Joe Stanganelli an attorney explains why it is a good idea for Eolas to own the web

Critics nonetheless mewl argue that patents "stifle innovation." This is like arguing that requiring people to pay money at a restaurant "stifles feeding," or that making it illegal to steal a UPS truck to start a delivery service "stifles entrepreneurship." (Doubtlessly, when Thomas Edison denied Nikola Tesla the $50,000 he had promised him in exchange for spending several sleep-deprived months improving Edison's DC generators, Edison likely felt that honoring the contract would have "stifled" his company's innovation.)

It is unlikely that making it illegal to steal a UPS track to start a delivery service "stifles entrepreneurship" but of course it is an empirical question. In the case of patents the evidence is in: patents stifle innovation. Only evidence can refute evidence - theoretical arguments, feelings, and analogies are irrelevant.

If you want to know what the world would be like without IP: look at the criminal world where they can't easily sue each other for patent and/or copyright violation. Is there software innovation in that world? The virus producers are innovating faster than the anti-virus vendors. Sadly, absence of IP doesn't seem to hold them back. Of course they copy each other like crazy...but what is really interesting is this. Quite the opposite of trade secrecy (which they do have access to) they are open sourcing their code development, giving their secrets away for free in hopes of benefiting from others' innovation.

The Federal Research Public Access Act

Of course we need to allow negative values of "beneficial".

Alex Laird's petition.

The real state of affairs in the music industry.

The last post might leave you wondering: if closing down small start up domains prevents competition, why were the big guys against SOPA/PIPA? That is the difference between a growing innovative industry and a dying industry. Music, movies and books may be thriving, but studios and publishing houses are dying. So: what is the last refuge of the desperate? Government protection - read SOPA/PIPA.

In a dynamic growing industry the incentives are different. Sure: Google would get some protection from competition from SOPA/PIPA. But Google isn't after the few dollars to be gained by smashing the competition. They are after the big dollars to be gained by growing their business. The Google vision is that of the cloud: always connected internet devices connect us to our own data and shared data stored on Google and other servers. What is killing Microsoft? Google docs is certainly part of the story. But if our data online is at risk - either because Google is required to pry into our private data, or because the Feds may come along and grab it - the rest of us aren't going to buy into that Google vision. Crucial to the big markets Google sees as still ripe for plucking is that we have to trust that the cloud is safe. SOPA/PIPA, domain seizure, the DMCA, take-down notices: these all make us rightfully distrustful of the cloud.

Perhaps I should remind you of the history of Microsoft: while they were a growing dynamic company they were opposed to software patents. Now that they are pathetic and declining that's all they have left. They can't sell their own products, so they use (pretty meaningless) patents to tax Android phones.

When an industry or company turns to the government, sell short, they are going down.

I want to elaborate on the previous post. The point of the SOPA/PIPA as well as the meguploads take down is that there is no accusation that the site operators were pirates, merely that pirates used their site to distribute pirated material. For the sake of argument let's just accept the law that piracy is illegal. People can easily use social networking sites such as facebook, and cloud storage sites such as dropbox to exchange links to pirated files and make them available. Nor can the site operators easily police their sites; the technical difficulties aside (and they are significant) there is also the issue of user privacy if the operators go poking around in files and postings.

It seems to me unlikely that the Feds would take down large widely used domains such as facebook or dropbox - certainly if they did there would be a massive public outcry, and they would be forced to back down, and we'd have to witness politicians profusely apologizing and explaining that it wasn't their fault.

What that means is that it becomes hard to start a new social networking or file-sharing business. The new-comer or startup - unlike facebook or dropbox - can be shut down without a massive public outcry. So: the unintended consequence is that it is now a lot harder to start the next facebook. We face a huge economic crisis. Many people think we need to innovate our way out of it. Creating huge barriers to entry and giving existing players a big advantage over entrants isn't the way to do this.

If we follow the logic of Chris Dodd to the obvious conclusion: the internet facilitates the piracy of copyrighted material. So let's just shut it down.

Really I find what happened with the megauploads take down stunning. Bear in mind that there were at least some legitimate files stored on those servers: for example, a lot of xda-developer files were distributed through megauploads. Imagine I parked my car in a garage. Then when it was later alleged that some of the other cars in the garage were stolen the police seized my car along with the others. All the legitimate users of megauploads lost their files. Talk about guilt by association. What if it was alleged that people were sharing pirated files through dropbox, and the feds removed dropbox from the web?

Aleks Yankelevich drew my attention to an interesting patent case Gore versus Garlock. The Federal Circuit court decided to reverse a lower court reaching the stunning conclusion that prior art doesn't matter if it was kept secret. So if you invent something and keep it secret, someone else can patent it.

To be clear: in terms of promoting innovation - if someone already invented it once without claiming a patent that's pretty good evidence that no patent was needed to provide the incentive to innovate. There is the argument that one of the purposes of patent law is to give incentive to reveal secrets - the problem is that argument doesn't make sense. If patents last 20 years I'll only take out the patent if I don't think I can keep the secret for 20 years - in which case nobody will be able to use the information I revealed until after they would have figured it out anyway.

The ability of Congress to ignore any evidence (see SOPA/PIPA) and the courts to ignore common sense is frightening.