression of this truth was provided by Bill Gates in a Microsoft internal ‘Challenges and Strategy’ memo, dated May 16,1991. “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents”, he wrote, “the industry would be at a complete stand-still today.”
Rather more revealingly, Gates concluded that the “solution” to the problem of patents was “patenting as much as we can… A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”
Just one of the many compelling arguments against patents for software, as in other parts of our lives, is that invention and innovation in software is cumulative, and depends entirely on the efforts of others who have gone before – and that this will continue to be the case with every small development in the field of programming. Good programmers invent new processes every day, and other good programmers use these processes to make further inventions. That is, and always has been, the nature of the job. To assign patents to these small inventions, which are effectively expressions of speech, is to stop innovation in its tracks. This matters because code runs our lives. As Lawrence Lessig puts it: “These machines run us. Code runs these machines. What control should we have over this code?”
If necessity is the mother of invention, patents are its delinquent offspring, providing stumbling blocks to innovation and progress, inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, and restricting our knowledge of how things work.
How much did you have to pay to get the patent? I have one in the works and need to apply for another.
Are trade secrets theft? Is the Coke formula or the “Eleven different herbs and spices” theft? How do they differ in this regard from patents?
You are confusing copyright and trademark.
MM is of course protected by both at present.
A trademark is in perpetuity as long as it is actively in use.
A copyright was intended to be for “a limited time.” I seriously doubt the Founders intended that to mean for the life of the author plus 70 years.
You have a perfect right to argue that copyright SHOULD be for a very long time as at present. I don’t think you can logically argue that this is what the Founders intended.
Plus, it's not like there's just a single 100-year-old work being protected. Mickey Mouse has been in constant use over a variety of different works over that whole period. granted, it's more of a trademark than a copyright, but since Disney still actively uses it, there's no reason to allow others to try and make a profit off of Disney's past and present work.
here in Phoenix, I use attorneys who only process patents copyrights etc
my 1st cost 5k to the patent office and 175 bucks per rendering and the lawyers charged a lil over 3 k
I was in my 1st for near 9 k
And if you want documentation, as they say.... "Use the Source, Luke". ;)
/johnny
Walt Disney has been dead for 45 years?
But his copyrights are supposed to live on in-perpetuity for his corporation?
Corporations never die.
It's impossible for individuals to compete with corporations with in-perpetuity anything.
Patents are not theft. However they can be misused or grated incorrectly.
Biological organisms should not be patented.
Software should not be patented. However code should be protected by copyright, but a shorter copyright than that used for books, films, etc.
While limiting the use of innovations can be said to be an impediment to progress, I don't see how a similar argument can be made for the exploitation of an image or character someone else created - I don't see that as progress.
Patents for innovations are for 20 years. Copyright on stories, places, characters and images created by an author are for the life of the author plus 70 years - that is PERFECTLY reasonable in my opinion.
In the time of the founders the timeframe was 14 years for useful technologies and such - I don't think 20 years is significantly different than 14 as to making an argument that 14 years is in line with what the founders intended but 20 is far beyond what they intended. So I CAN logically make the argument that 20 years is well in line with what the founders intended, because 14 is what they granted in 1790.
The best way to handle that would be an absolute maximum on copyrights.
Life of the creator, plus 50 years. Or 100 years from date of public release.
It is quite possible for individuals to compete with corporations with established characters and images without using their characters and images - they just have to invent NEW characters and images.
I know that might be hard, it just isn't FAIR that uncreative people cannot exploit and profit off the characters and images created by creative people!/s
What’s even worse ave patents for software that make it impossible to create an app if some yahoo patented a bunch of little things that are necessary for the concept to even work!
As long as Coke keeps its formula secret, and no one else is able to copy it, then they're good.
But that is a risk.
“Patents are its delinquent offspring, providing stumbling blocks to innovation and progress, inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, and restricting our knowledge of how things work.”
Actually it is the opposite, by submitting a patent you have to describe your invention thus disseminating your idea and increasing the corpus of knowledge.
Assume that you are working on a product that will cost say 1 M USD to show that it works and the time for this is say 3 years. The probability that it will work is 10 %.
Then you have to test it on humans as it is a pharmaceutical drug and then you have to check for side effects, the risk for this is say 90 %. Now you have worked with the product for 7 years, but it is still too early to bring in to the market. This will cost > 100 MUSD. And you now have 7 - 10 years for the product on the market if it suceeds.
It is not uncommon that a drug late in the development has to be scrapped due to side effects.
If there was no patent a chemist can copy the drug and sell it without the cost for development. If patents are abolished the development will stop, except for products with short Time-to-Market cycles.
Wow! Something I have to do but the cost is outrageous.
You do realize that the original intent of the founders was to provide income to the actual creator during his lifetime, right?
To you the Constitution is a "living document" that should conform to your whims.
Evidently I believe that patents and copyrights were established by our founders to promote the useful arts and sciences. That was the intent of our founders - and yes the effect would be the provide income to the creator, his estate, and/or his corporation.
Do you think “corporation” is a bad bad word that should invoke revulsion and derision in all good men?
The Constitution is a document of words with set and definite meaning. The meaning of the Constitution in regards to patent and copyright law is clear - and it is clearly in line with my own view.
Socialism where all property, physical or intellectual - belongs to ‘the people’ (i.e. the State), and where “corporations” and “profit” are bad bad things seems to be the credo your delusions are more in line with.
As an example, if I write a clone of Tetris without access or use of any of the original source, I didn't actually invent anything.
You could always approach this the way Fishware did when it was providing software for the Amiga and other systems.....charge a low price and patent nothing. No one forces you to apply for a patent. Some companies over apply with too much blue sky but the Patent Office in many ways is to quick to grant patents...and as with any good bureaucracy sometimes it is way to slow.
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