NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Microsoft vs. Google: Patents, Society, and Greed
Microsoft vs. Google: Patents, Society, and Greed
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000887.html
In his 1971 science fiction novel "The Futurological Congress,"
author Stanislaw Lem takes a dark look at the premise that most of
what we see around us -- even the seemingly obvious -- is actually
illusionary to some extent, and that even many people who believe that
they know they underlying truths are themselves being fooled by deeper
layers of reality's onion.
In the worlds of finance and high technology, there is a great deal of
truth to this interpretation, and we need only look to the warped and
largely destructive world of patents to realize how far we've gone
astray.
Patents and related concepts have a long history, but this 1844 quote
from a report to the French Chamber of Deputies in the debates
preceding adoption of the French Patent Law of 1844 is noteworthy:
"Every useful discovery is, in to Kant's words 'the presentation
of a service rendered to Society'. It is, therefore, just that
he who has rendered this service should be compensated by
Society that received it. This is an equitable result, a
veritable contract or exchange that operates between the authors
of a new discovery and Society. The former supply the noble
products of their intelligence and Society grants to them in
return the advantages of an exclusive exploitation of their
discovery for a limited period".
The emphasis on "service rendered to Society" is particularly
striking.
Fast forward to 2011, and the concept of "serving society" seems to
have been painfully marginalized as a prime mover in the titanic
patent battles and associated atrocities that are increasingly a
millstone around the necks of society and consumers -- creating mainly
enormous monetary and lost opportunity costs.
This sorry situation didn't appear overnight. Back in 2002, in "Stop
the Patent Process Madness" ( http://j.mp/cYeqEz [Wired] ), I briefly
described the rise of stealth and protective patents, and how the
enormous expansion of both software and business method patents has
further distorted the picture.
Since then, I would argue that matters have gotten far worse, with
patents now being explicitly wielded as weapons of financial
destruction, rather than as the instruments of innovation that were
originally intended to serve society.
The current very public arguing between Microsoft and Google regarding
massively expensive "bundles" of patents purportedly associated with
smartphone systems (and Android in particular) -- well explained and
analyzed on Groklaw ( http://j.mp/psztN3 ) -- is a notable current example.
Leaving aside Microsoft's flagrant and disingenuous attempt at
mischaracterizing the situation, including their obnoxious, out of
context release of an email from Google that Microsoft clearly hoped
would cast false aspersions on Google's motivations, the overall
landscape related to high technology patents is nothing short of
insane.
To use the vernacular, a "simple" DVD player involves a lot of
patents. A typical PC invokes an amazingly large range of patents.
And a modern smartphone can trigger a stupefyingly gigantic mountain
of patents -- perhaps as many as a quarter of a million.
Notably (and especially in the smartphone case), the technical term
for most of these patents is "bull" -- they shouldn't really have been
granted in the first place.
But we've reached a point now where even good players feel obligated
to file patents left and right in order not only to protect themselves
from malevolent patent sharks, but also to try preserve openness for
future developers.
If core Internet technologies had been patented decades ago in the
manner that tech is patented today, I would assert that the Net we'd
have now would be an enormously more closed and restricted
environment -- if the Internet had even managed to really continue
developing at all under such conditions.
Average consumers are largely unaware of how grossly these "layers" of
the patent system not only effectively create a "tax" on the
technology that they purchase, but also create such a fear of
litigation that many creative individuals choose not to proceed with
developing products or services that otherwise could have benefited
society greatly.
There is an imperfect -- but still fairly horrifying -- analogy
between the way "bundles" of patents can be treated by the
unscrupulous as anticompetitive weapons, similar in some respects to
how bundles of sub-prime mortgages were manipulated in manners that
helped lead to our recent economic collapse.
Another relevant example is ICANN's atrocious "gold rush" scheme for
massive generic top-level domains expansion ( http://j.mp/r4yRRt [Lauren's Blog] ).
In all of these cases -- patents, mortgages, domains -- the original,
society-serving functional purposes of these concepts have been
largely lost in the rush to treat the buying and selling of these
"instrumentalities" (or related derivatives) as mechanisms mainly of
financial gain for a relative few, but with society at large losing
enormously as a result.
Peeling the onion down another layer, I believe that this is
symptomatic of a deeper failing, an increasing tendency to value not
the creation of new products and services that benefit society and
consumers generally, but rather the manipulation of the systems
themselves by the unscrupulous to serve greed -- forcing even the
benevolent players into the game on a purely defensive basis.
A practical path out from this nightmare is not entirely clear. To
call Congress dysfunctional these days is to be charitable beyond
measure.
At the very least, as individuals we can try to stay informed
regarding the reality of these situations -- the inner layers of the
onion.
This will not only help us to see through ignoble tactics such as
those employed by Microsoft in the current smartphone patents
controversy, but more generally enable us to more accurately discern
where many other matters of concern actually stand, and what society
should be demanding from our legislators, leaders, the financial
community, and major industries in general.
In Lem's "Futurological Congress," most of the population lived in a
carefully conceived, falsified representation of reality.
We need not follow their example.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com