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

Dean Baker writes in the blog of the The Center for Economic and Policy NYResearch link here responding to a New York Times opinion column written by Cary H. Sherman the "chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents music labels." link here

Baker has much the better in the argument, pointing out that the Times has printed industry propaganda on more than one occasion.

Here are two paragraphs from his piece: "The real issue here is that copyright is an archaic property form that it is no longer practical to enforce in the Internet Age. Serious policy people should be looking to develop alternative mechanisms for financing creative and artistic work. Unfortunately, the organizations that ostensibly represent creative workers are not very creative. It is impressive that the NYT allows a piece from the industry to appear with apparently no fact checking. Two days earlier it had a similar column complaining about the failure of SOPA. Given its dominance of the NYT's opinion pages, it is understandable that the RIAA would be upset about the growth of independent voices on the Internet."

Mike Masnick chimes in link here with much the same criticisms.

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

Alex Laird's petition.

Larry Seltzer writes a provocative piece in Byte entitled "Is this Patent full of crap?" (link here)

The ideas are those of patent lawyer Andrew Schulman, but the story is full of insight on a patent lawyer's thinking and offers real clues into why the patent system is such a mess--complexity compounded, full of precedents that ordinary humans will find puzzling at best.

This encourages innovation?

Recommended reading.

The real state of affairs in the music industry.

While waiting in my doctor's office with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of the Washington Lawyer, the journal of the DC bar. It had a long piece on the "March Toward a National Digital Library" by Sarah Kellogg that I think worth reading. And pondering. It is online here .

A lot has been happening, but it remains slow going as the lawyers and the interest groups continue to try to find a workable deal on the remaining issues. Still the author is hopeful. But she also notes that we have had the technology to digitize print matter since 1971 when Project Gutenberg published it first e-book. Forty years. Think about that.

We as citizens with the largest stake in the public interest can take a much more jaundiced view of what has to be considered a national and global failure. The existence of the internet and the actual digitization of so much material that remains locked up is a national disgrace. At this point, keeping this material under lock and key is a tribute to the copyright monopolies that have been established and then extended in time and coverage due to their political power. The deadweight cost to human kind of these monopolies is staggering.

Why is it that there is no national clamor to end this nonsense?

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.