There’s a Patent For That
Universal access to human knowledge is within our grasp. This is a positive result of technology but when I see a slew of frivolous software patent suits I cringe. Patent trolling always hinders innovation.
Why patent? The main reason is for protection, profit (my idea, my money) and it follows that the patent holder gets the license to sue (revenue generation). The benign justification is that by excluding others from duplicating an invention or process, the patent owner is more likely to spend time, energy and resources on their product. However, it seems as if more resources are spent by corporations and their cadre of patent lawyers scouring innovations for patent infringement.
When major record labels started suing their fans for downloading their music for free, a lot of the independent labels and their artists were aghast. How can you make money by suing your customers? Work with your fans instead of fighting them. DRM only hurts people who actually buy your product.
A study by The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review supports what Lawrence Lessig has been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.
Steven Johnson wrote an excellent essay on the secret to innovation:
The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs.
He says that good ideas stem from a network of other ideas and history shows how technological advances build on existing ideas creating further innovation (a mashup, if you will). Hence the above premise poses a problem:
The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields.
A more open model for idea exchange should be the focus, instead of wasting a ton of effort on lawsuits defending patent rights which does not create any real-world value.
