This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.
Thanks to Slash.dot I came across this Guardian article on intellectual property, Owning ideas (Andrew Brown, Nov. 19, 2005). The article provides different examples from software to genomics. One of the examples the article provides is Microsoft patenting XML related technology for packaging objects into XML, see Microsoft slammed over XML patent – ZDNet UK News.
Can we patent the idea of intellectual property? Or the process of frivolous patenting of business practices?
Here is a quote on IP and software:
Software patents came along later, and are much more damaging, because they can be enforced. Copyright protects only particular program code. It does not – crucially – protect the way that it looks and works. Nor does it protect the clever ideas contained within it. In a world where software is only protected by copyright, competition works like evolution – by incremental improvement.
Patenting software could stop all that. Because patents are meant to protect inventions, they apply to ways of doing things in software. This can be discussed as if it were real machinery, but in fact it’s an idea, or an arrangement of ideas.
The final problem with software patents is that they can be taken out on business processes, such as Amazon’s one-click buying. Here, what is protected is not even a trick to writing programs. It is a way of dealing with customers. That is the kind of innovation the market is meant to spread more quickly than any other mechanism. Patents on business processes obviously deliberately slow this process down, and if clever business ideas can be patented, why not other ideas? There is a man in California trying to patent movie plots.