In honor of Comic-con - a rebuttal to the End of IP

This week is Comic-con in New York.

Comic-con is awesome.

Comic-con could not be possible in a nation without a strong commitment to intellectual property protection. While people may differ on the benefits conferred by the Sonny Bono amendment (AKA the Mickey Mouse Protection Act), no one honestly argues that the characters in their favorite comics, video games and movies, should be free for anyone to pass off as their own.

That being said, the Anti-IP crowd (which is really an anti-software patent crowd), has yet to make the empirical case that nations without IP protection produce more intellectual property than nations that have weak or strong IP regimes. The Manga output of, say South Korea vs China, speaks to this.  The reasons are varied, and the subject of individual posts.

However, in honor of Comic-con, I present the following (terrible) Comic which demonstrates some of the problems that Anti-IP advocates face.

(all "YEA!" should be read as though spoken by the talking food of "Yo Gabba Gabba".)

jgarner@leasonellis.com

Columbus Day Inventions - App Inspiration

In my continuing quest to prove that Patent law is not simply a mechanism for destroying the aspirations of having a "Social Network" style movie made about your life, I decided to put together a bunch of Columbus Day themed Patents.

While you can look at these patents and see the clanking mechanical devices of a century past, I prefer to see them as a rich vein of design and functionality that can be easily ported to a App for fun and profit. 

Humm...maybe I should patent turning mechanical patents into Software Patents... 

If you get tired of looking at awesome patents from the last century, a magical time of steam and whatnot, feel free to read the 8 page take down of the IP profession in today's New York Times.

Each of these patents would work well as an App or a graphic novel, cum spoken word performance piece. Either way, the prior art is well documented and at least 100 years old.  Just because some jerk calls you up and threatens you with infringement based on a flimsy patent does not mean that all patents were / are bad.

Columbus Day Patents: 

(All of these devices work better in their original, century old form, than Apple Maps)

For All you Brooklyn-ites, Fixie rider, Kickstarting metal workers out there, I present Brooklyn Native Raymond Finkelson's level attachment compass for bicycles. 

Designed to let bicyclists of the early 20th century know their direction, and grade, this bit of vintage Brooklyn Tech can easily be made and adapted to the wider, flashier Iphone 5. Christopher Columbus would have loved to have a bicycle and a Fixie at that. Only the truest of hipsters could rock pants that skinny. 

Above - A instrument for taking Nautical Observations. US Patent 11,475 (found here). Lots of Iphone 5 Potential here. A bit of graphical and computing horsepower lets you tilt a 3d representation of the Earth for all your nautical observational needs. Columbus would have given several shinny beads to the natives who hooked him up with this sweet app, and small pox. 

Above - Graphic Solar Instrument. Remake this into a Grid-based Helvetian typeface, you are set. Patent found here. Nothing impresses the locals like telling them exactly when Sun will be eaten by Mountain. Also it is helpful when you need to know when happy hour starts.   

Jgarner@leasonellis.com 

www.leasonellis.com 

Off hiatus, and the End Of IP

I have been on hiatus from Claimed Elements for a little while (which is official-ese for "I had other more pressing things to do").  However, much like the leaves change, so does my desire to blog.

A lot of this change in desire has come from some recent developments in the "End all IP" Troika of economists, open source software mavens, and Pacific Rim Software Pirates.

Recently, a study produced by the St. Louis Fed ( Paper can be found here) makes a strenuous call for the abolition of patents.  In brief, the authors conclude that there is no benefit to innovation by adopting a patent system. Let me state 1) that the St. Louis Fed has better things to do than opine on Patent Law. 2) They really should have better things to do than opine on Patent Law (Like calling for an increase in marginal lending practices so as to allow people easier debt servicing (oh, you don't like it when Patent Lawyers go all "economist speak", well turnabout is fair play.")

Obviously, I disagree, and not just because I like getting a paycheck.  There is a major fallacy lurking at the heart of the study.

Comparison.

Now, I grant you that Patent law has gotten a bit out of hand (something I call the Locust Syndrome, but more on that another time), but there is absolutely no way to determine if a system with or without patents produces more innovation.

Why. Because we don't have a second, alternative reality Earth to use as a control.  The authors focus (as most anti-IP people do) on Software Patents.  The problem is that they can not point to another first world, industrialized nation with the infrastructure and educational system necessary to produce sophisticated software code. We can't say that in 1520, the rate of innovation was better or worse than the rate of innovation today. The circumstances of innovation and progress are the end result of  historical accidents, low hanging fruit, and economic factors.

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson "in the early 21st century, America only did three things well, make movies, make music and write the best code."

The author's have not provided an example of a country that is producing superior, or more innovative software compared to what is developed by companies taking advantage of the U.S. Patent system.  The reason is obvious, in an fully integrated world, it is impossible to tell what effect the Patent system has on developments country A vs country B. Without a control group, we are merely grabbing at strawmen to explain why our version of reality is the right one.

So lets all take off our sandwich boards and calm down.

Jordan Garner (Jgarner@leasonellis.com)
www.leasonellis.com