The only exclusion is something made for research or experimentation (have to look up exact wording), but it does not give you the right to make a patented item for your own use.

When patents/patent office were started, 2 things:
1. the time-to-market, if you had to manufacture something back then (build a factory, etc) is vastly different from how we do it today. you can have prototypes of cast and machined items in weeks, not years, today. So protecting an idea for 17 years might have been necessary at one time, but maybe today it should be 3 years or 5 years?

2. The stated purpose of the patent system was to force inventors to release them to the public domain, by guaranteeing that after a certain time, the idea ceased to be your intellectual property and became available to the public. Prior to that, keeping an industrial secret *secret* was the only way of protecting it, so ideas never got into the public domain–instead remained a “secret” of the inventor for his lifetime.

I agree with you about intellectual property being a different case.
I think only physical things should be patentable, not processes or software or other things that fall under the IP description.

Thanks for the clear presentation of what I suspect is the mainstream western mindset about IP. I will try to address concisely the points with which I disagree.

I did not conflate IP and patents, but that’s beside the point. (That people sometimes bundle trade secrets in with IP is also beside the point: in not disclosing something I know, I am not claiming ownership of an idea; although I am not helping them get there, everyone else is still free to have and use that idea.) The basic idea of IP is that ideas can be owned, and in questioning the moral validity of the construct, we must consider what it means to enforce that construct. To consider the basic principle, I think it’s not necessary to go beyond examples like the basic ones I laid out earlier (though I would be interested in how you address them or why they are not valid simplifications).

The book example you have is one of the less pleasant ones, but you have to consider the alternative: we have to choose between letting someone copy your work and letting you go beat someone up (or destroy their printing press or imprison them or whatever). Faced with that choice, I say that allowing the copying is the more morally valid stance. If not, where does it end? Can you forever own a sentence? What about the idea of wearing some combination of colors? If you are saying it’s morally wrong to let others copy ideas owned by others, that should not change because of passage of time: do you think IP should have no expiration? Or do you think you shouldn’t be able to own physical things that are older than 20 years or 95 years or whatever other arbitrary threshold?

I think trademarks are a somewhat separate issue, and I think I am okay with some limited trademark arrangement on the grounds that it is a defense against fraud. In other words, making a Starbucks copy is not okay because it would be presenting yourself as that other organization. (I think the current system in the US has too much of the IP side and I don’t think UPS should get to trademark being a brown delivery company. With something like “iPad”, I think Apple should only get to complain about “Apple iPad” usage, and Dell and Samsung and ASUS should get to make their own iPads if they want, too. Also, with limited short strings available, I think a computer company should be able to call itself “Apple2″ or “AppleSony”, and Mike Rowe should get to run Mike Rowe Soft.)

Your saying my argument is equivalent to arguing for allowing assaults is an unfortunately common knee-jerk response that shows a basic misunderstanding of the argument. It’s exactly for the same reason that it’s not okay to just go assaulting someone that it’s not okay to just go assaulting someone because they “stole my idea”. The whole point is that “stealing an idea” is not a valid concept; I also cannot go assault someone because they “stole my wife” (assuming she was willing, not kidnapped).

Regarding the “empirically bad” comment, you realize that just listing positives of IP is not an argument, right? I think it’s a difficult argument to make either way because of the lack of data. For instance, do you know of any advanced society that has strong property rights but no IP rights? I think an IP-less world would be so different that it’s difficult to imagine, and the costs of our IP infrastructure are difficult to see, except in the really blatant cases like the ones you mentioned. One thing you can look at is what happens when key patents expire, and I think it tends to be a burst of innovation and human progress. You can argue that without IP, the key innovation would not have ever existed (or existed as early); I suspect that is rarely the case. To tie it in to the maker crowd: I have heard that the recent explosion in 3D printers is happening now because of the expiration of some patents; I would be interested if anyone has something to back that up.

Thanks for your support of Pololu, awful name and all. Let’s hope that, like people with “great personalities”, we can make up for our shortcoming with extra good products.

- Jan

First, the term IP is not equivalent to “patents”. The U.S. recognizes several other forms of IP, including copyright, trademarks, and trade secrets. (It’s ironic that Jan repeatedly asserts the legitimacy of his company’s trade secrets, which are as I mentioned one flavor of intellectual property: it’s neither legal nor moral for me to break into his Las Vegas offices and steal them.) Keeping in mind the correct conception, I think, helps expose why the stance that IP is “morally invalid” is badly misguided.

Suppose that I write a novel, which takes me several years. I obtain a copyright on my work, then go about the business of trying to secure a publisher and sell it. If IP is morally invalid, then (i) it’s moral for you to take my work, word for word, and publish it on your own without obtaining my permission, giving me any credit, or compensating me; and (ii) it’s immoral of me to try to stop you from doing so. Another example: again, if IP is morally invalid, then it’s moral for me to open a coffee shop called “Starbucks,” copying the company’s logo and store layout precisely so as to benefit from the billions of dollars and decades of work the company has invested in building its brand and refining its concept; and it’s immoral of Starbucks to try to stop me. I think that a great majority of people would agree that in both examples, the *violations* of intellectual property, not the IP itself, are immoral. Jan asserts that “the primary purpose of that construct [IP] is to forcibly prevent people from doing things.” I suppose that’s one way to look at it, but I think that a better view is that IP’s primary purpose is to protect the freedom of individuals to create and extract value from things of value without worry that others will unfairly exploit their efforts, not to infringe on the “freedom” to engage in such exploitation. If I take Jan’s characterization to an extreme, I could argue that laws against assault are immoral because they forcibly prevent me from punching random strangers in the face. I think it’s clear that the freedom to go about one’s business without fear of violence supports, not undermines, legitimate freedoms.

Jan also makes the claim that “intellectual property is also empirically bad for society.” This is patently false. Without intellectual property protections, an enormous amount of economic and social value would be lost because people in a position to create IP would have far smaller economic incentives to do so. Books, music, movies, software, pharmaceuticals, integrated circuits, brands, etc. etc. would be vastly less common, and of much lower quality, if anybody were permitted to take anything they wanted at any time without regard for its inventors and owners. The fact that countries with adequate intellectual property protections outperform others is, I think, incontrovertible. That some goods are physical (ie have non-trivial marginal cost of production) and others are virtual (ie have close to zero marginal cost) isn’t irrelevant, but is not in itself a moral license to steal assets created by others.

The question of how various legal systems *define* and *enforce* intellectual property is quite separate from the morality of the underlying construct. But it’s an important question. I agree wholeheartedly that IP protections as constructed in the U.S. (for example) have some serious problems, the effect of which is both economically damaging and unfair to the point, I suppose, of reasonably being labelled “immoral.” For example, after RIM developed its push email technology, an obscure entity asserted patent infringement. RIM was ultimately forced to pay royalties in excess of $1B (I think), even though the consensus view was that (i) even though the patent owner had “prior art,” RIM developed its technology entirely independently, with no knowledge of the existing patent; (ii) the original entity never made any attempt to commercialize its invention; (iii) the patented IP was probably construed much too broadly, as is common with software patents; and (iv) the enormous value RIM had created was the result of lots of hard work in engineering, design, sales, marketing, operations, etc., and the proportion resulting from this particular IP was pretty small. Separately, a court found that a restaurant called “Elvis’s” in Texas (?) infringed on IP owned by the estate of Elvis Presley, even though the restaurant’s proprietor was named Elvis, and he made no attempt to create a rock & roll theme or do anything else that might reasonably be construed as an attempt to profit from the late singer’s likeness or body of work.

These are just two examples of intellectual property protections run amok, to the detriment of legitimate economic interests and deeply offending our sense of what is fair. Reasonable people can disagree about the extent and duration of IP protections that are moral and provide the right balance of economic protections for creators against the rights of other individuals and society at large. But let’s not confuse these and other wrong-headed enforcements with what I believe is a simple truth: some protections for the rights of people who create things of value through investment of time, money, and talent — whether those things are made of wood, steel, words, or lines of code — are both in our collective economic interests and about as straightforwardly moral as I can imagine.

For the record: I like Pololu (awful name notwithstanding), have bought things from them in the past, and will likely continue to do so. I also agree with Jan that simultaneously pursuing patents and criticizing the system isn’t hypocrisy. And as an aside, I love Adafruit and wholeheartedly share Phillip’s bewilderment towards @Jorgen Knavis’s claim that Adafruit somehow represents an unholy expression of the open source hardware movement.

That’s nice for those who break it, because they like a challenging competitor who knows when they are beaten over someone half trying just so they can invoke a law. And it actually makes me want to buy, despite the locked down code.

Consistent principles are indeed hard to come by. BUT just because they’re hard to find and harder to maintain/execute doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stick to our own just because, well, it’s legal, so why not?

By that reasoning, I could be the dick-wad that drives down the vacated and soon-ending lane on a highway to cut a line of traffic. It’s legal, so why not? Instead, I waste hours of my life sitting in traffic because I’m not entitled to cut to the head of the line. There is no reward in this other than knowing that I’ve maintained my values. Survival of the fittest would dictate that this is illogical and yet 95% of the considerate humans on this planet abide by this social courtesy. Why is that? But that’s off topic…

In order to successfully make an analogy between ownership of ideas and ownership of humans would require you to establish that /ideas themselves/ have the same innate equality and liberty that a human being has. Since ideas are not living beings they have no such equality. I get what you’re saying: ideas should be as free as people. But saying that they “should be” by means of an analogy does not establish the reasoning itself.

First off we should be more specific than ‘idea’. Because there are really two types. 1. Scientific or mathematical principle. 2. An invention. The prior is not patentable nor is it truly secret since we’re surround by the nature of the universe in which we live, even if its not obvious (quantum physics, for example). The latter is specific to a person or small group of people (who may be independent of each other) who applied some collection of the prior to create something unique.

To your wheel analogy: even if I have the patent on the wheel and you make one for yourself, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter unless you mass produce that wheel for others.

The wheel analogy is a bad one in my opinion because it tricks people into thinking about the mathematical properties of a circle which is not patentable. A patent on a wheel would not be valid if it were “an apparatus by which the outside edge is equidistant from a center point and the circumference of that edge is proportional to 2*Pi *R”. Well, duh. There are, in fact, many inventions that /are/ unique to a particular implementation of a wheel. Spokes, bearings, cross-section of a rim, manufacturing technique, braking method, etc. When you think about the latter inventions, you can see that they’re far less obvious than the circle itself and could merit a patent.

Are people entitled to the profits which are a result of their labor? Are peopled entitled to own things which they purchase? Surely you believe they are if you’re trumpeting the freedoms of the USA. If not, you’re a socialist (in the real sense, not the Fox News sense) and that’s okay — but we’ll never reach an agreement since our fundamental principles are inherently different.

Does a burglar complain that laws against breaking and entering limit their freedoms? If you leave the doors of your house unlocked, do I have the freedom to enter and take your possessions?

Inventions are the fruits of labor. They are the results of iterating over an effort to learn, an investment of time and materials, and failures.

A patent is not a claim of rights to anyone’s mind. A patent is issued on a first-come first-serve basis for unique inventions. The act of me filing a patent does not remove any of your rights to conceive the same invention and implement it. I am not missing this point at all. What it /does/ is stop you from mass producing and profiting from that same invention. Not fair? Well, I’m in no way claiming that the patent system is perfect. Far from it. But I’d wager that if you and I had the same idea and we both went about implementing it, chances are: the end result would be different in some way. And if they ARE exactly the same, then chances are it’s not a valid patent anyway (it fails the ‘obvious to those skilled in the field’ test).

Furthermore, patents and ‘rights to ideas’ (lets call ‘rights to ideas’ ‘open source’ for short) are not, actually, incompatible.

Consider, for example, MPEG. Sarnoff owns the patent. There are plenty of open source implementation of this invention. You and I can download them, learn it, tweak it, push it back upstream, etc. I can implement my own decoder essentially using the patent as my data sheet, I can publish this on my blog and that’s fine. Why? Because I’m not selling it. I have every right to do this as an individual. I have no right to do this as a corporation (and I believe Canonical refrains from shipping some CODECs by default for this reason).

So where was freedom limited here?

If inventions are the results of labor and if we’re entitled to possess the fruits of our labor then, by extension, we’re entitled to the possession of and all rights to our inventions (the invention itself, not just an instantiation of it).

–Miles

That sounds pretty melodramatic, especially given that you don’t know how much energy we put into our encryption schemes. The reality is that it was not that much effort, and thinking about that kind of stuff should be a fun and educational exercise for any programmer.

I don’t understand your gimmick comment. It comes across to me as an, “Oh yeah? Your mom’s a gimmick!” kind of retort. I wasn’t touting our secure bootloader as some kind of effective feature; I think I generally downplay it. Maybe the gimmick is that there is no security feature, and I’m just making you all think there is one! Or maybe the gimmick is that I’m saying it’s not very secure so as to trick you into wasting time breaking into fourteen impenetrable layers of steel-reinforced encryption…

Seriously, though: you have got to be exaggerating when you say things like, “[DRM] doesn’t seem to actually prevent theft of anything. Rather, the only thing I’ve ever seen it accomplish is widespread customer alienation and bad will”, right? I’ve seen all kinds of copies of our products and pictures and web pages, and I’m sure there would be more knock-offs if people could trivially read the firmware off the microcontrollers. I don’t think we suffer from widespread customer alienation and bad will, at least not because of our bootloaders.

- Jan

It’s difficult to find consistent moral principles (beyond the likes of “look out for number one” or “nothing matters”); you should still look for them, and it doesn’t help to dismiss everyone in whom you see an inconsistency as pernicious or unworthy of honest debate. Your assessment of my character is irrelevant to the discussion since I am not suggesting anyone should accept my statements on trust: I am presenting my principles and considering their ramifications. Skepticism is fine, but do it with reason.

IP and capitalism are tightly coupled in practice now only because ownership of ideas is allowed, just as slavery and capitalism were tightly coupled when ownership of humans was allowed; neither pair is tightly coupled in principle.

Regarding your comments on original inventor protection and others not earning the right to the idea, you’re missing the point that others always had the right to the idea, and you’re trying to take it away in the name of protection. Consider the wheel example again: if there’s a bunch of free people who don’t know about wheels, they still each have the right to make a wheel, right? A right to something like that is independent of the knowledge or means to carry it out. “Protecting” the first one to stumble onto the wheel (even if he put a lot of effort into it) is not recognizing his right: it’s denying everyone else the rights they had all along.

For those who keep asking about the IP/secret distinction, that first wheel-maker does have the right not to tell others how to make a wheel, just as he and everyone one else always did. The others, of course, do not have the right to torture that info out of him. To switch from a prehistoric case to a futuristic one, does each of us right now have the right to go to Mars using some home-built device? Does each of us have the right not to tell the rest of us how to do it? I suspect everyone would say yes and yes. The sad thing to me is that most people think the answers should change should one person figure out how to do it.

- Jan