Re: Bezos on 1-click ordering

[Nicolai Rosen <nick@netaxs.com>]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Mark-Jason Dominus wrote:

> 
> 
> > I think that the whole idea of a patent is absurd. You're saying that you
> > own a discovery. 
> 
> Not quite.  It's not really like you own the discovery.  It's more
> like you own an exclusive license from the goverment to make use of
> the discovery.  That's not absurd; people license stuff all the time.

But that's my point. It's a license fromt he government. It's artificial &
contrary to the rights of everybody to use science for their own benefit.

> Congress' power to award patents derives from the Constitution, where
> it says:
> 
>         The Congress shall have the power ...  To promote the progress
>         of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to
>         authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective
>         writings and discoveries ...
> 
> That's what patents are supposed to be about: Promotion of the
> progress of science and the useful arts.  The inventor gets an
> exclusive license to his or her invention for a certain period, in
> return for making public the details of how it works.  The idea is
> that the patent is a trade.  The public will come out ahead in the
> long run because inventors will be encouraged to disclosed their ideas
> by the promise of the patent.

That's not the way patents work though. If anything, they restrict
innovation. Were we to do away w/ them, you wouldn't get fat corporations
making money by preventing others from innovating. Examples of this
include Intel's efforts to keep that japanese company from producing a bus
for AMD (or something like that. My memory's shot), the patent on fixing
Y2K bugs by windowing, etc..

> > The methods to do these things already exist. You're just
> > discovering them.
> 
> That's a pretty fine philosophical hair to split, isn't it?  Anyway,
> whether you call it inventing or discovering, it seems to be equally
> hard to do.

So then as the person who had access to this information first, you have a
head start. You shouldn't need patents, especially at the current rate of
technological progress.

> > The idea of intellectual property has always seemed a bit,
> > artificial for me).
> 
> It's artificial for lawyers too.  In law there's a distinction between
> natural and statutory rights.  You have natural rights to life and
> liberty because it's unethical to deny them.  But your copyrights are
> much more pragmatic.  You have copyrights not because you're ethically
> entitled to them, but only because Congress passed laws that said that
> you have those rights, presumably because it appears to be in the
> public interest to give you those rights.  Again, the idea is that by
> granting copyrights, Congress is encouraging people to write books,
> and by granting patents, Congress is encouraging inventors to disclose
> their inventions, and that the public welfare will be improved as a
> result.  But the rights only exist for the ultimate benefit of the
> public, not the author or inventor, and they're specifically different
> from natural rights such as the right to own property.

That may be the intention, but that's not how things work in the real
world. Also, I think that if we're granting a right that isn't a natural
right, then we need to take a serious look at why that right is being
granted and whether or not it's justified.

Nicolai Rosen
nick@netaxs.com
Earthstation/Netaxs

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