[Patents] Re: patent pools enforcing per-copy-licensing mode of software development

[PILCH Hartmut phm@a2e.de]

> >Hartmut writes:
> >Why universities in the first place, if they are not to foster free
> >diffusion of information that benefits all of society?
> 
> So I assume Hartmut, that you don't want universities patenting 
> anything - no biotech patents, no software patents, no hardware patents?

As you know, I have little problems with technical patents, i.e. patents
on solutions based on new knowledge about causal relations between natural
forces and a physical effect.
 
> >Why not instead let IBM and Microsoft do the work of universities?
> 
> Increasingly they might control everything, as people with new software
> and hardware ideas see all the profits and commercialization captured
> by IBM and Microsoft, whose entrenched clout makes it difficult to
> compete for startups and individuals.  Unless they have some effective
> protection, like a patent.  

This is what patent lawyers always say.  It is their professional
ideology, written 50 years ago into their schoolbook, quite out of touch
with reality.

As you know, there are a lot of startups who write good software and are
successful with that, even without "protection" by patents.  But even
venture capital funds will tell you: once a large number of patents is
established in any field, it becomes difficult for most startups to get
moving, so venture capitalists won't even give much money to a startup
that has patents.

On the other hand, some institutions that don't develop software but focus
completely on developping patents can at least be certain to reap *some*
returns, which they couldn't if they rely on product development.

Patent-focussed startups have nothing to fear from the patent system nor
from anyone else.  But also they don't have much to gain, since all they
can hope for is a share in some patent tax pool.  This is much less money
than you get by marketing a successful software product.  And it may not
be enough to persuade a venture capital company.  The latter may prefer to
invest in the big companies.

So the old game known from biblical times as 

        "He who has, to him is given; he who has not, from him is taken"

is independent of the existence of patents.  Patents just change some 
rules of the game, shifting the competition to a different focus,
demanding a different type of company.

> But if preserving the power and clout of large companies like IBM and
> Microsoft has been your goal all along, I withdraw this observation.

I am not particularly against those companies, but your propositions are
very favorable to them, especially to Microsoft, while pretending to be
oriented toward some utopian desire of equality between the
well-entrenched and the startups.

Proprietarist ideology has very much in common with communist ideology.
Both try to infinitely extend one principle, which is appropriate for one
sphere of life, to the whole world.  Both try to mobilise utopian desires
of the small man.  Both promise a better world in some distant future,
when all the evident practical problems of their system have been solved.

That the principle of private property is opposite to the principle of
common property is just incidental in this context.  

In 1989 some, like Fukuyama, thought mankind now got rid of totalitarian
ideologies and was heading for a new age of balance which could no longer
be overturned easily.  They were apparently wrong.  The danger never comes
from the side from which you expect it to come.

-phm