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Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
Dave asks: "Question: Where's the harm in keeping the system as-is, minus the patents. Give me an indefinite copyright on my own work...Where is the problem with that?" Regarding legal protection of IP (copyright and patents) the Instapundit legal paper you linked to yesterday (which I thought was quite good) says:
They must be "for a limited time" because part of the public's payback is that the invention or creation will eventually enter the public domain. They must also be reasonably calculated to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," meaning that they must bear some relationship to creativity, not simply political clout. To sum up. Copyright and patent law is a compromise between the creators of IP and the general public at large. The government wants to foster progress and innovation but progress (in anything) implies the ability to build on the past. Imagine the state of physics if Newton had copyrighted and kept secret differential calculus and only published the results of his calculations without ever revealing how they were done. Thus all creative work *must* eventually pass into the public domain. So the government makes a compromise. Works are protected for a limited time to allow the creator to cash in for a bit - but then the work has to go into the public domain. I think the problem Lessig is on about is that closed most source software never makes it to the public domain in any meaningful way. So the software industry isn't holding up its part of the bargain. Fine, you cashed in - now where's the advancement of the art we can all build upon? We (the commons) never get it. Thats the problem with leaving the system as it is. Possibly, the answer lies in depositing all commercial source code into trust to be opened when copyright expires. Thats just an idea off the top of my head. I haven't thought it through but I think it would satisfy the aims. In some way - I think the open source community is a compensating mechanism. Those old unix utilities should have been released into the public domain eventually but they weren't - so the developers are busy essentially reinventing them from first principles to rectify the situation and ensure progress of the practice as a whole.
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