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.
Likewise, a lot of the failings with IT sector patents are granted for failure to recognize prior art.
It is POSIX-compliant. Much different, though it makes the two systems look similar.
I don’t think patents are necessarily theft (though they can be). I just think they are pretty much unenforceable anymore unless you are a huge corporation. Building your business model solely on the hope of enforcing your patent is pretty risky.
How did you manage to pay $5K to the Patent Office?
Well understood but my point was if patents are theft what “crime” is it to intentionally deprive the world of ones discovery/development by keeping it a secret?
Ahh—gotcha. I totally misunderstood your post, then.
I didn;t the patent attorney did
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A "Preliminary Patent Application" gets you one year of "Patent Pending " protection an cost $75 last time I checked. Initial filing fee was about $750.
A patent attorney will charge you an bundle. You can either do your own online patent search, or hire a professional searcher for far less thatnthe attorney will charge you for the searchers fee.
Lots of "Patent it Yourself" software out there also.
the claims are the broad strokes of intellectual property
doin my own patent is like removing my own appendix myself
no chance
“I didn’t the patent attorney did”
Here is the Fee Schedule, in case you want to check your attorney’s itemized bill to you.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee092611.htm
Yeah, the source code is always the ultimate (excuse for not having) documentation. :)
But I meant more on the user or even integrator level.
I did some stuff a while back where we were constrainted to using libxml2.
The docs I could find for that were basically what were “auto produced” via probably source comments, etc.
And those (not the source code) necessarily give the full sense of what the “intended” behavior is.
Know what I mean?
So, may I ask, what propelled your effort? Do you also work in the field?
If you are trying to patent something in an obscure technical field, hiring some patent attorneys is like hiring a doctor of psychology to remove your appendix.
Semantics. POSIX wasn’t even a word when Linus started cloning UNIX. (1991<1997)
I had cool hardware that didn't have drivers. So I wrote them (plagerizing heavily from others).
Back then, I was more of a systems engineer, but needs must when the devil drives.
Today, I'm just a cook. ;)
/johnny
Thanks will check it out. http://www.minimaxconcrete.com
But my initial point is that Linux is a Unix clone not an invention. Linus himself admits, "I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers", and minix was itself a unix clone. The point isn't that there is anything wrong with Linux, it is that people who are cloners have a skewed vision of "invention".
I was taught that the US patent system was adopted from Venice, where patents were used to entice guilded crafts to divulge their knowledge to the public. Wiki has a pretty good Summary History of Patent Law.
I agree with you that 100 years for copyright is bad (awful) policy. I suspect bribery to the politicians was in play. Life of the creator, max.
The genetic code patents don't bother me, because they have to be embodied in order to obtain protection. But some countries have a policy against patents in the field of health care. Not much in the way of medical R&D in those countries.
Trademark has an indefinite life. Theoretically, it can be perpetual. The point of trademark is to create and protect a public assocaition with a certain "quality" or brand of product.
Copyright means that the existing works can't be viewed without a licence, which usually means paying a royalty to the copyright holder.
Ten grand is a good budgetary number for US Utility only. Cheapest I have done was about half that, most come in around $7,000 all done. $3,000 for preparation and filing is actually on the cheap side. Most important thing is to have the writer understand the prior art, and how your invention is patentably distinct. Then it's up to you to decide if that difference has a chance of commercial success where the profits will recover your cost of IP protection.
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