Re: [Patents] Copyright for innovation

[Stefano Maffulli <stef@zoomata.com>]

On Fri, 2003-10-24 at 00:02, David Allouche wrote:
> Imagine MyStartup Inc writes KillerFeature, a nice innovative program
> (which contributes to the progress of computing) but lacks the "sales
> force" to penetrate the market quickly. Then BigBusiness Corp stumbles
> upon the software and shamelessly clone it (without ever reusing a line
> of code) thanks to its army of Programmers From MIT then uses its squads
> of Marketeers in Black Suits to quickly take over the market.  The
> investors of MyStartup would expect some garantee that this will not
> happen and currently the only way to this end is patents. Copyright is
> not enough. 

I ran across this argument often in latest days.  My answer is that you
Startup Inc needs to have a better business plan, not patents!  My
example for rebuttal of this argument is Zope Corp.  

If YourStartup Inc wants to innovate in software, better not use the
same business model of the current market dominators, since in a
monopoly-based market (as is proprietary software) only ONE company wins
and the rest of them get collect the dust.  See the GIS field, with ESRI
being the ONE and even colussus like Autodesk and IBM get only a minimal
share of market.

I agree with you that we need to suggest a new vision for the ICT world,
but that future should never allow patents on ideas.

> Surely, the macro-economic cost of software patents is not justified by
> this kind of micro-economic scenario. However whe can expect pressure to
> interpret copyright more widely.  I can imagine the copyright law being
> extended to consider recreating identical solutions a copyright
> violation as far as an identical solution reuses visible design
> decision.  For example, "user experience" might become copyrightable, it
> is already more or less...

This thought is so medieaval.  Shall we (society, citizens)  grant a
monopoly to ideas (like a "user experience", like the tabbed interface)
in exchange to what, exactly?  And how much do you think it would cost
for YourStartup Inc to develop and implement from scratch a "user
experience"?

Just to give you some numbers, the development of Windows NT 4 (not a
complete rewrite of previous systems, afaik, but a consistent investment
in changing the UI) costed 4Millions, but MSFT put more than 60Millions
for support and helpdesk.  

I cannot find my references anymore (broken links) but the order of
magnitude should be that.  If somebody has the exact figures I would be
grateful to be informed.

> Do we consider such an extension of copyright acceptable and what
> alternative can we propose? How can we balance the "value of the design"
> and the "value of the implementation"? 

The value of design is extremely low, and I say this as Italian and as
an architect.  The real juice is the organization of the production
plant, the brains of the designers, the manifacturing process,the
branding, the marketing, the overall management.  NOT the design per se,
that comes in a night of thoughts and some paper/pencils/colors or a
computer :-)  And we could start a whole different OT thread about my
connationals whining of "chinese" companies "copying" our clothes. bah.

bye
stef

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