How The Patent System Is Like A Broken Web Cache
from the kills-the-pace-of-innovation dept
Rick Falkvinge has posted a thought-provoking piece that analogizes the patent system to various forms of web caching and their impact on discussions. As he notes, in online discussion forums and blogs, if there's a delay from when your comment is made to when it appears, the conversations tend to be slower and less involved. It gets really bad when all comments need to be moderated and that's because you don't get that immediate fulfillment. Honestly, one of the reasons why I think Twitter took off at the level it did was because it felt so realtime (and became more so over time).And yet, the patent system is quite different. The whole basis is that you have to delay things.
You can observe the same phenomenon on moderated blogs, but on a much tougher scale. There, it can take hours for people to be able to build on and improve upon ideas, as the bottleneck is that much thinner. If somebody needs to manually approve a comment in a particular location, that’s basically a guarantee that there will not be a meaningful improvement of ideas in that location.The obvious retort is that innovation is different than a discussion. But, that's not really true. So many studies on innovation have shown that it's an ongoing process and that a big part of that process is often communication with others (not even directly about the innovation at hand) to replenish ideas and to keep things fresh and moving forward. It actually has many characteristics of a discussion.
Now, imagine a twenty-year web cache server. If you come up with a good idea, people won’t be able to improve on your ideas and take them to the next level for twenty years. Another twenty for a total of forty years before you could respond in turn. You suffer. They suffer. The exchange of ideas as a whole doesn’t just suffer, it crawls to a near-stop, its velocity measurable only by laser precision measurements.
If five minutes of wait time kills the rate of ideas as much as it really and actually does in all our experience, what would a timescale of decades do?
So, with that in mind, Falkvinge's point is even stronger than you might think. He goes beyond just arguing that innovation is slowed down for the twenty year patent delay, to basically say that innovation is stifled to a much greater degree, because the necessary participation, experimentation and idea generation by others is so stifled, that they don't even take part.
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Filed Under: delay, innovation, patents, web cache
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Cognitive Dissonance ?
Long live patent and copyright ! Wait... What have i done ?!
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Only true when "improvements" are trifling.
But as there's no way out of bureaucratism (including that at corporations which file stupid patents) except by revolution, it's intractable.
As to last paragraph: no, I think it arguable that being forced to find other ways to implement the same idea can actually help. It's only when the ideas aren't very fundamental that the tangle arises. And you're discussing this as if the problem is totally of information flow: meanwhile, the Chinese are just manufacturing without regard to patents, and the US manufactures less every day.
A closely associated problem is the maturing of educational institutions that produce only weenies who'll never get near manufacturing: they regard "ideas" as widgets. Focusing on an essentially irrelevant area with a silly analogy -- have you never heard of queuing analysis? -- is just more ivory tower blather, academics pretending that they're engaged in trying to find a solution, when in fact they're just a drain on those who produce.
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Re: Only true when "improvements" are trifling.
I would have to disagree because there always seem to be people out there so say "yeah that works and everyone is doing it but there just has to be a better way". You do not always have to force people to find different ways and forcing people to find different ways to do something does not always make actual improvements because alternatives are sometimes unworkable at a current technology level.
So while I understand how you can think the patent system is helping is create a diversity of ideas and solutions I think you will find that thanks to how human nature and creativity works you would find all these alternatives out there anyways when there are needs for them.
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Rethinking the Patent Office
The patent office would hold a repository of ideas upon which inventors could draw, as opposed to being the keyholders for a series of padlocks put on any particular innovation.
Of course, this would also have to happen in conjunction with some sort of change to the law reflecting non-exclusivity and implementation notions. Ideally, those who execute on an idea are free to profit from it, but everyone else is free to improve upon it.
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Patents & Delay
There are exceptions to this, of course. Certain patent applications publish long before a product comes to market, if it ever does. Many Apple patents fit into this category: designs and "new" features crop up in news reports discussing things filed in Apple applications. There is no shortage of irony to me when I read about new Apple features disclosed on slashdot, for example, that were revealed in a patent application.
But like many transcripts, logs, cache files, etc., few people bother to look. Then they're all hot and bothered when an application filed 7 years ago claims a feature they implemented as a second comer.
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Re: Patents & Delay
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Innovatards
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Original purpose of patents
Oh in an ideal world ... what would we have to get excited about?
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Re: Original purpose of patents
In a free market ample competition would allow someone to bypass those asking unreasonable fees and/or terms; but honestly isn't there always /some/ unemployment? Not to mention things like H1B visas for the US...
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falkvinge faulty
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