Open patents and intellectual property

[Arthur Smith <apsmith@aps.org>]

I sent the following to Bruce Sterling after reading some of his
Viridian ideas (http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/). I haven't really
heard back from him yet, but it seemed relevant to this list too, now
that I've discovered it. The OPL (if it works as I think it should) may
be another major step in moving us to a new concept of information
sharing, as opposed to the information hoarding that surrounds the very
term "intellectual property". It's essentially the same issues and the
same problems whether you're talking about open source, self-published
MP3's, Sterling's open design ideas, or anything that flies against the
way patent and copyright concepts have been misused in the last decades
of the 20th century.

Anyway, I hope this fits in here  - openpatents.org sure seems like an
idea whose time has come,

		Arthur Smith (apsmith@aps.org)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Free and Open creativity
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 01:34:05 -0500 (EST)
From: "Arthur P. Smith" <apsmith@aps.org>
To: bruces@well.com

I'm intrigued by your manifesto, in particular calling for designers
and artists to stop thinking of their creations as property and start
sharing them. I know this concept owes much to the open source software
successes, but something very like this I think really derives from the
way science is, or should be, done - the concept of sharing new ideas
and discoveries to let everybody benefit, and to let others quickly
build
on (or falsify) your work is one of the reasons science has progressed
so amazingly far in this century, leading to many of our new
technologies
in the process.

Since I work for a major scientific publisher we've been grappling with
this concept of treating what we publish as intellectual property which
we, the authors, and the whole community also feel should somehow be
freely
available and not locked up in the ways that "property" seems to want to
be.
A number of proposals have been made - the most forceful perhaps
by Stevan Harnad (http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/) who thinks authors
of scientific articles should either pay to have their work refereed and
distributed by publishers (not to be confused with a vanity press which
it
so closely resembles...) or such things should be funded by grants, in
any
case making the literature freely available to readers. We've so far
settled
on a medium where we allow, even encourage, physicists to self-publish
their
work as they format it themselves (particularly on the Los Alamos
E-Print
Archive at http://www.arxiv.org/), and then we run through the editorial
process here to refine things and spiff up the papers a bit and
republish
something that subscribers pay to get access to. At least that's the
model
we'll be in for a few more years - we do have one experimental journal
running
in the Harnad model. In any case, scientists have almost never been
directly
paid for their work of creation or discovery, instead receiving payment
in recognition at least within their academic department. Except of
course
for patents.

And thinking about patents seems to bring a possible broader scope to
the
concepts suggested by your manifesto. Now that we have these wonderful
new media for communication, wouldn't it make sense to replace the
patent
system with something that still rewards the creator for a creation,
still
rewards the inventor for an invention, but doesn't leave that
intellectual
entity as a piece of property which cannot be used by others without
surmounting a barrier of fees and licenses? At least patents, unlike
copyrights, are of relatively brief duration, after which the concepts
become
public knowledge; but if we recognize the creator from the start,
wouldn't we be likely to see publication of great new designs and
processes
in, say, a few months after their creation, rather than the 20 years it
takes a patent to expire (not to mention the 3-10 initial years of
secrecy
before the application is approved).

Reducing the cycle time for great ideas to build on one another, making
these great ideas publicly available to the 2 or so billion inhabitants
of this planet who could possibly do something with them - wouldn't
that lead to an explosion of creativity and technology development in
resolution of innumerable problems we have here?
The global warming issue you have focused on is one demonstration -
clearly we have a huge range of technologies that could help in one way
or another, but we need them to be working now, not 10 or 20 or 30
years from now. Space development is another - there are a lot of
suggestions of technologies to get us into space for a tiny fraction of
the cost NASA expends now - an open approach to the technology
development and design could get us affordable space transportation for
the masses in a much shorter time.

There are clearly a lot of unknowns in this. Where does the money come
from
to support these inventors and designers who are donating their
creations?
One way is to create a foundation that awards money based on the
usefulness of
contributions, supported in turn by the consumer level (manufacturing or
service) industries that make use of these ideas. A lot more detail than
this
is needed - but I think it could possibly lead to a whole new economic
paradigm: in addition to the manufacturing and service sectors, we have
a "creative" sector that is at least partly funded through a (surely
voluntary)
tax on the first two. Perhaps we are heading that way anyway? Sort of a
meta-economy on top of the real one? Eventually as artifical
intelligence
kicks in, perhaps the meta-economy will be the only one where humans
actually
do any work? But that's a way down the line.

I think it's a  wonderfully exciting time we live in, but I would be
deeply
disappointed if the great new communication tools we've been given
become
a mass of barriers and toll-booths, wasting creativity through needless
duplication and lack of communication. I think between artists and
designers, scientists and engineers we may have the makings of a truly
new order in the world - there seem to be many separate threads along
these
lines - perhaps they will converge?

Anyway, thanks for listening...

		Arthur

------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur P. Smith                       Research & Development
The American Physical Society                   
1 Research Rd. Box 9000              e-mail: apsmith@aps.org
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