He might just go to Bill Gates and say, "Sire, I invented the most
marvelous thing.  I dare not reveal it to the world because they would
steal it, but you have enough money that if you would like to enjoy
the invention, you may pay me for its private use."

Also, if I have a competitive edge, I might build a factory that uses my
cool invention as a 'trade secret' and puts out goods cheaper or of better
quality than you do.  Because if there were no patent, you would have the
same competitive edge as I and I would have no benefit of my cool invention.
By allowing patent, I can share my idea with you and we can reach a price
such that it's still worth it to both you and me to have you pay me.  We
both get benefit, and the world gets benefit.  If showing you my idea
means you can steal it, then there is no motivation for me to tell you.

Patent allows the common man to compete with the rich for access to
invention by saying "we promise not to confuse 'sharing' with
'giving'."

The common confusion about patent is that people would just give
things away when they can't sell them.  But that is not their only
option.

I think the reason that mathemeticians and physicists are always used as
examples of people who freely share stuff is less to do with the fact that
sharing is natural in the absence of patent and more to do with the fact
that commercial applications of the information they trade in are scarce.
In the modern day and age where interesting math can have commercial
applications I don't think it would be the case that absent patent
protection, sharing would always occur.

The reason I think patent protection for computer science is not a good
idea right now is that there are too many cool things too densely packed
in this too-young space.  A lot of them really are obvious.  And since patent
precludes independent invention, and I'd venture a guess most people are
going for patent protection to "keep independent invention from happening"
not to "keep a unique idea that never would have been thought of protected",
I think it's wrong.

That depends on the invention.  For something like the RSA patent, 2-3
years would have been too short and indeed might have induced the inventors
to sit on it until the market was ready for it -- defeating the porpose.

    KMP> At least then in the case of gross error
    KMP> by the patent office on the 'obviousness' issue, the industry
    KMP> could still recover gracefully.

I understand the motivation but I doubt time limits alone will so what
you want.  Maybe time limits in addition to revenue derived (a variant of
the limit idea you toy with) might work better, but I am unsure how and
what else it might hurt.  It seems pretty clear one switch (patent-cs-p)
one knob to turn (length-of-term) will not cover the cases you care about,
though.

cheers,

I had thought that one of your concerns was that free software projects
produced lower-quality output.  And your explanation was that they didn't
have some of the responsibilities of corporations: documentation, support,
QA, etc.

I grant that there are some free software corporations, like RedHat, so those
don't need to concern us here.  But what is your analysis of Apache?  Isn't
it a non-corporation, high quality, free software effort?

Or perhaps I've misunderstood your position...

Moreover: the patent office is looking for "obvious to someone of _ordinary_
skill in the art".  In CS, this is similar to having an undergraduate degree.
Even if thousands of CS professors thought the concept was obvious, and
tens of thousands of graduate students did too: the patent office would still
say that the invention was "non-obvious" if ordinary college students couldn't
figure it out in their heads.

  How would the _invention_ be made public "anyway"?  Why would someone
  _want_ to make something public if the public just takes it and leaves
  him with all his expenses and development cost?  Considering the often
  enormous costs of bringing something brilliantly simple to market, the
  whole point of the patent system is to make it possible to make simple
  and obvious inventions that are only simple and obvious after the fact.

  The public does not "own" whatever people come up with, but I guess that
  your basic attitude is precisely that the public has a _right_ to take
  the inventions and the work of the individual, sort of in exchange for
  free food or something.

///
--
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

After the 17 or 20 years that the patent runs, rights to use the
invention do indeed get "given to the public."

Just wanted to make sure everyone understood the realities of patents.

  This sounds like "the commercial software world" is an entity of itself,
  distrinct from the same customers who get screwed.  I do not think this
  is even possible.  The customers _believe_ they have received reasonable
  products at a reasonable price, and the companies care very much that
  they believe this.  If the facts are so different, how come they are so
  _unable_ to destroy the belief?  This is not sinister religion or cult,
  it is simply business, right?  That should mean that someone who can show
  that the prices or the products are unreasonable should get a fair
  hearing.  When this does not happen, something is clearly wrong with at
  least one party's perceptions of the situation.  The computer world has a
  long history of abandoning whole product classes when something else came
  along.  The death of CP/M, for instance.  All the excellent hardware and
  software that came from Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard,
  Honeywell Bull, etc, is all gone, in favor of Unix-like software that
  takes more people to maintain and which some people argue cost more in
  total ownership.

  However, the almost religious belief in "the future" has made a lot of
  people opt for things that are bad today but which has some "promise".
  Microsoft has managed to capture that notion of delivering the "promised
  land" and Windows was perhaps the best evidence yet -- it killed off so
  many so much better "alternatives" because people believed that Windows
  would be "the future".  They have been willing to pay for entertaining
  this belief, but that belief is under serious threat.  At the very least,
  there are now more futures, not just one.

| You say "these issues are debated every day in congress," but
| congresspeople are *not* the commercial software community.

  I read "in [the] Congress" to mean politicians and "in congress" to mean
  the community of business leaders.

| The Free Software movement is a truly grass roots movement that seeks to
| redress this correctly (again, IMHO) perceived imbalance between motives
| of profit v. quality and fair value for customers.

  But the customers actually have a ver different take on all of this.

| When the dominant commercial software companies begin to ship products
| that show the same sort of care that, for example, automobiles do, then
| there will be less of a clamor for Free Software, because people will
| recognize the value of a quality professionally produced product.

  If it were a grass roots movement, it would be concerned with the same
  things that made the automobile industry concerned with quality and
  safety.  Richard Stallman is no Ralph Nader.  Instead of realizing that
  we need the software industry and then force it become responsible, the
  Free Software movement aims to hurt the industry in ways that does not
  teach it to be more responsible, since there is no guarantee that the
  attack on the industry will stop if they _get_ more responsible.  In
  other words, Ralph Nader had a constructive purpose.  Richard Stallman
  has a destructive purpose.

| However, since most shipping commercial software is shamefully unstable,
| buggy, (often never fixed without the payment of *additional charges* for
| "upgrades"), not to mention poorly documented, Free Software will
| continue to gather support as a necessary corrective balance to the
| billionaire-making juggernaut of shoddy commercial software.

  The only commercial software for which this is _really_ true, is the crap
  that emanates from Microsoft.  Other companies, having seen that this one
  large company can become so rich by providing 80%-solutions, figure that
  they do not have to make more than 80%-solutions themselves.  This is one
  of the major reasons for the massive number of software failures.  It is
  not particularly hard to write bug-free software, when you actually try,
  but if you think it is "impossible" or that bugs are acceptable, it will
  _seem_ very hard.

  There are other software makers besides Microsoft.  Do not believe _any_
  of their propaganda.  Microsoft is completely irrelevant.  The people who
  want Microsoft products are _not_ your market.  Do not buy _any_ of their
  stuff.  Just do without it.  This is not even difficult, much less hard.
  What do you want crap for, anyway?

///
--
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

1. with the introduction of the PC computers became affordable to
   quite a few people

2. many of those people did not have the faintest idea about
   computers, but got convinced thatusing them would help them with
   whatever they wanted or had to do

3. if they knew anything, they knew that IBM was the big name in
   computers and going with IBM wouldn't be wrong

4. buying a PC got them DOS

5. the object code only system of program delivery removed any
   possibility of recompiling your code for something else

6. this enabled microsoft to force system builders to offer MS
   products almost exclusively

7. this led to a generation of "experts" who weren't (often still
   aren't) aware that alternatives to MS even exist and on whom many
   of the people who make purchasing decisions rely on

hs

--

  This is all very natural, really.  Few people seem to be able to grasp
  the notion of "alternative system" and manage to think about what things
  would be like if some serious changes were made.  So if Microsoft has
  gained monopoly power, what is bad is not "monopoly power" but that
  Microsoft has gained it and things would be better if some less evil,
  possibly even "good", monopoly power could replace them.  This is, of
  course, evidence of the traditionally accepted human stupidity in action.

  Microsoft is not a monopoly that just sprung up out of nothing.  It is
  based in a pathologically paranoid leader, Bill Gates, who is so insanely
  competitive that he thinks someone will topple Microsoft any day.  So the
  only way _he_ can win is to topple other companies first.  Since he and
  his fellow Microsoft staff are the only ones who are so _nuts_ that they
  think this way, they "win".  Normal people do not consider _everybody_ a
  threat to their existence and do not compulsively acquire and destroy
  their "competition", nor do they seek to undermine _every_ other player
  in the market by coercive tactics.  There is simply something wrong with
  the mental health of the Microsoft senior leadership when they manage to
  instill this kind of fear in their own employees. Insane competitiveness
  is contagious: everybody else have to prepare for it and work themselves
  into a frenzy.  The whole point with a civilzation and a legal system is
  that people shall not have to fend off every possible predator on their
  own, but the American legal system has seriously failed to protect people
  (both businesses and customers) from predators in the market, so they
  have to get into a predotory mind-set themselves.  Microsoft has proven
  that the old adage "dog-eat-dog" competition is not dead yet, and that in
  order to fight this evil monstrosity, people now believe they have to
  engage in similarly evil tactics.  However bad the Microsoft people are,
  the proper solution is not to become like them and fight them on their
  own terms -- because whetever someone _thinks_ is "their terms" is most
  likely _not_ their actual terms, and they just see them as attacks they
  have a right to defend themselves against -- just increasing the amount
  of violence the predator needs to use to "win".  Just listen to that
  psycho Steve Ballmer and his hysterical shrieks about Free Software!  On
  the other hand, maybe some of the anti-commercial software people here
  have done just that, and almost hear the voice of that lunatic when they
  read Kent Pitman's articles?  In a twist of irony, paranoid people have a
  tendency to create an environment in which their fears come true, and
  that is just the case with the psychos who run Microsoft -- they have
  single-handedly created an environment where other business people, their
  own customers, and politicians want to see them dead and destroyed, and
  so, too, with the Free Software people who are, and this is important,
  not _wrong_ in wanting the death of Microsoft.

  However, the only way to beat a tyrant at his own game is to be a worse
  tyrant.  Since the real evil is that tyrants can evolve in what was
  supposed to be a free economy overseen by a powerful government that
  would crush criminals in time, the government needs to crush the
  criminals quickly and mercilessly when it is too late.  When the United
  States military forces can crush the Al Qaeda by carpet-bombing
  Afghanistan and have hopefully destroyed some of the "pharmaceutical"
  production of that country, and can stage wars on the "pharmaceutical"
  production of Columbia, it can and should be used to carpet-bomb Redmond,
  Washington.

  Most good people do not want to fight, but some of them become bad when
  they think they have to or are somehow "forced" to, instead of being
  smart enough to figure out more precisely what they need to do.  Since
  bad people is a fact of life, being smart enough to counter-act them
  intelligently is vital to the continued existence of civilization.  What
  we see in the software industry is that the sheer naïvité of engineers,
  who are generally far less assertive and aggressive socially than those
  who want to "make it" as business leaders, retreat to the disciplines
  they master, and _therefore_ become so fantastically hostile when they
  think they are "wronged" and instead of having the decency to think long
  enough to figure out what they experience, erect images of "enemies".  Be
  it in newsgroups or in the market, where the "worker" rebels against the
  "forces" of a "market" he does not understand, or in Free Software, where
  the same naïvité idolizes the hobbyist and scorns the professional, the
  pattern is the same: some experience of some form of pain causes a person
  to stop thinking and to declare whatever appears to be the source this
  "enemy" and that absolutely anything goes in fighting this "enemy".  I
  cannot imagine a less intelligent or less mature way to respond.  (This
  is one reason why I think the only real threat to human existence is the
  failure to stamp out stupidity.)

  For the current problem of Free Software, it has become a lot worse with
  the increasing success in beating Microsoft, but, again, it has been a
  highly emotional and personal fight, instead of the professional fight it
  should have been.  Microsoft "competes" by slaughtering the competition,
  while most other companies tries to compete in good spirit by offering
  better products.  People who have been hurt by Microsoft, and I consider
  the fact that a computer crashes on you so you lose your work as being
  hurt by their willful incompetence, tend to hate them, and this is very
  understandable, but it is precisely that hatred that has made the evil
  monstrosity possible: People who hate are extremely predictable and very
  easy to make _completely_ ineffectual, and some paranoid and competitive
  psycho like Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer can easily and quickly tame this
  hatred and even turn it into a force for his own purposes, and what would
  be more beneficial for Microsoft than a huge war between programmers who
  thought they had to fight Microsoft by giving away their works on the one
  hand and the evil monopoly that could give the customers what they want.

  Some have said that Microsoft cannot take GPL'ed source and just use it,
  but they can: They break every other contract they enter if they think it
  is to their competitive advantage to do so.  And who would be able to sue
  them?  Besides, how do you find out that some source code in a closely
  guarded secret-source system is ripped off from "free" code?

  All in all, the Free Software is playing right into the hand of Microsoft
  -- by legitimizing their tactics and their goals, by giving away their
  own work, and by creating a business community where Microsoft can use
  their "might is right" philosophy to crush competitors, which is what
  everybody will expect when they start to compete with Microsoft, anyway.

| I'm not formally trained in economics.

  I would recommend Aswath Demodaran's Investment Valuation to get a better
  grip on economic value.  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471414883

///
--
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

"Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb+use...@becket.net> wrote in message
news:87vgb7qiac.fsf@becket.becket.net...

There is a very interesting example of a man, Jerome Lemelson, who filed
some 550+ patents in his life, patents that have earned more than $1 Billion
(!) yet he never actually created a thing!  People argue about whether he
was a genius or a leech but he (and his lawyers) worked the patent system to
an extreme that is very hard to justify.
Read: http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,11582,FF.html
it is quite an interesting story.

I remember this differently though part of that time I thought I was an
EE, so I might be wrong.

    HS> 1. with the introduction of the PC computers became affordable
    HS> to quite a few people

Actually the PC was quite expensive compared to other small computers
in the market but this goes with the credibility you mention in 3.

    HS> 2. many of those people did not have the faintest idea about
    HS> computers, but got convinced thatusing them would help them
    HS> with whatever they wanted or had to do

My experience in the early to mid 80's was that they had all kinds of
expectations from the small computer: accounting, invoicing, and maybe
even word processing to an extent.  Maybe we are talking about a different
crowd though.

    HS> 3. if they knew anything, they knew that IBM was the big name
    HS> in computers and going with IBM wouldn't be wrong

Yup.

    HS> 4. buying a PC got them DOS

Yes, which MS could sell independently.

    HS> 5. the object code only system of program delivery removed any
    HS> possibility of recompiling your code for something else

At the time, even if you had the source, you couldn't do much with it
w/o the PC hardware.  Most screen handling stuff went below the BIOS,
and some if not most sections of the code for popular apps were
written in assemebler.  It wasn't like things were calling standard
lib and having screen control funneled through curses.

    HS> 6. this enabled microsoft to force system builders to offer MS
    HS> products almost exclusively

This would have been an advantage.  MS did not stop there.  They cooked up
an ingenious licencing scheme where they effectively forced vendors
to pay per machine shipped regradless of what OS it shipped with.  

    HS> 7. this led to a generation of "experts" who weren't (often
    HS> still aren't) aware that alternatives to MS even exist and on
    HS> whom many of the people who make purchasing decisions rely on

This is absolutely right.  But you have to remember even up till the early
90's in the space you are describing there was Novell for servers and DOS
for PC's.  Mac's were too expensive, Sun/Dec I will not even mention.  
Even X-terminals were expensive.  Xenix _might_ have been an option but
even then people were getting attached to little utilities that required
100% compatibility.  I was a reasonably knowledgeable person who
did most of his coding on SunOS but when I was tasked with coming up with
office systems recommendations in 1991, I found out you just couldn't beat
clone 286's netbooting from 386 Novell servers.  With custom apps written
by 4GL sweatshops. That was the reality when you set out to spend other
people's money.  (My money? I think I had a Sun i386 back then).

cheers,

Since the patent system is a *bargain* that the body politic strikes,
"we give you a monopoly, if you give us the details of how it works",
it's reasonable for both sides to bargain for the best deal they can
in that bargain.  

  The public gets the product at all.

///
--
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

  Yes, it is.

  You seem to have access to a lawyer because of this retarded libel crap
  of yours, so ask him about intellectual property, or get a good book on
  the topic.  This is stuff you can just read about and learn.  There is no
  point in trying to communicate with someone who willfully ignores the
  existing literature in this area because of his political opinions.

///
--
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

"Fundamentals of American Law", published by the NYU law school.  The
chapter on "Intellectual Property Law" is by Rochelle Cooper
Dreyfuss.  

Dreyfuss outlines five rationales often given for IP law:

 * "natural rights theory", "that the creator has a moral right to the
   fruits of his labor, including the benefits produced by his
   intellect."

 * "the exchange-for-secrecy rationale", "that, without a legal right
   to prevent others from copying his invention, the creator may be
   tempted to keep it secret".

 * "the quality control principle", exclusive rights prevent, for
   example, "others from distorting or mutilating his work".

 * "prospecting theory", that exclusive rights keep the holder of the
   exclusive right in control, who thus has "comprehensive knowledge
   of how the field is unfolding and can help maintain an 'orderly
   market' in its further development".

 * "the profit-incentive theory", which we all know about pretty well.

Dreyfuss first points out that the natural rights theory is "largely
rejected" by American law, "although many nations' intellectual
property laws are at least partly premised on this rationale."

The profit-incentive theory is labelled by her as "the most dominant
influence" on American IP law, and she says that the copyright clause
of the US Constitution is "as a whole ... interpreted as reflecting
the profit-incentive theory".

The public interest rule in the copyright clause however controls, and
is part of the reason that the natural rights theory is rejected in
American law.  "Profits are intended to encourage the creation of
works that enrich the public.  Thus, when situations arise in which
the public's interest in access conflicts with the creator's interest
in profits, it is the public that usually wins.  Furthermore, the
emphasis on profits means that the dignity interests encompassed by
some of the other rationales [that is, the natural rights, quality
control, and prospecting ones] receive only secondary recognition."

Now that's about IP in general.  The notion that its a bargain is
already thus established, and that if the bargain is not in the
public's interest, the public has no reason to strike the bargain.  

What about patents?  Here is her introduction to the section on patent
law, which clearly advances the exchange-for-secrecy motive as the
primary one:

"Patent law protects what are commonly regarded as inventions.  It
creates, for 20 years, exclusive rights against all who make, use,
offer to sell, or sell the protected invention, including independent
inventors.  In exchange, the patent is published so that the ideas in
the invention go into the public domain immediately, where they can be
used to create other inventions."

  That is just plain ridiculous nonsense.  Patents are public documents,
  and although a patent search is generally expensive, you should be able
  to locate and read any patent if you have the patent number, very close
  to free of charge.  Of course, there are several million of them, but at
  least IBM has a great patent search engine on the net.

  I cannot imagine how you could become so confused.  Read some books
  written by legal experts, and fewer by clueless anti-patent activists.
  I have already recommended David R. Koepsell: The Ontology of Cyberspace,
  Law, Philosphy, and the Future of Intellectual Propery.  It is a
  remarkably intelligent exposition of both the current situation and the
  problems we face.  Only 130 pages long, it is packed with insight.

///
--
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.