Intellectual Dishonesty

Open source is about new beginnings for me. While many write about the end of closed-source and the intellectual property racketeers, I’m more interested in the end of the beginning for the new model that will displace the intellectual property monopolists.

The funny thing for me is that intellectual property is, often, intellectually dishonest.

Intellectual property laws were created to promote innovation by granting a market monopoly to the innovator. Remember, society bears the cost of granting a patent monopoly resulting in higher costs as a trade-off to promote innovation. Patents aren’t a natural, free-market right; they are a privilege granted by society for the long-term benefit of society in general.

Intellectual property laws were created at a time when, compared to today’s standard, it took forever to create a market. Inventions were mechanical devices that had to be created, perfected and manufactured. In the eighteenth century, seventeen years seemed a reasonable amount of time to exploit one’s new patent and a relatively small price for society to bear to promote innovation.

Today, entire industries are conceived, developed, deployed, exploited and made obsolete within seventeen years. I’ve been in the software business since 1979. In that time I’ve seen block-mode terminals, character-mode terminals, client-server and, now, web-based application deployment. Web-based deployments themselves have seen multiple generations. Does anyone remember the promising lucrative field of artificial intelligence (AI)? I remember being sold AI solutions back in 1983 that never materialized.

I was pitched a clever new database model last year that “turned rows into columns.” I didn’t really understand the pitch until they drew it out on the whiteboard. As they drew the diagram they referred to the non-disclosure statement I had signed as well as their newly minted patents for this fantastic, new database idea.

What they drew was a hierarchical data model. This was something I first started programming in back in 1982. I asked when their patents were issued, “Last year,” they replied. Good grief, someone has re-discovered IBM’s IMS and has received a patent. The sad thing was the patents were an asset with which this company attempted to raise funds from venture capitalists. The equally naïve/inexperienced VCs probably didn’t have an institutional memory of IMS either.

What’s the point of this rant? It’s pointless, I guess. It’s difficult to witness the insane point that our intellectual property laws have reached. Microsoft claims that Linux violates 235 of their patents yet they claim it would be burdensome to actually identify those patents.

The intellectual property racket must end. Intellectual property laws were designed to promote innovation, not to allow monopolists to stifle it. We have an entire generation that has been taught that new ideas have to be “protectable” to be worthy of consideration. Whatever happened to being faster and better than the competition? Do these companies really need a seventeen year head-start? Does Microsoft really need a government-sanctioned sledge-hammer with which to intimidate smaller companies?

Do we, as a society, still need to grant monopolies to companies in order to promote innovation? I’ve never felt I needed a monopoly to be successful; I just needed to be faster than the other guy. I’m a pedal-to-the-metal kind of guy and I’m convinced that I can move forward faster with my own ideas than anyone else can move in trying to copy me.