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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-02 11:07 am (UTC)Keep in mind that permissive licenses don't seek to remove copyright, merely revoke some of these normal strong protections that apply normally to copyrightable works, so they can be freely used. Copyleft licenses "hijack" copyright so that derivative works must be licensed under the same terms.
Software patents... I can see both sides of the coin, unfortunately. I'm more of the view that software patents are bad, because they stifle reimplementation.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-02 12:42 pm (UTC)My reasoning is that we don't live in a vacuum. We build upon what others do. This is why an invention or a literary development or artform tends to spring up simultaneously in many places. We are each important to the production of ideas and deserve some of the kudos, but none of us is essential. When an idea's time is come then it will arrive. It depends less upon any individuals than upon the state of human society. If we give individuals all the credit then we impoverish the society that is the greater author.
I'd argue with you about copyleft, but I'll leave that for another time. I'm sharing my dialup connection with visitors at the moment so I'd better go offline. :)