Luke Burrage, a professional juggler (but hey, aren’t we all?), does one of my favorite podcasts, The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. His Episode 100, “Science Fiction and Personal Philosophy,” is fascinating–he explains many of his career choices and approaches to life and creativity. He has a long and rambling but interesting discussion–first thirty minutes or so–where he uses the metaphor of how his love of sci-fi and imaginative personal fantasies of time traveling to the past helps explain how he deals with living now. It sounds odd at first but if you get into it, it’s quite interesting. Basically he talks about how if he were transported to some primitive society somehow (time travel; alternate universe; goes into cold sleep and awakens in a future dystopian primitive society), it at first would seem that the advanced knowledge he has would help him to become like a god; or, if he were say put down 50 years ago, to know the trends that are coming — culturally, scientifically, etc.–and to win nobel prizes or fame and fortune. But then he shoots holes in all this and makes a good point that knowledge of this type is not enough. You would not know how to make a TV or transistor (unless you happened to be an expert in that) just because you know about them. You might know DNA is a double helix but would not be able to explain much more beyond this, or prove it. Etc. At most if you lived in the past then you would be a future guy living in the past, and maybe on occasion the extra information you have would come in handy or make you somewhat unique. His point is that he accumulates information now, in the real world, he is in a similar situation–not much different than some future man living among us. And that we ought to always accumulate knowledge and skills and be prepared to use them when the opportunity arises. He goes into a lot about serendipity and helping create your own luck and his ambitions in his career. The part I noted as relevant to IP and information is his implicit if not explicit recognition that good ideas are not enough; you need to execute and be prepared to execute. That is a point many critics of IP have noted, when they rebut claims that we need ownership of ideas, on the grounds that ideas are cheap and easy, and not what you need for success anyway. (BTW Luke’s use of the term “intellectual property” does not, I think, mean patent and copyright, but is just an informal usage common among businessmen to refer to successful ideas, reputation, skills, know-how, etc.)

“A Generation of Software Patents,” by James E. Bessen
Research on Innovation; Boston University – School of Law
June 21, 2011
Boston Univ. School of Law, Law and Economics Research Paper No. 11-31
Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2011-04

Abstract:
This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry.

Related:

• Price Controls, Antitrust, and Patents (July 2011)
• Antitrust vs. Trademark Law (June 2011)
• The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC (Aug. 2006)
• IP vs. Antitrust (Sept. 2005)
• The Microsoft-Apple Gesture Oligopoly
• Controls breed controls, Monopolies breed monopolies

Some older posts on when price controls and antitrust law are almost tolerable:

Patents, Prescription Drugs, and Price Controls

From an older Mises blog post:

Great piece by Nina Paley:

Culture is Anti-Rivalrous

Economists talk about rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods, but Culture is neither rivalrous, nor non-rivalrous; it is anti-rivalrous.

I. Rivalrous

Rivalrous goods diminish in value the more they are used. For example, a bicycle: if I use it, it gets me from here to there, if you use it, it gets me nowhere. If I acquire your bicycle, you don’t have it any more. Only one of us can have the bicycle at one time. We can share it to a limited extent, but the more it’s used the less it’s worth; it gets dinged up and wears out. The more people use the bicycle, the less utility it has.

If I steal your bicycle, you have to take the bus

All material things – things made of atoms – are rivalrous, because an object cannot be in two places at the same time. Everything in the physical world is rivalrous, even if it’s abundant.

A commons is a rivalrous good. Hence the “tragedy of the commons“: the more people use a square of land, the less valuable it is to each of them. The grass gets eaten too fast to grow back, the soil can’t handle the incoming rate of sheep shit, and degradation ensues. [continue reading…]

Fantastic insights in this Business Insider piece:

Your Start-Up Isn’t Unique, But That Doesn’t Matter 

Adam Ludwin, RRE Ventures

I’m a huge fan of Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix series.  If you haven’t watched the first three installments, you can (and should) do so here.The series lays out the persuasive case that big, important breakthroughs in science and technology are emergent phenomenon.  That is, they arise organically out of our collective, cumulative knowledge.  An “invention” is simply a historically demarcated tipping point on a continuous path of progress.

Fittingly, Furguson isn’t the first to point this out.

Henry Ford said:

Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

And long before Ford, the 18^th century mathematician Farkas Bolyai vividly observed:

When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.

One of the remarkable implications of this theory of invention is that it de-emphasizes the individual innovator.  Not only are notable inventors standing on the shoulders of those who came before, but even their particular contributions are often made by others simultaneously:  Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray patented the telephone on the same day; Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently advanced a theory of evolution; and Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and others have all been credited with inventing calculus.

Read more>>

Great IP-related insights in Jeff Tucker’s article Show Love to the Merchant Class:

Then there’s the competition. Anyone is free to copy and replicate your successes. The more you succeed, the more you inspire imitators who are pleased to do exactly what you do but somehow manage to do it at a lower price. This means that you must constantly stay on your toes and innovate. At the same time, you have to constantly watch your back. A bad day of sales could mean nothing or it could mean everything. It could be a bump on the road to glory or the foreshadowing of disaster. There’s no way to know for sure.

Mike Masnick highlights a great post:

Debunking Some Big Myths About Patents

from the stop-using-these-arguments dept

Rick Falkvinge recently put together an excellent post debunking ten of the common myths you hear about patents. Here’s a taste:

Myth 2: Patents drive innovation.

Fact: Patents do not drive innovation, they ban innovation. A patent is, by its very definition, something that bans the entire world except the patent holder from building and improving on a particular innovative step. If patents are driving innovation, which is claimed, then this outright ban must be shown to have side effects that somehow drive innovation to a larger extent than the extent to which the direct ban destroys it. No such side effects have turned out to exist.

To the contrary, patents are being used by incumbent industries to shut down disruptive competition. Rather than competing with better products and services, the current kings-of-the-hill are finding it more cost efficient competing with more expensive lawyers. This does neither drive innovation nor a healthy competitive market.

Other myths debunked are claims that investors won’t invest without patents, that patents are a useful measure of innovation, that the problem is just with patent trolls, that patents disclose innovation, and a few others as well. It’s really a fantastic read. It likely won’t change the minds of patent system supporters, but for anyone involved in these debates, it’s a very straightforward and clear debunking of many of the common myths about the importance of the patent system.

Update: Mark Lemley: The Very Basis Of Our Patent System… Is A Myth

Great cartoon from Nerfnow mocking the idea of intellectual property:

From :

Warner Bros. Wins Key Legal Ruling Impacting All ‘Wizard of Oz’ Remakes (Exclusive)

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals hands down a potentially big decision on some iconic characters thought by many to be outside copyright protection.

11:40 AM 7/6/2011 by Eriq Gardner

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote the famous children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s easy to assume that since the book was published more than 110 years ago, the characters of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the rest are safely in the public domain.

Or so Hollywood hopes. Many movie studios are in the midst of re-adapting the classic. But the truth about what’s in the public domain and what’s not may be a little murky, thanks to a decision on Tuesday by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Read more>>

Jeff Tucker gives a riveting, fascinating discussion of innovation and related matters centered around the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

Video and audio are here.

From HammerofTruth:

90+ Internet law and IP law professors sign anti-PROTECT-IP letter… “The Act fails this Constitutional test. It authorizes courts to take websites “out of circulation” – to make them unreachable by and invisible to Internet users in the United States and abroad — immediately upon application by the Attorney General after an ex parte hearing.”