Software patents are a bad idea and the patent office just makes it worse. Most software patents are issued for incredibly simple concepts. You don’t even need an embodiment of the patent for a software patent, that means you don’t have to build it first before you can patent it. Software patents are really patents on ideas.

The patent office will issue just about any patent if the lawyers put enough legal BS in it. Also Amazon did get the One-Click patent. The big players are patenting everything.

Software patents only hurt innovation. Since most of the software patents are trivial anyone writing software can (and probably will) infringe on someone elses patent. Because of this the big boys can legally smash any new and innovation company who does not, since it is new, have a patent portfolio to counter sue with.

As for country with or without IP respect being better or not, an anecdote: the USA did not respect at all other (richer at the time) country until very late and still has been a very successfull country. It’s kind of funny to see all the fuss about China and USA IP respect nowadays .

Another practical point: it’s relatively easy to track physical property and so to qualify stealing, even for a dumb, small or big government. Now with IP that’s another story, how is government now supposed to be so smart as to know what’s new, non-obvious to the skilled, falling or not into patentable matter and so in all fields of human knowledge? If a government is so smart while staying small, then what do we need private enterprise for? “government needs to be better at handling patent application”, well… doesn’t work.

Also to be efficient in high and fast innovation areas like software, such dispute resolution needs to be taken in a matter of weeks, not years. Doesn’t work.

Last thing, patent system tend to work better when there is a small number of patents and expensive processes at the research level, a billion dollar drug will be protected by only one patent so the cost for competitors to know about it is small, software and concepts needed for a simple web site that need practically no capital to produce are currently covered by thousands of patents. Doesn’t work.

Laurent

Yes, money is an interesting case, because it transforms in and out of physical representation, and its primary substance is conceptual. I think that the flow of money in its nonphysical forms would be better represented as contract than property. That is, you don’t own the money in your bank (unless it’s a Gringotts’ style holding vault), you have a contract with the bank to let you redeem it. In fact I believe the UK law is structured that way.

I would say that you are mistaken that property law defines the qualities of property. I’d reverse that and say that the inevitability of physical property was the seed of custom, which became law. But when that law gets to big for its britches and decides it can definine ideas as nonreplicable, it’s doing much the same thing as the folks who tried to decree pi to be 3, namely making a fool of itself.

Granted, we can do that only for simple molecules so far, not the highly complex drugs we have, but still…

TWG

On one hand, you can completely demolish IP patents. What are the likely consequences? It is argued that innovation will still proceed as normal. Witness the (relative)success of open-source software. But human nature being what it is, a whole lot of people will be desperately copying one thing and the other, and anybody who makes a breakthrough will only have a very short time to capitalize on the discovery before everybody else jumps on the bandwagon. There may be very real disincentives to develop new stuff as opposed to coming up with new stuff in the past solely due to the geek factor.

Then you have the immortalized IP patent, which plainly creates monopolies. The problems with that is obvious.

To cut it short, let’s keep patents around, but give people who make the relevant discovery some time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Two years? Three? Enough time?

TWG

“Money is merely the best-known incident of a large category of property that is known as “intangible’ property. The name alone should tell you that it is not an object, and is therefore infinitely copyable and nonexclusive.”

So you won’t mind me borrowing your credit card then?

You can try to reduce anything ad absurdum. Why not grant property rights to cats ?

You need to debate each specific category of ideas or IP on the merits of the case. Maybe “monopoly rights for entrepreneurial ideas” are not justified, but other IP categories are.

What’s so difficult to grasp in this point ? Say you had a very bright idea, and many people find it useful, and want to use it to their benefit. Are you entitled to some remuneration from them or aren’t you ? (Mostly they’ll be only too happy to pay you). What’s wrong with the state helping you collect what’s your due from potential cheats and defrauders ?

As I understand the examples and arguments used by Kevin Marks, Julian Morrison, et al. they are equally applicable to copyright law. The are lumping all IP together. Is a cd player to be protected as a “state machine” but the music is a “state” and cannot be protected?

Whoa, there big fella. This is a very interesting definition of property, but it is not the one that is commonly used and accepted at all. Property rights are about exclusive control, period. They have no connection whatsoever to use. I can violate your property rights by making use of your property in a way that in no way interferes with your use of the property. You can have property rights in something that can be used by a number of people.

If you own a large, vacant parcel, and I throw a picnic on one corner of that parcel, I have in fact trespassed, even though you were out of town and your use of the property was in no way interfered with.

Believing that property rights apply only to material objects is a fallacy. Do you own the money in your bank account? Of course you do. Is this money represented in any material object, such as coins or cash? No, it is not. In fact, the sum total of physical cash in the US (and I am sure in Britain as well) is a mere fraction of the sum total of money on deposit in banks.

It is impossible, in other words, for everyone to have all their money reduced to physical cash, yet this impossibility interferes not at all in their ownership of their money. They own something that is not a material object, but is entirely intangible. Physical cash, in fact, is not money, but is merely evidence of money. It is a map, not the territory.

Money is merely the best-known incident of a large category of property that is known as “intangible’ property. The name alone should tell you that it is not an object, and is therefore infinitely copyable and nonexclusive.

None of the above applies to IP, where performances and inventions are inherently copyable and nonexclusive.

There is nothing inherently exclusive about your parcel, either – anyone who wants to can walk onto it and make use of it, as in fact I did. There is nothing inherently non-copyable about cash and other forms of intangible property, either.

The non-copyable and exclusive attributes of property are something that is created by property law, not the other way around. My use of property is exclusive because I live in a society that makes it so. I mean, you can’t even identify “my” property without referring to wholly arbitrary and imaginary lines that are recorded in a courthouse somewhere.

Similarly, you can’t run around copying intangible property because you live in a society that prohibits such activities as a species of fraud. There is nothing about a bearer bond that makes it physically impossible to copy, after all.

Intellectual property is merely a species of intangible property, and intangible property is not qualitatively different from any other kind of property. Indeed, the essential attributes of real property (its metes and bounds) are intangible.

How strange and alarming when a reductio ad absurdum used for the purpose of argument and refutation turns out to exist ;-(

I believe this is called a “business method patent”

Alex

Why do we not grant monopoly rights for entrepreneurial ideas?

After all, why would an entrepreneur go to all the time and effort of opening a chain of coffee shops if his competitor can simply copy the idea? Surely this is both unjust and will result in a decrease in entrepreneurship, to the detriment of all?

I am of course being silly. But why is IP any less silly?