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O'Reilly On What Happened To BountyQuest 134

Posted by Hemos from the down-down-down-in-a-ring-of-fire dept.
theodp writes "In his latest Ask Tim, Tim O'Reilly suggests the failure of BountyQuest could be blamed on the inability of amateurs to penetrate the patent mess, noting that numerous people sent in what they thought was important prior art on the Amazon 1-Click patent, but the attorneys who reviewed it didn't find it useful. But in this case, the "amateurs" included two patent attorneys (one an ex-USPTO examiner), who found their 1-Click prior art rejected by BountyQuest for not being specific to the Web, an argument a Federal Court told Amazon a month earlier was an irrelevant distinction that could not be used to exclude prior art. Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'"
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O'Reilly On What Happened To BountyQuest More

O'Reilly On What Happened To BountyQuest

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  • asenine... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why the hell is he holding this "evidence" in secrecy? looking to sell it to the highest bidder on the next "lawsuit merry-go-round" ?
    • Why the hell is he holding this "evidence" in secrecy? looking to sell it to the highest bidder on the next "lawsuit merry-go-round" ?

      Think of it as an arms race. If others think they have the bomb, others won't launch theirs.

    • Other question: what place would you go to buy O'Reilly books online? (I.e.: where does the money enter the story?)
  • Such a mess:-p
    • > ...anything that can happen...

      This is a pet peeve of mine. It's just not true.
      In order for it to be true, reality has to be a
      finite-state machine. There's no conclusive
      evidence of this, and in fact almost all of physics
      assumes the opposite.
      • Actually, the full quote is

        "Through the sheer power of entropy, anything that can happen will happen, including nothing and something, the expected unforseen."

        Multiple views == way the world goes round. If you check my link(http://chaosloop.net/,) you will find a diatrab on the subject that will probably get under your skin. I would be interested in Continueing the topic actually, and as such an e-mail or im would suffice if you would feel so inclined.

  • Declaratory Judgement? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RWarrior(fobw) ( 448405 ) * on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:33AM (#7433757)
    Who might have the money and the balls to sue Amazon first, asking for a declaratory judgement that the one-click patent is invalid?

    • Re:Declaratory Judgement? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To sue under the Declaratory Judgement Act, you must be within reasonable anticipation that you are going to be sued by the patent holder. Amazon has not been threatening anyone with their patent that I can tell. It does not make monetary sense for anyone to get into a fight with Amazon over this patent because one-click shopping does not help people make that much money. The only reason that B&N actually implemented it was out of spite to Amazon and because they didn't realize at the time how stupid
    • Well if its that Web specific one should be able to use the non web specific "one click" technology on the web and not violate the patent.. if it does not qualify as prior art to disqualify the patent then it should not be able to infringe on that patent aswell.
  • Prior art is not enough, you need commercial interests that are large and strong enough to fight the battle.

    I had prior art on my ex-wife but she still took half my fortune and the two schnauzers. So what?

    And O'Reilly lost some credibility for going along with it. He should have called "shenanigans" and admitted that the patent circus is just a game designed to make life hard for the small entrepreneur.

    • I don't know what's more disturbing, that your wife sued you for half your fortune, or that you had two schnauzers! O'Reilly has never lost credability. They are and always will be the primo publisher of geek gank.

    • "He should have called "shenanigans" and admitted that the patent circus is just a game designed to make life hard for the small entrepreneur."

      Except if you look at recent history, the large corporations are not the ones abusing the patent system - it's that small entrepreneur you mention who patents something completely obvious and then makes the big corporations pay licensing fees to him. Yeah, Amazon has a patent on 1-Click shopping, a patent that shouldn't have been awared, but have they made anyone p

      • the large corporations are not the ones abusing the patent system - it's that small entrepreneur...

        WTF? What the fuckity-fuckity-flying-fuck? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU SMOKING? OK, must... get... control... again.

        Sorry, pal, but you are wrong. Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them. The "small entrepreneurs" you are thinking about are firms with good financial backing and a speciality in what amounts to legal extortion. They find a single patent and exploit it. Any realistic small business trying this will soon face the fact that for every one patent they try to enforce, larger and richer companies will come back with five or ten that they have suddenly found.

        The patent process claims to be about protecting innovation and invention but in fact it does exactly the opposite - it rewards those who have deep pockets and dedicated lawyers, and punishes those who spend their time really inventing.

        This is simple to demonstrate: the companies that exploit "obvious patents" are never small businesses who make other products, they are either huge businesses, or shell companies that do nothing else at all.

        And your insulting remarks about "unwashed FSF geeks" are just amazingly rude. You are either just trolling, or truly pathetic and uneducated.

        I'll settle for troll.
        • Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them.
          You can't really say that as an absolute statement. Eolas vs. Microsoft was one guy vs. Microsoft
          • Eolas is a good example of a business that does little except pursue patent claims. They were born from a university research team that was based on the concept of seeking and licensing patents.

            Hardly a standard model for small businesses, however inventive they may be.

            It's significant that Eolas appears to sell nothing except their technology licenses.

            As for "one guy", it's Eolas plus the University of California that sued Microsoft, which is anything but a "small business". Eolas is just the commerci
            • Believe me, there's no love lost on Eolas (or Microsoft for that matter), but to set the record straight, UofC had nothing to do with the lawsuit.

              http://www.eolas.com/zmapress.htm

              If they were involved directly with the lawsuit, I'd be interested in seeing a reference.
            • I don't buy your backpedal that a group of people who have the above business model cannot be put into the category of "small entrepreneur." You called me a troll in your first reply to me so this is the only post I will make in response to you.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them.
          More counter examples: here [thestar.com] and here [sptimes.com]

          • Did you even read those links? The first one is about Monsanto suing a small farmer, causing him to have to give up growing canola on his farm, as he's been doing for decades. The second one seems to support the original post, showing exactly how hard it can be for a small inventor to defend his claim. The guy has been broke for decades.

            • Bah, that's what I get for pasting from an earlier copy on Google results. The post I was going to make was:

              here [inc.com]

              which shows how small-startups can get the money intros into the patent area. (It showed up on the same page as the first link, at the bottom. The wrong link was at the top. Search for "small company seed patent"). That's a direct counter example of "Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them". Small businesses CAN afford to claim patents, and there are funds

              • Ok, that link is better, but still only shows that the company can get funds to go through the patent process. It doesn't say anything about the kind of backing you'd need to defend those patents against a major player. $50K certainly won't cover that as well. As for the other one, while he made $1.5 million, after reading the whole thing, it seems to be a tale of how Scheiber got screwed over in the patent game, getting only what amounted to peanuts for his invention that changed the industry.

                • Well, the most famous one is probably Stac vs. Microsoft. Stac's patent saved their bacon when MS infringed it's file compression technology when they included in Windows. Ended up costing MS $120 million.
      • the large corporations are not the ones abusing the patent system - it's that small entrepreneur you mention who patents something completely obvious and then makes the big corporations pay licensing fees to him

        Spot on! How dare one-man outfits like IBM demand licence fees from others [forbes.com] for their patents!

      • I don't know if they were "forced" but they took the safe route.
      • Face it, the same crowd of unwashed FSF geeks who are crying over patent abuse is producing a few people who are taking advantage of the U.S. Patents Office inability to award patents based on merit.

        Care to back that assertion up with, say, some specific cases involving software patent abuse and Free Software fans?

      • Except if you look at recent history, the large corporations are not the ones abusing the patent system [...]

        Please read this webpage [mit.edu] on how valuable IBM considers its patents to be and why. IBM holds more patents than anyone else. When they say cross-licensing is an order of magnitude more valuable than infringement lawsuits, everyone had better listen. Cross-licensing takes away all of the exclusive power patents were invented to bestow upon the patent holder. Cross-licensing is only for the biggest

  • On his bookshelf. (Score:5, Funny)

    by xenoweeno ( 246136 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:34AM (#7433770)
    O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf,

    A TV remote control, i.e. used for pay-per-view pr0n purchases from the sofa?

  • Difficult (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheFlu ( 213162 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:35AM (#7433771) Homepage
    Searching for prior art is too difficult, what we need is something where you can just click once to find what you need.

  • It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:36AM (#7433777) Journal
    Bezos wants to patent the gesture, and it is so ludicrous that even Steve Jobs endorses it, and yet the rest of us have to endure this idiocy for years.

    I say we issue anti-patents. If the patent you are filing is found to be dim, ridiculous, or utterly moronic, not only shouldn't you get the patent, but you should be denied access to the very "technology" you sought to control.

    • or file preemptive patents: that is, any good idea you get, file a patent on it so that you have control over it. Specifically, you have the control to let anyone use it without threat of lawsuit.
    • I say we issue anti-patents. If the patent you are filing is found to be dim, ridiculous, or utterly moronic, not only shouldn't you get the patent, but you should be denied access to the very "technology" you sought to control.

      Wow! What a great idea.

      Tell me when it's implemented, and I'll make sure I file a patent on paying income tax straight away.

  • This web distinction opens up other loopholes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by donscarletti ( 569232 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:46AM (#7433835)
    If something can be dismissed as not prior art because it is not specific to the web, what is to stop a clever lawyer to ask for the patant itself to be ruled inapplicable in a particular instance because it is not specific to something else?

    This could include things like PHP or ASP or apache CGI. Or maybe it could be argued that it is specific to the delivary system of Amazon or particular types of merchandise. Possibly one could even integrate a third party service into it such as Paypal or MS Passport and claim that it is a totally different business model and therefore not covered by the patent.

    The possibilities of dodging the patent are opened up much wider by the patent being able to continue. This should be exploited

    • Did you read the links? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...If something can be dismissed as not prior art because it is not specific to the web...

      The courts explicitedly stated that this was NOT a loophole. The links specifically point to a similar system on Compuserve that could be prior art.

  • Once upon a time... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kulic ( 122255 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:47AM (#7433842) Homepage

    IIRC, a patent used to be awarded for a device that it would take a master craftsman more than two to three full days to design and make.

    Extending that to software patents today, exactly how many lines of C would you say a master programmer can output in two to three days? I have a feeling that it may be a lot more than what this technology is built on.

    Thankfully I live in Australia, where we don't have anywhere near as many stupid software patents, but I can still foresee the day that I will have to get a patent judged invalid before I can write a program more than 100 LOC. I wonder if we will have an analogous situation to music piracy today, where everyone will write outlawed code because the big companies hold the patents on basic programming constructs and refuse to play ball.

    • Well, yeah... 100 Libraries of Congress is an AWFUL lot of code. ;)

    • Re:Once upon a time... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by imadork ( 226897 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:21AM (#7434033) Homepage
      I wonder if we will have an analogous situation to music piracy today, where everyone will write outlawed code because the big companies hold the patents on basic programming constructs and refuse to play ball

      Now that's an interesting thought. I think (hope?) that it couldn't ever happen, for the following reasons:

      Prior Art for basic programming constructs is well-known (I'm thinking constructs like for loops and pointers here).

      Even if someone does manage to get a patent on a future basic concept, patents (in the US) expire after 20 years, and copyrights don't expire for 75+ years.

      Patents tend to be country-specific, and need to be filed in every country that you want maximum protection in. Only the biggest companies can afford to file patents in all the relevant countries, and there are sure to be a few countries where that construct is not protected. Copyright, on the other hand, is recognized worldwide (or, at least, in all the countries that signed the Berne convention), without having to file in each country.

      Now I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about here, but this discussion makes the patent system seem relatively benign, doesn't it? If someone wanted to really control a technology, they should try to find some back-door way to have it protected under copyright law, not patent law...

      • Re:Once upon a time... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Feztaa ( 633745 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:51AM (#7434260) Homepage
        Now I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about here, but this discussion makes the patent system seem relatively benign, doesn't it?

        Just imagine what your life would be like if every piece of technology in your computer right now was 20+ years old.

        That's 1983... GNU hadn't even been started yet, Apple hadn't even released the first Macintosh by then...
        • You do have a point, but imagine what your life would be like is somehow those same technologies were covered under copyright...

          Given a choice only between these two options, I'd rather try an build a computer with early 80's technology than late 20's technology!

    • >Thankfully I live in Australia, where we don't have anywhere near as many stupid software patents...

      No they just have a patent on the wheel [ananova.com]. Issued in 2001.

      More interestingly -- their patent search site, [ipaustralia.gov.au] starts with "Don't reinvent the wheel."

    • "...how many lines of C would you say a master programmer can output in two to three days? "

      The studies say 20-30 lines.

  • Question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:48AM (#7433847)
    For all the fuss over one-click... has anyone actually used it?

    Personally, I find it to be the stupidest way of ordering anything.

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:05AM (#7433938) Homepage
      Seriously,

      When I buy of the web, I want to cross verify my order, address, CC details etc., atleast once before I hit the final submit button. Especially with the shady practice of Amazon and the others to add, unwanted gift wrappings even if i didn't order one explictly, or to default to next-day air shipping (more $s) , even if I want free 5-7 days ground shipping.

      I want to make sure, They charge my CC, nothing more, if not any less. :-)


      • I agree. I use a disposable credit card number [mbnanetaccess.com], so each time I order I input a new credit card number anyway. Does anybody want to be one click away from sending the wrong product to the wrong address for too much money? Although it sure feels addictive in the iTIMS--if I didn't have one-click turned off, I can see spending many more dollars there through sheer impulsive purchasing.
        • What happens, if you return the product for any reason, and the company wants to recredit you the money.
          Can they recredit the money to your actual CC number using your disposable CC number ?

          • dunno, actually. I've never tried it, but I suppose so.

            The credit card company itself knows the correlation between the disposable cc numbers and my real billing #, of course. And I would suppose that just as they know which real # to charge that they could also reverse those charges.
    • I believe that Amazon threatened to Sue Barnes and Noble over it during the first Holiday Season after aquiring the patent.

      This forced BN to change their website from a 1-click buying method to a 2-click buying method (ie. they artificially introduced a second click), rather than risk facing a lawsuit.

    • For all the fuss over one-click... has anyone actually used it?

      I have. I don't often buy from amazon, but I have the one-click feature activated for the times when I do.

      Personally, I find it to be the stupidest way of ordering anything.

      Why? I find it works quite well.

    • Apple licensed it, so yes.

  • BountyQuest missed the point, IMO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Monday November 10, 2003 @09:48AM (#7433849) Homepage Journal
    It's not individual stupid patents we should go after; it's stupid patents in general. I'd rather see O'Reilly put his money into lobbying against the idea of patents on "business methods" and other vaguely defined ideas that simply shouldn't be eligible for any kind of IP protection, ever. And please don't trot out the line about, "Well then people won't innovate!" Somehow innovation seems to have done just fine for hundreds of years without people taking out patents like "A method for folding toilet paper so as to facilitate wiping your ass from front to back."
    • I realize that the one-click deal became a big money focus, but I recall that the site was about all kinds of prior art and many of them were more interesting than that one issue. I still don't quite understand why it wasn't kept going. It seems the bandwidth and hosting costs are minimal these days and it's a good cause. I would assume that just on ad revenue alone it would be a sustainable site. Their FAQ was excellent. I was going to write a book on patents at one point and after reading thier FAQ I fel

  • Lost senses? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Masque ( 20587 )
    Forget Amazon suing anyone else over one-click; what if someone else loses their senses and licenses one-click? What then?
    • Forget Amazon suing anyone else over one-click; what if someone else loses their senses and licenses one-click? What then?

      You get fast and easy (one click) licensing.

  • I never understood how..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:00AM (#7433904)
    I never understood how this "one-click" was patentable. Buttons on computers screens were around since ever, my first GUI computer in the eighties that had buttons. You clicked them once, and they did something, hence "one-click."

    Also, retrieving customer information wasn't innovative, it has been done before.

    In the car world, it would be akin to patenting "one punch" where in a control (pedal-button) needs to be punched,pushed, or what have you, in order to evoke a realtime response, i.e. a car's function. Whether it is retrieving more fuel to feed the pistons or apply pressure to the brakes.

    I'm sick of people using obscure language to get a patent on stupidly obvious shit! Everytime one of these asses go out and sue someone, they should be liable for full legal costs, damages, and jail time. It's just a big drag on everyone else who is actually 'innovative.'

    • Basically you're right. A button simply initiates some action on the part of the system. It doesn't really matter what the action is, it can be any damn thing you please. Most sites used the "buy" button to add an item to your virtual cart. Amazon simply decided to add a couple more steps to the action and complete the purchase without further input. Some people might like a system like that, and others may not, but regardless, it's not really innovative. It's just the same technology and methods used

  • Not prior art... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:04AM (#7433932) Homepage

    What Mr O'Reilly has as prior art is the following

    1) Own publishers

    2) Put all of your books on one shelf

    3) Remove from shelf

    This can be made online by sending an IM to his secretary in one click to get the book.

    Sincerly

    Jeff Bozos Lawyers
  • My thesis work was patented by another company. However, no one, myself, my school or my current company wants to fight it because the lawyers fees would be at least $50K. They would only fight it if it would have broguht them more than mount of profit.

  • This is a subject (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dark-br ( 473115 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:29AM (#7434091) Homepage
    Theodp did indeed submit what he thought was prior art to the bountyquest 1-click competition -- he sent in a huge binder of IBM mainframe documentation without any comment about what part of it he considered prior art. When pressed for details, he gave some section numbers, but for the life of me I couldn't see its relevance, and neither could any of the bountyquest patent attorneys. It basically described a system in which you issued commands, and the computer responded! I think we all know a few of those. I gave him far more time and consideration than the actual merit of his submission required -- it seemed to me to be one of the most useless and irrelevant of all the submissions, yet he keeps claiming it as if it were the answer. Spending time answering his assertions seems only to have whetted his appetite for attention.

    Theodp's accusations of malfeasance are particularly irritating because I did in fact pay out $10,000 of my own money for the three pieces of prior art that seemed most relevant. None of them were a slam dunk, though. (However, after the contest ended and BountyQuest went on the rocks, someone did send me a killer piece of prior art, which I still have in my possession in the event that Amazon ever sues anyone else over 1-click. I never used it because in the interim, Amazon settled with Barnes & Noble, and the case was put to bed. Meanwhile, I had become convinced that Amazon had seen the light (and the pressure -- suing B&N was a PR disaster for them) and would not again choose to use patents offensively.

    As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them. Amazon is no worse in this regard than anyone else, and I believe that because of their bad experience, they are likely a lot better. They understand in a way they never did before that they are part of a technology ecosystem, and owe a lot to the open source and open standards developer community who created their opportunity. The Amazon web services interface is a direct outcome of what they learned through their mistakes over the offensive use of the 1-click patent, and the conversations about "giving back" that ensued.

    The fact that BountyQuest failed was a big disappointment both to me and to Jeff -- it seemed like a good idea. But like many other startups in the dotcom era, it didn't make it over the hump.
    • As to acquiring patents (however ridiculous), the system is so broken that all companies are doing it these days, so that they'll have some defense if someone else sues them.

      But that's a big problem. Acquiring patents costs time and money. On one hand, this makes the small guys vulnerable. The small guys can't afford to acquire a portfolio of ridiculous patents just in case someone sues them.

      On the other hand, this is all just a total waste of resources. Companies are amassing these things that are total

  • Sue Who (Score:3, Interesting)

    by porkface ( 562081 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @10:30AM (#7434096) Journal
    Would he step in if Amazon sued, say Microsoft?
  • Interestingly, O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'

    In related news, Tim O'Reilly was shot dead when coming out of his appartment building this morning. Witnesses described the shooter as a middle-aged, bald guy with a wide grin who ramsacked the bookshelves before escaping on foot.

  • Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I always thought that the dude that started amazon is the same dude that started BountyQuest.

    If so, it kinda explains... well.. everything :)
  • I used to work for a company that was trying, and hugely succeeding, to apply a patent of theirs from 1986 that involved selecting construction materials from a hierarchal list to the web. Sites like Dell and Gateway that allowed custom configuration based on a hierarchal list were the targets...and they paid up based on this patent, which was never really challenged as being "non-web."
    1. There are companies that specialise in performing prior art searches and people like what they know.
    2. The need for novelty knockouts, with no reward for close prior art relevant to obviousness, meant that likelihood of reward for a submission was too low to justify spending significant amounts of time hunting for prior art. Requiring novelty knockouts was understandable because novelty is a relatively clear cut issue and less prone to generating arguments than obviousness.
    3. The pool of engineers who visited

  • "On his bookshelf" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @11:47AM (#7434708)
    O'Reilly goes on to say that he now has a killer piece of 1-Click prior art 'on my bookshelf, in the odd event that Amazon loses its senses and sues anyone else over 1-click.'"

    I don't understand this. He starts this whole bounty program to fight bad patents, we know he thinks the Amazon 1-click patent is bad, and he has this "killer" prior art which is apparently lethal to the Amazon patent in question, and yet he won't reveal what it is ?? Wouldn't we all be better served by seeing what is NOW, so that people who want to roll out 1-click type sites can do so without worrying about possible litigation and whether or not O'Reilly really has such killer prior-art ? I'm sorry, but if all I have to rely on is O'Reilly's say-so that he has the prior art that will protect ME from getting sued, I'm probably not going to test the waters.

    It sounds to me like either: 1) he doesn't have squat, and is bluffing (poorly), or 2) he just doesn't want to pay out an earned bounty. Either way, it's fishy.

  • The whole patent/IP system should be canned. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ngunton ( 460215 ) on Monday November 10, 2003 @01:52PM (#7435791) Homepage
    This may seem extreme, I know, but I really think that a lot of things that are currently screwed up in this world are so because of our increasingly complex and impenetrable legal system. See the book "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K. Howard for more on this subject. This excellent book talks about how our legal system of rules has become increasingly specific ("rationalistic") over time, to the point where it is like a huge, dysfunctional computer program (my analogy) that attempts to anticipate every scenario that might occur - all in the name of taking human discretion out of the equation. As a result, just the opposite effect is achieved, with small minded bureaucrats being able to pick and choose arbitrarily from the morass of rules as it suits them. In the old days, laws were more broadly written, to allow real people to use their own judgement ("common sense") in applying the rules to real world situations. Since the rationalistic approach assumes a finite number of rules can model a world with an infinite number of possible situations, it will only get more and more complex, with more and more loopholes.

    But specifically regarding patents - one of the biggest reasons given for patents these days is that without them innovation would cease, since it would no longer be in any company's interest to bear the initial research and development costs. The reasoning is that if anyone else can immediately copy your new ideas (which cost you a lot of money to develop) then you are at a disadvantage, and thus won't do it.

    Well, how about the Personal Computer? If IBM had made the PC architecture closed, would the industry have exploded in the way it has? Probably not - witness Apple's failure to grab much of the market due to their own architecture not being clonable. In the beginning, Apple was certainly in a good position to dominate the new market, but instead the cheap "PC clones" dictated the direction, and the industry expanded rapidly. Much innovation followed (in the hardware sense, if not in the operating system sense). Did IBM, the originator of the PC architecture, suffer as a result of all this? Perhaps in the short term, but in the longer term the company has thrived from the byproducts of the PC industry - and, more importantly, so has the whole computer industry. When the greater world benefits, then so does IBM, albeit in a more subtle and indirect way.

    Another example: The Internet. Open standards, open source software. Would TCP/IP, HTTP, XML, CGI, and all those other foundation blocks of computing today have taken off if they were patented? I think not. Would anyone have believed that Open Source could work at all if it hadn't done so already? Obviously people are willing to produce innovative stuff just for its own sake. In the short term, perhaps, there is no direct profit to be seen - but it comes further down the road, to everyone. The whole world benefits.

    So what about things like drugs? They don't work in the same way as computers, surely... but really, they do. If companies shared their "secrets" then the whole field would leap ahead so much faster than now, and there would be enough for everyone to thrive. Think of all the things that could be done with shared knowledge instead of hoarded secrets! Also, with a more open research community, research and development wouldn't cost as much as it does now anyway.

    The whole IP industry is one based on fear, rather than sharing. Fear that I won't make enough money, and everyone else will steal my idea. But history shows that people innovate quite happily without the millstone of patents and IP law hanging around their necks. We have lived through most of history without patents and IP - why is it suddenly essential now? Answer: Greed and fear.

    Patents these days stifle the small inventor and favor instead huge corporations who can afford to employ armies of attorneys for the sole purpose of getting "defensive" patents. The system has grown so complex that it simply doesn't do that it was originally
  • What is so special about software that the legal system allows it to be simultaneously protected in three major ways - trade secrets, patents, *and* copyright?

    You can patent software without supplying the source code to the public or the patent office, so it gets patented yet remains a trade secret. On top of that, copyright gives it the life+70 years protection.

    Other creations are only allowed to simultaneously use one out of the three protections, maybe two in a few cases. But it is ridiculous that so

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A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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