From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 11:04:55 MST
> I'm considering all kinds of ideas with regard to Biobots for which
> the technology is just about available. I wouldn't even think of
> starting something like this without a fair hope of getting patent
> protection on a chunk of the technology or process. Why? Because
> a big Pharma company could come along and pour 10x the money at
> it and unless I had patent protection I'd be standing in the street
> with a tin cup.
That's a very short-sighted and unimaginative attitude (although I
admit that at the present, human lifetimes are short-term things
and one does need to be concerned about that). When the economy
itself, common business practices, and to some extent the values of
society are all based on the assumption of patents and the lone
inventor model of creativity, it naturally makes sense that opposing
that assumption will have consequences. But that doesn't validate
the assumption.
For some reason, our culture has bought into the Edison myth: that
an inventor is a lone genius who creates something new and marvellous
out of nothing, patents it, and makes a fortune from the idea alone.
But that's not how nature invents things: nature invents things by
making tiny improvements and adaptations over a long time, each of
which makes things a little better, and which after millennia result
in marvellous and wonderful things.
If society had instead embraced the natural model of creativity,
that all creation is small improvements and adptations of existing
things, patents would be unnecessary, because there would not be
the need to recoup expensive development. Long development cycles
are speculative and inefficient--they only exist because patents
make them a good bet. Without patents, progress is made gradually
in short steps that don't need years of monopoly protection to
profit. Information is shared to everyone, so when your idea is
produced by someone else, you're still free to produce his ideas
as well, and to continue making small improvements. Creative minds
will still always profit, because beating competitors to market by
even a few weeks with a small improvement is valuable, and giving
those creative minds unrestricted access to all the information
they can find makes them even more powerful.
Grand ideas are no more intrinsicly valuable than manual labor;
the idea that either has value is the Marxist fallacy. Value comes
from demand, not labor. Neither labor nor invention should be valued
or rewarded until it produces something that people want to buy. If
abolishing the patent system means that grand ideas will be less
rewarded, I say that's a good thing.
Grand ideas and visions are entertaining, but we shouldn't value
them economically until they are actually practical, and we
shouldn't create a system to make them valuable before their time.
Patents exhalt novelty for its own sake, and denigrate craftsmanship
and entrepreneurial talent. I don't just want new gadgets, I want
the kind of mature, advanced, quality products that come from years
of small improvements and the combined ideas of thousands of minds,
not one or two minds with a protected market.
An inventor is a craftsman of ideas. It is a poor craftman who
throws away the knowledge of centuries of his predecessors for the
sake of novelty. The fine craftman finds ways to incorporate new
things with his experience and tradition to make something not just
new, but truly better.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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