[p2p-research] CAD files at The PIrate Bay? (Follow up)

[Stan Rhodes]

Kevin,

I don't understand what you mean by "enter the picture."  Patents can and
will be used to destroy competition, which I figured was the main reason
small manufacturers might want a pool of them.  If you mean that you don't
see any good reason for small manufacturers to try to get state-enforced
monopolies themselves, then yes, I don't see it helping them at all.

File-sharing designs has two important issues in play, as I see it.

First, the designs themselves, subject to copyright, should probably be
"GPL-ed" to "common-capture" them so that users always have the right to use
and modify them.

Second, on the devices/processes subject to patents, I absolutely agree that
patenting them is a waste of time and money.  I would take the old "Bell
Labs" approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Patent

Designs could be pooled online, and sent to the USPTO as a newsletter.  The
patent office could be contacted and asked what would be the least painful
way for them to ensure that prior art was being established.

Also, it would be quite useful for designers to include small notes of prior
art that were "seeds" of their own design.  This both helps establish an
evolutionary history with attribution, and creates an an automatic
counter-strike to claims of patent infringement from other parties.  This
could easily be nothing more than a page for prior art and inspiration for
each version of product, perhaps via a wiki or other version control system
that makes it easy.

Tagging would be essentially for easy cross-referencing.  I believe that is
essentially what the USPTO does, by filing every patent in multiple
subcategories that it touches.

Thoughts?

-- Stan

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> It just occurred me, but isn't the whole question of file-sharing
> patented designs only of interest to a fairly limited subset of the
> Making movement?  Given (literally) a micromanufacturing economy of
> 100,000 small shops with CNC tools, it seems pretty unlikely that
> patents would even enter into the picture for a garage manufacturer
> serving a market area of a few thousand people.  After all, securing a
> patent is extremely expensive and takes a long time.  It probably
> wouldn't even be worth it for someone not engaged in large-batch
> manufacturing.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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