protection
Jan. 2nd, 2008 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eCopyrights and patents are supposed to protect the developer. The rationale is commonly held to be that they enable people to recoup their investment before others with more financial clout move in and push anybody else out of the market. Unfortunately it doesn't always work this way (I suspect it rarely does).
The best image compression technology that I know of was developed by two mathematicians, Barnsley and Sloan. It is called fractal compression and can reduce file size by ten or a hundred times over a jpeg image. So why isn't it used everywhere? The inventors patented their system and required such high fees it was never taken up, so nobody uses it. Everybody lives with inferior systems because patents have made improvements too difficult.
I've been reading an article on how some new 3D displays finally look like they might transform our computers. Sadly it includes this line: "...we have a patent on how you draw a straight line on a rotating screen..." Somehow I think that may be the seal of death on that system. If Bresenham had patented his 2D line drawing algorithms and the multitude of others who developed buffering, blitting, and other display techniques, it is doubtful we would have got GUI interfaces on our computers. As things stand now Microsoft and Apple delayed the advancement of the personal computer by a decade or more. Imagine if they'd been further retarded by aggressive patenting.
I'm in favor of artists, mathematicians, inventors, writers, and programmers being able to make a viable living from their efforts, but the current patent and copyright systems don't do that. At the moment copyright absolutely reverses its original intention. (It was initially designed to stop wealthy, powerful publishers from locking up culture and knowledge.) Patents were intended to foster development by letting innovative individuals survive in the face of the depredations of the wealthy and powerful industrialists, but it now costs thousands of dollars to patent something, and vastly more to defend it in court, so patents have become an obstacle to innovation.
A number of alternatives to the standard copyright have sprung up in recent times: Creative Commons, GNU, copyleft, artists' license, and so on, but I don't know of anything comparable for patents. That's sad. I think our technology will suffer because of it.
The best image compression technology that I know of was developed by two mathematicians, Barnsley and Sloan. It is called fractal compression and can reduce file size by ten or a hundred times over a jpeg image. So why isn't it used everywhere? The inventors patented their system and required such high fees it was never taken up, so nobody uses it. Everybody lives with inferior systems because patents have made improvements too difficult.
I've been reading an article on how some new 3D displays finally look like they might transform our computers. Sadly it includes this line: "...we have a patent on how you draw a straight line on a rotating screen..." Somehow I think that may be the seal of death on that system. If Bresenham had patented his 2D line drawing algorithms and the multitude of others who developed buffering, blitting, and other display techniques, it is doubtful we would have got GUI interfaces on our computers. As things stand now Microsoft and Apple delayed the advancement of the personal computer by a decade or more. Imagine if they'd been further retarded by aggressive patenting.
I'm in favor of artists, mathematicians, inventors, writers, and programmers being able to make a viable living from their efforts, but the current patent and copyright systems don't do that. At the moment copyright absolutely reverses its original intention. (It was initially designed to stop wealthy, powerful publishers from locking up culture and knowledge.) Patents were intended to foster development by letting innovative individuals survive in the face of the depredations of the wealthy and powerful industrialists, but it now costs thousands of dollars to patent something, and vastly more to defend it in court, so patents have become an obstacle to innovation.
A number of alternatives to the standard copyright have sprung up in recent times: Creative Commons, GNU, copyleft, artists' license, and so on, but I don't know of anything comparable for patents. That's sad. I think our technology will suffer because of it.