Re: [Patents] That Article

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> You can sometimes make communication easier by forgetting about the
> idea/expression dichotomy and just talking about the breadth of the 
> exclusion.
> 
> Insiders want fast, cheap and narrow IP, while some outsiders want to impose
> the slow, expensive and broad form of IP that generates a lot of legal fees.
> 
> One of the problems of communication that we are facing is that the
> "fast, cheap and narrow IP" is called "copyright" and associated with
> dichotomies such as "idea vs expression" which do not really adequately
> describe the problem (and therefore allow some people from the patent
> camp to delegitimate the "fast, cheap and narrow" variant and create
> a lot of confusion).

A journalist reading this list asked me in private 
mail whether this means that we assert that copyright is also
inappropriate or ineffective.

Of course it does not.  Copyright works well in the software
field, as everyone working there knows.

But the terminology of copyright, especially vulgarised versions of this
theory, seems to be made for literary more than for functional works.
It is abstract, its relation to reality is not easy to grasp and easy
to nitpick on, and it makes ousiders intuitively think that copyright 
is not made for the realm of software.

I therefore propose to forget about terms such as "idea vs expression"
and instead treat copyright and patent as two proposed solutions to the
problem of turning software achievements into assets (software IP), and
compare the parameters that matter in this context, such as exclusion
scope, cost and speed.  It appears that what we need, not only in software,
is a system of fast, cheap and narrow IP, and copyright comes close to
that spec whereas the patent system badly fails, in software and beyond,
thanks to 100 years of stewardship by a community that simply believes in
and extends the once-established rules and doesn't care about what they 
are supposed to achieve.

See

        http://kwiki.ffii.org/IndpropEn

for a future vision of a copyright-like system of industrial property.

But maybe we shouldn't call it copyright.