Ron's Info-Closet Annex
The online extension of Ron's Info-Closet.
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Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org
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I find "intellectual property" an obnoxious concept. Although I am fairly anosmic (or smell-blind, to coin a kenning), I find that the concept of IP stinks. Whereas trademarks can be almost benign, copyright is awful, and given the current practices of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, under which effectively all it takes to obtain a patent is money, patents stink the worst. Have you seen US patent #5,443,036, on teasing a cat with a laser pointer? The patent is self-satirising; it almost looks as though there's a Discordian at work here.
There are some interesting proposals to fix our broken patent system. One is OpenPatents.org, which is developing a kind of GNU General Public License based on patents rather than copyrights. Another is PATO, a similar but simpler system that would act like NATO in that it would be a "mutual defense" collective. The only requirement for joining such a collective is that you must agree to license your present and future patents to everyone else in the collective. In return, the rest of the collective license their patents to you. You now have access to a vastly larger patent pool with which to defend yourself against litigation, so if someone comes to you and says, "You're in violation of my patent on using a laser pointer to tease a cat. Pay up!", you can say, "Well, you're in violation of my licensed patents on laser pointers, teasing, and cats, so back off, Greyface!"
I spoke informally about this with an IP attorney I know (whom I rather like), and he told me that defensive patent pools are actually standard practice in many industries. John Walker of Autodesk developed the PATO idea independently circa 1993, so I don't know whether the world has caught up with him in the past ten years or so, or whether he was just out of touch with computer industry practice back then.
Entered 13:43 [/polyticks/ip] permalink
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