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[News] Standards Make Progress, Patents Stifle Progress

Open Source and Open Formats

,----[ Quote ]
| Without a documented, open standard, the application becomes the only way to 
| get data into or out of a file. If the application is a closed-source, 
| commercial program, then the user is at the software company's mercy, hoping 
| that the program will continue to work, and that the format contains no 
| serious bugs. The economics of proprietary software reward complicated and 
| hard-to-understand file formats, because they ensure that users will continue 
| to use the program.      
| 
| With open-source sofware, the opposite is true: Programmers have an incentive 
| to make the file format as open and readable as possible, and to encourage 
| others to write programs that work with the same format. Format changes are 
| documented and debated by a community of programmers and users, ensuring that 
| the program strikes a good balance between backward compatibility and future 
| features.     
`----

http://ostatic.com/158404-blog/open-source-and-open-formats

Can We Get Rid Of The Myth That More Patents Means More Innovation?

,----[ Quote ]
| Patents don't help with that. In fact, patents quite often can often do a lot 
| more damage by slowing the pace of innovation -- limiting the ability for 
| companies to improve upon a technology or even a business model concept.  
`----

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080306/143656468.shtml

Microsoft and its lobbying arms lie about this. All spin for profit.


Related and recent:

If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?

,----[ Quote ]
| The main reason why I have trouble with the "property" part isn't just the 
| fact that it leads people to try to pretend it's just like tangible property, 
| but because it automatically biases how people think about the concept.  
`----

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080306/003240458.shtml


"Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism

,----[ Quote ]
| Once the ideas have escaped there's no getting them back ...
| 
| "Intellectual property" is one of those ideologically loaded terms that 
| can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn't in 
| widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World 
| Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained 
| exalted status as a UN agency.
| 
| WIPO's case for using the term is easy to understand: people who've "had 
| their property stolen" are a lot more sympathetic in the public 
| imagination than "industrial entities who've had the contours of their 
| regulatory monopolies violated", the latter being the more common way of 
| talking about infringement until the ascendancy of "intellectual 
| property" as a term of art.
| 
| Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-
| understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can 
| get his head around without too much thinking.
| 
| That's entirely true - and it's exactly why the phrase "intellectual 
| property" is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts 
| of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are 
| troublesome at the best of times, but they're deadly to any country 
| trying to make a transition to a "knowledge economy".
| 
| Fundamentally, the stuff we call "intellectual property" is just 
| knowledge - ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, 
| databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be 
| valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into 
`----

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

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