Re: [Patents] Paper: "Rent Seeking and Innovation"

[Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca>]

(I realize this is an old message, but just wanted to put in my $.02CDN)

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

> Where is your comparative industry sector economic analysis or data to 
> support such an assertion?  There are two costs with patents: getting
> them and fighting battles.

  Greg,

  You only include the patent holders in this minimalist analysis, and
only a small part of one sector that is involved in software.  Your
evaluations aren't coming up different than ours because your numbers are
being criticized, but because you aren't accounting for all the required
factors.


  First:  people/organizations who don't hold patents still have
considerable costs because of patents.  This is simply not a matter of
paying royalties, but the huge amount of time to determine if you are
infringing a patent in the first place.  Whether you claim it is a patent
quality problem or not, independent invention is not a defense in patent
law and thus being ignorant of all patents (never reading them, never
wanting to 'learn' from them if that is possible) does not protect one
from the costs of patents.

  This is typical in the software field - patents provide no benefit to
non-patent holders ad the claimed 'disclosure' doesn't happen. In the case
of Free Software you have joined a copyright pool for very legitimate
business reasons, and yet still need to deal with the expenses of a patent
system which provides absolutely no benefit, and in fact is being used
aggressively as a form of incumbent protectionism against your attempt to
compete in a (claimed) free market.


  Second:  While non-free software distribution(1) is dominated by (a
small part of) the private sector with negligible input from other
sectors, the free software market is multi-sectored with public,private
and volunteer sector participation.  While the patent system may 'appear'
(and even this has never been proven) to work with the very top of the
private sector, it is entirely disfunctional for the other sectors.


(1) - That is the 5-10% of software that is distributed at all.  I've seen
many articles that indicate that 90-95% of software by lines of code is
never distributed at all and is used in-house.


> So SHOW ME THE DATA.

  Prove to us that you would recognize the data and maybe someone will
spend the time.  You have thus far not indicated that you have any
interest in acknowledging the existence of more than a very small subset
of the software market.

> Greg Aharonian
---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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