Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Dave Winer says:

I seriously think my country has lost its mind. We’re getting the
best wakeup call possible with the torture bill. We’re getting the
warning, if we re-elect the Republican Congress, we deserve what we
get.

width=”108″>However,
it’s not up to me, it’s up to the Republicans. That’s the basic truth.
If you love the Constitution, if you love this country, how can you
support what Congress just did. I struggle to find something to say,
but then there really is nothing left. If the Republican voters can’t
figure this one out, we’re totally screwed.

Here is my response to Dave just now:

First, and perhaps most important, your focus on Republicans makes wise sense.  We need to gain allies in the Republicans. The Republicans hold the keys in this current political environment. And the responsibility, by the way.

Dave, this post about the country is my favorite in a long time–a very important post which deserves wide reading.  Pamphleteering in the best sense.  What more can I say.  I am sad.  Period. 

The “war on terrorism” is completely manufactured.  As someone said recently, terrrorism is not an opponent, it is a tactic.  The way to deal with it is through police work and spying. 

Our nation is at war, however.  Ask the troops, the families, the survivors, the defense contractors.  Neil Young says it well, with the title to his album “Songs in a Time of War.”  This is our era.  But, many ask, who is the war against, and why are we fighting it?

There is no opponent worthy of the name.  There is no threat worthy of the dying.  Bush, with the support of congress, has unleashed a real war against sham enemies.

The answer is that we are fighting a war in order that the President and his allies can benefit from what are usually the secondary benefits of a war–silencing of dissent, cowing of the opposing party, consolidation of executive power, suspension of individual rights, and war profiteering by friends in business.

What is so frightening is how effective Bush and his friends have been at gaining these benefits.  Perhaps they can focus almost exclusively on maximizing these benefits, given that there is no real opponent in the war per se.

One of the interesting things to consider is the difference between wars with real, credible opponents–and wars with sham opponents.  The Vietnamese as a threat to the United States?  The Iraqies as a threat to the “American Homeland”?  The Cubans? 

What are we thinking…

Reading list here….good for discovery.

You have ownership over your ideas. You can keep your ideas to yourself.  You can share them.

Society needs markets for creative ideas.  Innovators invest in solving problems and then provide those ideas, for a fee, to others who implement them. 

Ideas are particularly easy to steal.  Ideas are very difficult to
sell, because in order for a price to be negotiated, the idea must be
disclosed.  Once the idea is disclosed, a potental buyer is often in a
position to simply take the idea.

To make a market for innovation and creativity work requires some form of registration and protection of the property right.

For some forms of property, society sets up systems to help secure those rights through registration and protection.  It is in the interest of society to do this, to reduce disputes and to facilitate trade.

Land title and title insurance, automobile titles, investment securities laws, copyrights and patents all provide the function of securing a property right in order to reduce disputes and facilitate trade.

From Wikipedia:

Patents in general

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee (the inventor or assignee) for a limited period of time.

To obtain a patent, inventors must file patent applications
in each and every country that they want protection in, such as Japan,
China, the US or India. Some regional offices exist, such as the European Patent Office,
which act as supranational bodies with the power to grant patents which
can then be brought into effect in the member states. A European
patent, for example, can be brought into effect in up to 36 countries
in or neighbouring the European Union. Although there are no worldwide patents, the Patent Cooperation Treaty provides a unified patent application filing procedure for most countries of the world.

Patent applications must disclose how to make and use the invention
in sufficient detail so that another person of ordinary skill in the
art can reproduce the invention without undue experimentation. If it is
not self evident, then a patent application must also disclose what
practical utility an invention has.

The history of the US patent system is that when a new
domain of innovation arises, such as drugs or biotechnology, the patent office
adapts.  This is all to the good. This is indeed the way the system
advances. 

Some make the argument that software patents are somehow less valid than other
forms of patents because they only became recognized in the late 1980s. But this is
because software itself only became recognized as an independent domain of
innovation at about that time.  The situation with software is no
different than the situation with internal combustion engines 100 year
ago.

Software, up until the 1980s, was seen as something that hardware companies
gave away in order to sell their machines.  I worked as a management consultant to Sun and AT&T on Unix SystemV.4.  At the time Bill Joy was Sun’s chief software architect, and even with his genius software was not yet really recognized as a standalone value.

The revolution in information
technology happened when operating systems became modular enough and open
enough for software to flourish as a distinct field of innovation.  While this began to happen in a big with with the IBM 360 mainframe, it did not really take off until the personal computer era. Software
engineers went from second class to first class citizens.  Schools of
engineering introduced degrees in software engineering.  Software patents
arose during this same time, as software innovation began to be recognized
independently from hardward. 

Software patents are vital to protect innovation that, in modern information
architectures, is layered above hardware.  Software patents are
particularly important, because most innovation in technology is now in the
software layer.  The reason that large companies like IBM focus on
weakening software patents is that they know that this is the future. 
Independent thinkers should be stepping up to defend patents for software,
unless they want to become technoserfs of the large corporations.

For those with a scholarly bent, here from WikiPedia is the history of software patents:

The first software patent ever granted is probably a patent for a
“computer having slow and quick access storage, when programmed to
solve a linear programming problem by an iterative algorithm, the
iterative algorithm being such that (…)” applied for in 1962 by British Petroleum Company ([2], see end of page 3). The patent relates to solving simultaneous linear equations.

The USPTO
has traditionally not considered software to be patentable because by
statute patents can only be granted to “processes, machines, articles
of manufacture, and compositions of matter”. In particular patents
cannot be granted to “scientific truths” or “mathematical expressions”
of them. This means that most of the fundamental techniques of software
engineering have never been patented.

The USPTO maintained this position, that software was in effect a
mathematical algorithm, and therefore not patentable into the 1980’s. The
position of the USPTO was challenged with a landmark 1981 Supreme Court case, Diamond
v. Diehr. The case involved a device that used computer software to ensure
the correct timing when heating, or curing, rubber. Although the software was
the integral part of the device, it also had other functions that related to
real world manipulation. The court then ruled that as a device to mold rubber,
it was a patentable object. The court essentially ruled that while algorithms
themselves could not be patented, devices that utilized them could. This ruling
wasn’t as straightforward as many would have liked, forcing many electronic
device makers into the courts to establish that their inventions were in fact
patentable. [3]

Due to different treatment of federal patent rights in different parts of
the country, in 1982
the U.S. Congress created a new court (the Federal Circuit)
to hear patent cases. The new circuit rejected rulings from some parts of the
country, and nationalized others. For example, the court made patents generally
easier to uphold by presuming patents were valid unless proven invalid and
weakening the defence of non-obviousness. This court
allowed issues, such as patentability of software, to be treated uniformly
throughout the US.
Due to a few landmark cases in this court, by the early 1990s the
patentability of software was well established, and in 1996 the USPTO issued Final Computer
Related Examination Guidelines. See Software patents under
United States patent law.

In Europe, the EPO and other national patent offices
have issued many granted patents for inventions involving software since the European Patent Convention (EPC) came
into force in the late 1970s. Article 52 of the EPC excludes “programs for
computers” from patentability (Art. 52(2)) to the extent that a patent
application relates to a computer program “as such” (Art. 52(3)).
This has been interpreted to mean that any invention which makes a non-obvious
“technical contribution” or solves a “technical problem” in
a non-obvious way is patentable even if a computer program is used in the
invention. See Software patents
under the European Patent Convention.

Patent protection for early-stage ideas is simple and easy for the individual inventor.  The reason it seems expensive is that big companies and big law firms want you to experience it that way.

Protection is afforded by having filed provisional patents–which are not expensive.  This protection can be solidified by filing a complete patent application for those ideas subsequently.

An inventor can wait for a year after the filing of the provisional application to file a complete application.  This means that good ideas can be invested in. Ideas that in retrospect seem less valuable can simply be dropped.

The advantage of this process, for an individual or small company, is that if they enter into a negotiation with IBM or Microsoft or Google or Yahoo their ideas are protected.

One of the dilemmas of selling big ideas is that in order to market the idea one must disclose it, and once one has disclosed it there is often little barrier to the prospective buyer deciding to simply steal the idea. 

One of the only reliable barriers to idea theft is that the individual or small business is engaged in the patenting process.

Even saying to a prospective buyer that one has filed provisionals can often radically change the nature of the discussion, for the benefit of the inventor.

Finally, there is no reason that an inventor can’t license an idea to many players, for a nominal percentage of the value created by the idea.  This will help create a market for the service or solution, while at the same time rewarding fairly the original inventor.

Within a few months of the introduction of the spreadsheet invented by Dan Bricklin, (Dan tells me) there were more than 20 clones.  Eventually the market was taken by Lotus 123, created by Mitch Kapor after working for the company that marketed Bricklin’s original.

In an absense of software patents, which had not been developed, Bricklin got not a penny for his ideas from these companies.

If you want to experience a world without software patents, go back and look at the history of the computer industry.  What you will find is quite ugly.

This is similar in my mind to people who want to make abortion illegal, but choose not to face what life was like when abortion was illegal.  Women were scarred, were rendered infertile, and bled to death.  Women were traumatized.

A global technology community without software patents would be a lawless, hobbsian world.  You would hold your ideas close.  You would close your code.

And you would probably end up working as an employee of a large company.

Just something to consider..

IBM public relations must be singing this morning. They have pulled off “the big lie” at least for now.   They have made it look like they are opening up the crown jewels, when what they are really doing is radically diminishing the rights of independent technologists.

Some leading lights of the blogosphere are doing IBM’s bidding, fanning support for its so-called “reform” efforts.  For example Jason Woodrow has a comprehensive post that is the worst of the lot I have seen this afternoon.  Jason calls his post, provocatively,  “We don’t need no stinking patents..”  With all due respect I believe he has been sucked in by corporate amerika.

IBM and other large businesses are trying to weaken the patent system because it stands in the way of their powerful business goals. 

IBM and others like them employ thousands engineers/serfs, and tens of thousands of sales consultants.  IBM and other large corporations continuously pirate and infringe on the ideas of the little guys like you and me.  They are second-movers, fast-followers and integrators of technology first.  Their money comes from integration–from professional services.  IBM and other large firms are not the leading sources of ideas in the Web 2.0 world.  Little guys are the lead source of ideas.

The question is “WHO don’t need no stinking patents?  Small companies and inviduals? Or big companies like IBM?

IBM don’t need no stinking patents, because they want to be able to pirate and infringe at will.  The depend on the ecosystem for innovation, and then they pack it up and sell it to clients.

IBM is out to destroy patent rights, so it can have “freedom of action” to sell whatever it wants.  Read (again) what the IBM CEO said in the New York Times yesterday.

…said Samuel J. Palmisano,
I.B.M.’s chief executive. “If you need a dozen lawyers involved every
time you want to do something, it’s going to be a huge barrier. >We need
to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to [IBM] growth in the future.”

Large companies don’t need patents. Large companies have other competitive
advantages: big money, big marketing, big management, big client lock-in, big control over standards.  In a world without patents, large companies prevail.

The US patent system is not broken, despite what IBM tells you

The patent system is designed to make a market for innovation.  Patents give direct rights to innovators, which in turn makes it feasible for innovators to sell or license their ideas. Selling and licensing ideas in turn enables innovators to continue to innovate.

This virtuous cycle of temporary property rights being granted to innovators has served America very well.  It was invented by the founding fathers of our country, and it has been effective for generations.

The US patent system is the best in the world, as evidenced by the state of innovation in the US economy

Taken as a whole, the US innovation ecosystem is the best in the world. The US is the most innovative nation
on the planet.  Our patent system is at the center of our innovation.  It enables investment in research and development by individuals, universities, and companies. 

Our innovation rate is far above the Europeans, and they have the most “reformed” system.  We have the most traditional patent system, and the best technical and economic results.

We also have the most open industry structures, the highest percentage of small businesses, the highest levels of venture activity.  All of this, I believe, is because we have the most well-developed market for innovation.  By contrast Europe is dominated by big companies that monopolize the output of local engineers and scientists by forcing them into empoyee status.

Patent litigation costs are tiny.

Intellectual property costs are NOT a problem for any company I know,
and I know lots of companies.  Patent management and litigation is a
TINY part of the budget of technology firms–and industry-wide is less
than one percent of revenues.

Why then do large companies like IBM say that the system is broken?

The market for innovation is working well for society as a whole, but
it is increasingly expensive for big companies like IBM.

There are more
engineers and scientists working today than ever before in history, and
most of them are independent, work for universities or small companies, or are working in
alternative matrices in China or India.  In most cases they do not live
in the United States.  In almost no cases do they work for IBM or similar firms.

IBM and other large companies no longer do much core innovation. They have morphed into professional services firms, and innovation is an “input” they buy or license. Innovation is a “supply component.”   Most new ideas in big companies come from buying smaller companies, licensing technologies, or–candidly–copying innovators.

The problem the big companies are facing is that innovators are gaining bargaining power and sophistication. Innovators are starting more companies.  Innovators are asking more for their intellectual property.  Innovators are commanding higher license fees.  And innovators who have been infringed are finding ways to fund lawsuits and force the large companies to the table. 

Not only are large companies more dependent on the community for innovation, they lag the community.  In a world of millions of independent developers, scientists and
engineers, around the world, IBM will be out-innovated unless it can freely integrate ideas from
anywhere anytime.

Big companies are running scared, and IBM is the most fearful of all.

Big corporate amerika is
up against a disruptive threat: free engineers and scientists. 
Talent has escaped “the matrix” and challenges the corporate
model.

As the companies become more threatened, a few of them, led by IBM, have decided that they want to destroy the market for innovation as it currently exists.

IBM coopts smart liberals who are niave about big business.

What better way than to coopt the “free culture” movement, and turn it into a “free for IBM culture” movement?  With a few thousand dollars given to the right non-profit, you can buy the support of the likes of Larry Lessig and EFF. Give a grant to NYU, and you get yourself associated with patent reform.  Release a few dozen patents to the open source movement, out of 32,000 you own and 45,000 you control, and you seem a hero.  Contribute a few highly-scrubbed patents to the “peer to patent” projec–out of 3000 you expect to file just this year–and you become a beacon of patent quality.

What better way than to define those little guys as
“trolls” and set about weakening the rights of the little guys.  IBM’s
“reform” is stealing individual rights, in the disguise of being “open.”

IBM’s sophisticated conspiracy is sucking in otherwise smart folks. 
Ultimately IBM’s motives and plans will be revealed, and its unwitting
allies are going to look like fools.

[Charlie Wood just sent me a note to
say that Jason Woodrow is "an incredibly smart and talented guy." I
agree.  So is Brad Feld, who cheers for the IBM move without providing critical analysis.

Any inflamitory language that may have slipped into this post is because I am passionate about this issue. 

Friends, you are following lemming-like the most disingenious corporate exploitation of open values!  Really and truly!

Charlie
suggests that patent reform is a David and Goliath situation.  I
agree.  We independent inventors and small companies are David.  IBM
and Microsoft, HP, etc. are Goliath. 

What
disappoints me is that some leading Davids are jumping up and down
cheering "Goliath gets it!" as if IBM has turned saintly on
innovation. 

Believe me, IBM does get it.  Just not the way you think.]

Hi all,

Here’s my quick mass mailing to say if you were worried abt things in
Thailand, they’re all okay.  At least from my point of view. 
The prime minister may have a different answer.

This note also serves to say I finally got around to starting a blog:
 
http://freelancefirstlady.blogspot.com

Below is today’s post on the coup; I’ll try to update it as life unfolds here.  XXKelly

It’s true, there’s a coup in Thailand.

About
ten-thirty last night, just as I was getting in bed, a friend called
and told me to turn on CNN. Sure enough, there were pictures of tanks
outside the parliamentary buildings, a part of town not close to where
I am but not exactly far, either. The distance between City Hall and
Columbia University in Manhattan.

Because it was already
nighttime in Bangkok, nothing seemed particularly different or strange.
It was only when CNN and the BBC suddenly cut out that things began to
feel a little weird. At some point in the middle of the night, the
electricity went off.

This morning I got up as usual and went to
yoga. The streets were quiet, which is not so strange since it was
6:45am, but the studio was locked. A few of the other students and I
loitered in the lobby. Schools, banks, and most offices are closed
today. One of the other students had seen tanks on her way to class.

Eventually
the teacher showed up and, even though none of the other staff was
there, smuggled us in the back way, which I guess means we launched our
own coup of the yoga studio.

By the time we finished practicing
this morning, the streets were still empty — the intersection at
Chitlom, which I usually have to take my life in my hands to cross, was
so deserted I stood in the middle of the road for a few seconds just to
savor the experience. At 9am the rush hour Sky Train was virtually
empty, and people were quiet and looked glum.

Mostly it feels
like a snow day: I’m home again in my pajamas, drinking tea and keeping
an eye on the news online. Even the weather is unusual — cool and
raining. I live in a very ex-patty neighborhood, flanked by shopping
malls, so I can’t imagine that I would feel threatened unless the army
tried to take over the Emporium Department Store. As far as I know, the
shoe sale is still on, and good news — the dollar is strong against
the baht!

As for the political situation, it’s still hard to
know what’s going on. Thaksin has been politically under siege for
months, but there hasn’t been a sense of violence or abject power
grabbing. Well, maybe a little — there was a staged attempt on
Thaksin’s life a few weeks ago, but even that seemed more like
political theater than an actual threat.

I know that “coup
d’etat” sounds dramatic and makes Thailand appear a banana republic
(or, as my political scientist friend calls Thailand, a banana
monarchy), but in fact Bangkok is a very firt-world city, and this coup
seemingly a very white-collar maneuver. Sure, it’s no surprise that a
lot of the politicians are corrupt, and that there’s dissent in the
ranks, but the issues have been playing out more on the stock exchange
and Op-Ed page than the streets — that the military has taken control
seems a bizarre response to the situation. It would be as if Enron
middle-management had staged a coup.

The wild card, of course,
is the king. The general who’s taken over doesn’t really want to retain
power for himself and has declared his allegience to the king; even the
tanks circling Government House are wearing yellow ribbons, the symbol
of the monarchy.

But, the king isn’t a substitute for a prime
minister, and he isn’t a replacement for Thaksin. A few months ago,
when the dubiously-called elections were found to be
dubiously-monitored and Thaksin the dubious winner, some of the
opposition asked the king to intervene and appoint a prime minister.
The king went on national television and scolded them: this is a
democracy, he said, and a democracy holds elections. (To that point,
Thaksin has been legitimately elected twice by an overwhelming
majority.)

It seems to me with this coup that the general is now
forcing the king’s hand, making him intervene and perhaps appoint
someone else. Or, declare his support for Thaksin, which may be in the
best interest of democracy but does not seem to be in keeping with the
king’s personal taste.

It’s a curious kind of coup that a)
declares allegience to someone else; b) puts that someone else in an
impossible position; c) justifies itself by saying the country is too
divided under the current leader, and a coup is therefore required to
restore harmony; d) apologizes to the citizens for the inconvenience.

Even in their coups the Thai are Thai.

Stylefeeder has become a blogging tool!  The Stylefeeder widget is simply the best tool for doing social bookmarking of items on the web–quicker than delicious, more visual, more intuitive.

The idea of Stylefeeder is that individuals be enabled to become online style leaders.  They create a fantasy shopping list of links to cool stuff on the web.  Their list includes images of the items, as well as other useful info.  Their fantasy shopping list is fun for others to peruse, and expresses their deepest fantasies about the style in which they would like to live.

Those of us who have been using the tool are finding it a terrific way to blog.  For example, super-tool-maker Tom Morris went over to the office the other day, and was wowed by the potential of the stylefeeder widget.

The ever responsive and speedy Phil has now added an expansive “comment” field that lets a person make a blog entry.  This is in addition to the tagging option.

Why is this important?  Because it helps move bloggging from “blabber to publish” toward “read the web, note interesting things, identify and share them, and annotate one’s selections.”

Interestingly, this “read, tag, annotate” paradigm of blogging is the approach developed by the most valuable and popular bloggers in the world.  People like Dave Winer find stuff for the rest of us. And it is what the meme engines like Memerandum attempt, with limited success, to replicate.

Let’s face it, the blogging tool world has been dead for three years.  The paradigm has stayed the same:  I open up an editor, blab, publisy, and hope that you read.  If I want to make links to other things in the web, the process is very difficult.  The work flow dictated by blogging tools is write first, highlight a word, insert a link.  Or write first, upload an image (in the process choosing whether the assumed pre-existing text will flow around the image to the right or the left.).  Ugh. This promotes writing, as in this post, and discourages linking. 

Yet the most valuable bloggers are those who do hunting and gathering and sharing and annotating.  Those who do round ups each day.  Dave Winer, Glenn Reynolds, and so on.  They primarily point to things, and then comment. Here is a parody of A-list bloggers, an accurate one, by the way, that describes their behavior. A-list bloggers create annotated bibliographies of the best of the web, and expecially the bloggosphere.

At the Dean campaign Dave Winer made a tool that helped blog this way. He took a river of news aggregator–like one that I have used in his Userland Radio–and set it up so that each item had a little click box.  If you clicked a box, or several boxes, these items would be sent to your blog and could become the basis for comments.  Thus one could link to and comment on dozens of items in the space of a small amount of time.  This process, run by members of the blogging team, resulted in “Channel Dean”–an RSS-feed with a high volume of selected articles of value to the extended Dean community.

Stylefeeder now allows the easy selection of items from any source on the web, which means that one can range freely and widely to explore both old and new domains.  So in this sense it is more free than what Dave made.

On the other hand, Dave is now popularizing river of news aggregators, and these rivers can become rich sources for fishing.  The widespread use of Stylefeeder fishing gear, trolling rivers of news, might just rock the web.

Oh yes, there is one more thing that mashup creators might mull over:  Stylefeeder has OPML and RSS outputs. 

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Tags: Economics and cybenetics