Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Software patents
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 5/19/1999; 4:13:57 PM Topic: Software patents Msg #: 6488 (In response to 6482) Prev/Next: 6487 / 6489
This whole issue hides a tremendous amount of philosophical complexity, IMHO.On one hand, I'm convinced that the single defining characteristic of what some, with awe in their voice, call "The Information Economy" is that it is an economy that, unlike a material economy, is *not* based on scarcity. It's vital to understand that--if you define your information-economy business model in such a way that it implicity assumes scarcity, you will have excruciating difficulty sustaining that business model for more than another year or two, at best. Perhaps the best current example of what I'm talking about is the music industry, an industry that, to date, has been based on the idea that copying music is hard (i.e. music is a scarce commodity). With CD burners, the Internet, and MP3 becoming all but passe', the traditional scarcity-based music industry is heavily under the gun.
Now, the flip side of my argument: if your ENTIRE VALUE as an economic entity, corporate or otherwise, stems from your insight into manipulating information (read: some innovative, ground-breaking algorithm and/or data structure you've created), how are you to protect yourself from having the value that stems from your mental effort and unique skill in manipulating information taken away from you?
If anyone can use your algorithm/data structure(s), how exactly are you to compete in the market? It seems like you could only do so by engaging in feature wars (i.e. wars of attrition, e.g. MS Word vs. WordPerfect) or on the basis of incremental differences in UI and other areas that are, in the final analysis, universal to all software products and unrelated to the core capability of the product, which is expressed in the novel algorithm/data-structure(s).
As for the lawyers, it's important to remember that business and law are both forms of warfare. It always strikes me as amusing when someone accuses someone else of "predatory" practices, considering that homo sapiens sapiens is the most successful predatory species on the planet. Lawyers exist in order to confer legal advantages upon their clients. Period. Since lawyers thus far have all come from the ranks of homo sapiens sapiens, it stands to reason that, like homo sapiens sapiens everywhere, lawyers are quite capable of taking language intended to protect the rights of all people and manipulate it in such a way as to confer the expected benefits upon their clients.
The real question, IMHO, is not whether patent protection is a legitimate vehicle to apply to algorithms/data-structures. It is whether there isn't a more fundamental conflict between our traditional, scarcity-based economic system and the new, non-scarcity-based information economy that algorithms and data structures can't help but be part of.
Paul Snively
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