Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Giving birth through conversation

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/12/2000; 11:15:49 PM
Topic:I patent breathing. I was here first. Quit breathing.
Msg #:19670 (In response to 19669)
Prev/Next:19669 / 19671

I think that you could use your own pool toy yourself. I think that the thing that you can't do is sell a lot of them without paying royaltees.

Ahhh, but I made the swimming pool because I like to create products. It's not enough for me to just do it for myself, I want to share it with other people. And I want to get paid for it. I'm a commercial artist, a good one, and proud of it.

When I went to the Sting concert, as soon as he played the first few notes, while the stage was dark, I heard his signature. I remarked to the person next to me, "How does he do that?" Just strumming a few notes of a song is enough to tell me "That's Sting."

OK, so I'm listening to a Sting song now, and it begins with Stevie Wonder's harmonica signature. For all I know it *is* Stevie Wonder, it's so much his. Now does Sting have to pay Stevie? You gotta be kidding.

In art the highest compliment possible is theft of a key idea, esp if the credit is passed on along with the idea. Ray Ozzie once thanked me from a stage for contributing the idea of an outliner so he could use it in Notes. Now I'd shake his hand and say "You're totally welcome Ray, and thanks for taking the idea to millions of people."

I met with Linda Stone of Microsoft yesterday, it's her job to listen to people in the industry talk about Microsoft and pass that info on to Steve Ballmer. This is close to the idea I expressed to her. When a boy grows up he gets an appreciation for the jungle he lives in. And he starts to do things to make the jungle happy, not just his bank account. When I was younger and heard that Ozzie speech I was pissed off. That's because I was still a boy then. Now I'm a man, and I feel very differently about it.

(It still pisses me off when people take an idea and use it without attribution, as if it were theirs. Invention is hard work. And somehow people only want to claim credit for the ideas that gained traction, no one is clamoring to claim they invented something that no one uses. Where's the reward for creative risk? This is one of the big failures of the open source world, no respect of creativity.)

One more thought. If there were an ethics of technology, I think it should be unethical to file for a patent without making a public disclosure. To me it means you're disqualifying yourself for receiving my generosity. Later, we're going to have a talk about this, if it turns out you were patenting the things we were co-inventing. (Not you personally, whoever is doing it, believe me, they are.)

I want to work with technologists, not lawyers, not front-men, middlemen or pundits. If you're a shill, don't bother. If you're an adult artist whose medium is technology, you have no need for patents. You can get paid, make a profit, even get rich, without paving over the jungle.

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