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Open Source: IT, IP & Business
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| I signed up to talk at BARcamp Chicago on August 16 about Intellectual
| Property (IP) Law and Open Source. Just before summer, I had been invited to
| speak for a software user group and put up a blog post on IP and Open Source.
| That earlier speech spanned the categories of IP: Patents, Trademarks,
| Copyrights, and Trade Secrets; and Licensing aspects including the framework
| of Open Source Software (OSS).
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http://bobbrill.net/?p=74
O'Reillysoft has also just published a book on this subject.
Recent:
Patents should die
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| Patent Weakness #1: The patent office is filled with lawyers not
| scientists/engineers.
|
| The patent office has, for the past decade or so, been giving out patents for
| genes and software like Amazon’s One Click.
|
| Pharma companies didn’t invent DNA or genes. They simply discovered the gene
| for a disease and thereby a possible path to cure. Why should anyone have to
| pay royalties for studying said gene or discovering a cure independent of the
| pharma that identified the gene.
|
| In my opinion Amazon’s One Click patent was the epitomy of the stupidity of
| the patent office. The patent clerks kept arguing for prior artwork
| deomonstrating that someone else had already developed a One Click feature.
| This is ludicrous. The point of software is automate mundane tasks with a
| minimal amount of information and work by the user. So what does One Click
| do fundamentally different than any other button on any other piece of
| software?
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http://blogs.controltheorypro.com/2008/08/patents-should-die/
Why Treating Patents As Property Is A Bad Idea
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| We've pointed out in the past why it doesn't make much sense to
| treat "intellectual property" as "regular property," since it ignores some
| very important differences between the two. James Bessen and Michael Meurer,
| who wrote the recent book Patent Failure have always taken a slightly
| different approach.
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http://techdirt.com/articles/20080803/1921371875.shtml
End of the Blog
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| I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4
| years.
|
| [...]
|
| 2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing
|
| This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of
| the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I
| regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses
| copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial
| movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright
| industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to
| person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But
| in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well
| past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the
| U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has
| abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new
| works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed
| business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to
| obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only
| causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like
| Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back
| together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and
| quite deliberately.
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http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html
Intellectual Property Regime Stifles Science and Innovation, Nobel Laureates
Say
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| Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede
| the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent
| thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued
| for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure
| to encourage innovation, he said.
|
| Another problem is that the social returns from innovation do not accord with
| the private returns associated with the patent system, Stiglitz said. The
| marginal benefit from innovation is that an idea may become available sooner
| than it might have. But the person who secures the patent on it wins a
| long-term monopoly, creating a gap between private and social returns.
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http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1129
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