[Patents] Re: World Intellectual Property Day is April 26, 2001

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> The basis of your public policy is ludicrous.

> I used to work in software development, and I know that the best
> software developers do not work for free.  In the short-term, they
> have expenses to pay for.  In the long-term, they must provide for
> retirement, and they often have the ambition of becoming rich from
> their efforts.

We have currently a de facto symbiosis of free and proprietary software.
Proprietary software is good for making money flow, free software is good
for making information flow.
Both are antagonistic principles that can be combined.
Copyright is the formula for combining them.
You generate money for a while, but ultimately everything becomes free.
If you don't make it free, other people will write competing free
software, because they can't stand the chains of monopolism.
By then, you will have made enough money.
Actually this is also what patents are intended to do, in theory.
But in practise they enforce the money principle and kill the information
principle.
They harm both free and proprietary software.

> The free software is ultimately doomed to be swept away into the
> dustbin of history, along with socialism.

This statement could become true to some degree if the patent system
continues to expand.  But there are limits to that, even if the patent
maximalists have their way.

I think matters are quite contrary:  the patent maximalists are the
bolsheviks of our time.  They are trying to enforce a principle of private
property on a public good, just as the bolsheviks tried to enforce the
principle of public property on private goods.  That just can't work,
economically speaking.

Ten years ago I wasn't really aware myself that information is so
radically different from matter.  I actually learnt that by reading a book
on patent economics.  This book praised the patent system for its effect
of setting knowledge free.  This effect is based on the categorial cut
between information and matter, more specifically between empirical
knowledge related information and its corporal embodiment.

However in the case of logical knowledge, there is no corporal embodiment.
So called "software products" are just dummies, placeholders designed to
create a feeling that something is being sold.  What is sold are not
"products" but licenses: purely abstract legal constructions that actually
compromise the information itself by making it less usable.

This is not so difficult to see, but the patent movement is, like the
bolshevik movement, dominated by materialists who try to reduce everything
they see to matter and to their model of putting monopolies and price tags
on things.  On the one hand we have materialist idiots who go around
preaching foolish sectarian theories, on the other we have intelligent
people who keep their mouth shut because the system serves their current
interests.

In the general public, so far only a few people see that software is not
subjected to the rules of the Market, but also the rules of the Forum. It
obeys both the "publish or perish" type of university culture and the
secretive and oligopolistic business culture. It lives in this bipolar
field of forces.  If one of the poles is propped up with artificial state
power, the biotope of software collapses.

The bolshevik movement eventually went into the dustbin, and software
patents are also not here to stay.  But unfortunately mankind takes a long
time to learn.  The whole patent movement was a movement of lawyers
against economists, but as long as it stayed in the realm of matter
(natural forces), i.e. in the realm where each invention necessarily had a
corporal embodiment with marginal replication costs constant somewhere
above zero, requiring an industrial apparatus, the benefits and costs of
the patent system were somewhere close to being balanced.  This is no
longer the case when you enter the field of logical inventions, i.e.
inventions with non-corporal, immaterial embodiments (such as an
information structure or a way of acting).  And the results speak for
themselves.  The European Patent Office has produced a big pile of crap
that may please lawyers but is painful to look at for anyone with a faint
understanding of software.  Moreover, software determines the way in which
we organise our lives.  Informational self-determination is a human
necessity which lies at the level of the human rights catalogue, see Art
19 of the UN Human Right Declaration.  If the patent movement continues to
be so blind as to allow this brutal and ridicululous intrusion in
informational freedom, it risks being swept away one day by a tidal wave
that fairly rational people like me will no longer be able to control.
That would then be the late revenge of the economists whose advice was not
heeded by the lawyer lobby in the 19th century.

Of course I know that that doesn't matter to most patent lawyers.  They
will have filled their belly and droven their luxury cars to the golf club
at the expense of decades of general welfare and freedom.  Maybe for
decades until their system dies of exhaustion, or maybe for a short time
until it is swept away by a tidal wave.  Patent lawyers usually couldn't
care less.  No more than bolshevik sectarians cared for the well-being of
their system.  They just celebrate their property myths, based on the old
Roman saying

        fiat iustitia, pereat mundus
        justice shall happen, and may the world go to pieces

And all the phenomena of Orwellian newspeak, brainwashed dead
personalities and much more totalitarian and sectarian phenomenology can
be observed in former "real existing socialism" (as we called the East
German system) just as well as in current day EPO "real existing
proprietarism".

If you want to go ahead on that path, then celebrate the "World
Intellectual Property Day".

> ------Original Message------
> From: PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>
> To: "David J. Dickinson" <ddickinson@epo.org>
> Sent: April 26, 2001 10:52:04 AM GMT
> Subject: Re: World Intellectual Property Day is April 26, 2001
>
>
> On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, David J. Dickinson wrote:
>
> > Dear Patent Information User,
> >
> > April 26, 2001 will be celebrated as the first World Intellectual Property
> > Day, an opportunity to highlight the significance of creativity and
> > innovation in people's daily lives and in the betterment of society.
>
> > At their annual meetings in September 2000, WIPO member States decided
> > to designate April 26, the date on which the Convention establishing
> > WIPO entered into force in 1970, for special activities to highlight
> > the importance and practical use of intellectual property.
>
> > For more information on how this occasion will be marked by events and
> > activities around the world, either :
>
> > a)  go to the WIPO home page   http://www.wipo.int/   and click on the
> > "News" link to the story
>
> > or
>
> > b)  go directly to   http://www.wipo.int/news/en/worldip/world_ip   to ;
> > view
> > the information directly.
>
> Apparently WIPO is stepping up its myth-creating activities and becoming
> more and more sectarian.  This is well in line with the recent WIPO drive
> to write "unlimited patentability and strict limitations on patent
> quality" into international law -- we reported about the Substantive
> Patent Law Treaty.
>
> All this reminds me of the "intellectual property" celebrations of the
> French Revolution, about which Machlup narrates in his report to congress
> of 1958.  He mentions that French scholars of the time acknowledged that
> the "intellectual property" concept was a propaganda myth, designed to
> avoid less popular but more honest wordings such as "temporary monopoly"
> or "privilege".  It is this kind of sectarian propaganda that has allowed
> the patent system to run rampant and forget about its social function as
> an exception to free competition, designed to "promote the progress of
> science and the useful art" and measured by its capability of doing just
> that.  Machlup reports that the patent movement has been a movement of
> lawyers against economists.  The lawyers prevailed and created their
> self-reinforcing institutions.  But one day the whole thing may implode if
> they go on in a sectarian manner like this.
>
> Any patent law professionals who have a spark of conscience remaining in
> their soul should demand with us that this kind of myth-building using
> public institutiuons and public money be stopped immediately.  Let's make
> April 26th a "Day of Free Speech" or "Day of the Free Information
> Infrastructure" instead.  Or maybe "World Intellectual Poverty Day"?
>
> Hartmut Pilch
> Association for a Free Information Infrastructure
> http://swpat.ffii.org/
>
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