[Cryptography] Software patent lifetimes are the problem (Re: Hashgraph)

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Wed Jan 3 22:21:56 EST 2018


At 12:54 PM 1/3/2018, Nico Williams wrote:
>On Tue, Jan 02, 2018 at 04:40:11PM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>> The big problem with US patents is that you can use a technology for a
>> decade while an application is varied to thread itself through the eye of
>> the needle. So when assessing patent risk it is the potential claims, not
>> the actual ones that are the issue.
>
>No, the problem with software patents in (no matter the country) is how long-lived they are.
>
>The idea of a patent lasting N years is to give the inventor time to recoup their investment and make a tidy profit while eventually allowing the public to make use of it without further royalties.

This is the party line re patents, but the party line is wrong.

Patents were originally invented by kings who needed money to fight wars of ego; selling someone an artificial (state-enforced) monopoly allowed the buyer to charge monopoly "rents" and thus recoup his payment to the king many times over, while the king was happy with his "don't dare call them taxes" loot.  Patents were never born on the high moral ground; indeed, some might say the exact opposite.

Later, during the "Enlightenment", those rent-seekers ("rentiers") wanting patent monopolies developed better branding and public relations, and thus the concept of granting patents in exchange for disclosure was born.  But this was merely an artificially-contrived excuse for a *theory*, and was *never scientifically tested*.  Indeed, the concept that patents encourage innovation (and hopefully more taxable income for the state) has about the same scientific basis as bleeding to cure various diseases.

Depending upon your degree of respect for our Founding Fathers and their reasons for the incorporation of patents into the Constitution, these Founding Fathers were either woolly-headed idealists who were tricked by the branding and the PR, or, more likely, just ordinary politicians putting loopholes into the laws and constitutions for later exploitation.  Since both Franklin and Jefferson were ardent inventors, I'm inclined to label Franklin as the idealist and Jefferson as the politician.

The length of time for the monopoly isn't the problem; the problem is making the false "intellectual property" analogy to *real property* in the first place.  Real property is made of *fermions*: real property takes up space and is therefore essentially *incompressible* (ask any neutron star).  Gold and silver incorporate fermions; these elements demonstrate the conservation of matter, which make them useful as money.

So-called "intellectual property" isn't property at all, but *bits* which can be trivially copied without error; if you need a physical analogy, try *bosons* -- e.g., photons.  [Yes, I know about the no-cloning theorem; I'm not trying to argue q-bits here.  I'm also not trying to argue about cryptocurrencies, which are mathematical constructs guaranteed to force everyone to treat their elementary "coins" as if a conservation law exists.]

Jefferson fully understood the difference: "He who receives an idea from me, receives the instruction himself *without himself lessening mine;* as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Jefferson, as politician, sold out, while Franklin realized the true nature of innovation: it is a *network effect*, whose value increases with the number of people who understand and use it; excluding people from its use *actually slows innovation and its economic benefits*.

[Best recent example: 3D printing.  It only captured the imagination of the public after the major early patents expired.  This close temporal succession is not a coincidence.]



More information about the cryptography mailing list