Checksum Arcanius

Yesterday, my company, Microvision celebrated recieving its 100th US Patent, which is quite a feat. While I love MVIS to death, and really want to see the company to succeed, one of the speakers at the party (I think it was the CEO, actually) described Microvision’s intellectual property holdings as “a thicket of patents.”

To me, that statement effectively describes a lot of what is wrong with patent law and its cousin, copyright law, in this country, and throughout the world. Don’t get me wrong – I strongly believe in the need to protect intellectual property while promoting its public release, which copyrights and patents allow. Without these constructs, we would be much worse off. But with so-called submarine patents, effectively indefinite copyrights, and so on, there are clearly many ways these constructs could be improved to better serve the public good with minimal negative impact on (and, I would argue, net gain by) the creators of the intellectual property.

Copyrights, for example, currently last until 70 years after the author’s death, a time limit which congress seems to extend every time Disney’s oldest movies are about to enter the public domain. Companies these days don’t have Disney’s problem, however, because works for hire are copyright the company, which magically never dies. Copyrights are effectively indefinite. (This is my understanding; If anyone knows differently, please comment!). Indeffinite copyrights are ridiculously opposed to the purpose of the copyright in the first place.

And patents can be issued for the most vague and ludicrous things, from “3D First Person Perspective Interface” (Apogee Games got sued over Duke Nukem 3D by some company with a patent stating something like that…) to patents of human genes. Furthermore, all patents last 17 years in this country, a huge amount of time in many technology and biomedical fields. If a patent’s contents were ever useful, by the time the patent expires, its useless in most cases.

The idea behind intellectual property rights is that the works are protected for a long enough time that the creator can reap the financial rewards of producing something useful to society, then the IP is released for everyone’s use. This works because intellectual property really is entirely different than physical property: Intellectual property is a public good that can be shared by all without one person’s use of it making it any less useful to someone else; With physical property, on the other hand, one person posessing it neccesarily prevents anyone else from posessing it. Therefore, it makes sense that after being protected for a time, the intellectual property should be released so that its usefulness as a public good can be maximized to society at large. If the time period that the work is protected is long enough, then the effect on the creator of the intellectal property is minimal, because most of the comercial appeal of a product fades over time, so financial gain is almost entirely front-loaded.

I propose a 10 year copyright expiration from time of release to the public, and a variable length, continuous-use-only patent arbitrated by the party applying for the patent, other interested parties, and the patent office. The benefits of these two simple changes are profound and resounding. For example:

• Old software, such as Windows 3.1 at this point, becomes free to distribute. Microsoft certainly isnt making any money off of Windows 3.1 these days, and a lot of old computers could be useful in places without computers with software like that installed without cost (hey, we all used it at one time, it can’t be that bad). However, it is important to note that the source code to Windows 3.1 does not enter the public domain, because that was never released to the public.
• Old songs become free to distribute (how many CDs get sold after the first 10 years anyway?). Old songs can also be resold and used for derrivative works. Think of how great it is that Bach’s symphonies are public domain. Then take any great music, and ten years later you can use it to make something even better – a remix, a re-recording, etc. This is great, because it encourages the production of additional intellectual property, which can eventually be enjoyed by everyone. Also, it creates an incentive for artists and creators to continue creating instead of relying on old works to do all the work for the.
• Drug patents expire quickly, long enough for the researching company to recoup expenses and profit, but not so long that millions of people are screwed over for years and years because they can’t afford a proprietary medicine. Remember, we have to keep the incentive in place or the drug companies will never make the medicine in the first place. But there is no reason for government to continue perpetuating a monopoly that does more harm than good.
• The patent arbitration process makes it so that only reasonable patents are granted. Having multiple parties with differing viewpoints gives the patent office much better and more balanced insight into the process of granting patents. The continuous-use term means that patents which go unused expire early into the public domain. This encourages patent owners to actively pursue projects which utilize the patented idea of method, and it eliminates submarine patents, where someone creates something, only to be sued later by someone who applied for and got a bunch of random vague patents that can be construed to cover whatever the actual useful product the first guy created.

Cetainly, these ideas need to be fleshed out, but I feel strongly that changes to patent and copyright law, such as the changes mentioned here, would help create a system friendlier to and better for both producers and consumers of intellectual property.

In Half-Life, along with its mods, quite possibly still the best computer game ever created, the first major event of the game is a “Cascade Resonance Scenario,” which causes lots of stuff to blow up and aliens to start teleporting to earth. However, the details of a CRS were a mystery to me until I started playing Bontago.

When I set a high number of gifts, and make most of then anvils (which tilt the playing field), there is a good chance that before the game is won, the tilt of the board causes blocks to slide into more anvil gifts, causing the board to tilt more, and that this will create a postive feedback loop that ends up looking like this.

Even more interesting is that when I first saw this behavior, I immediately called it a Cascade Resonance Scenario in my mind. Indeed, Half-Life is that ingrained in my pshyche.

Surfing Digipen‘s site, because I happened to link to in in a previous post, I ran across Bontago, the winner of a rather prestigious-sounding award for computer games. So I downloaded it and started playing, and found that its quite fun, once you get the hang of it.

The idea is that you try to capture flags by expanding your territory by building blocks up. The higher your blocks are, the more territory they capture, but the easier it is for other players to topple them using earthquakes, rockets, and tilting the board.

Take a look at the screenshot, then go download it yourself!

According to this article, Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 leaves much to be desired. The whole Carlyle group thing didn’t bother me too much, but the plane trips thing did, and it is interesting to see that the claims that these flights were illigetimate were fabricated and that the person who approved the flights was none other than Richard Clarke, now an outspoken critic of Bush.

It doesn’t change, of course, the Patriot Act or the Iraq War vs. The Afghanistani War, but it does make you wonder about the rest of the claims in the movie. If Moore had simply left all verifiably false stuff out, then the entire film would gain credibility. But instead, he leaves it in and calls all the content into question. Of course, without the claims addressed in teh above article, it would have been a pretty short film about mostly Iraq, and we’ve all had enough of that.

I love my job. I didn’t make it in until 10:30 today, and it wasn’t a problem. I improved my barcode program by changing it so that the images are output directly to the browser, instead of saving it to a file and then outputting it in the browser, but this had the interesting side effect of forcing me to elimiate all the whitespace from outside of the php tags. Even one space or linefeed would cause the output image to become corrupted.

After work, I picked up Brian and we headed to Robinswood for Ultimate. A guy from the Thursday game showed up, and we had five to six on each team the whole time despite the less-than-perfect weather. It wet grass did make sliding considerably more fun. And the curse really does seem to be broken. At 9:00, my team was down 16-17, having rallied from more than 6 down after Joe showed up. Fortunately, the other team agreed to extending the game until one team was up by two, and my team scored the next three, putting us up 19-17. However, we extended one ore time, saying the winner was first to 21. The final score was 21-18, with my team prevailing (kinda).

Life is good. TRC hack session tomorrow. Shai, 1337 computer programmer extrodinair from Digipen, will attend, as well as Bob and hopefully some members of the TRC as well :-).

~Arc out

In case you happened to be trying to access SilverFir.net sometime over the last couple of hours and experienced connectivity issues, the reason for this is that I kept unplugging its network cable. “But why?” you might ask.

And I would boldly answer you, “Because now its connection to the router isn’t wireless as it was for many months; its not even via a Category 5 cabelstrung between the windows of the house, as it was last week. Now it is connected via genuine cable certifiably exceeding the Category 6 standard. Installing the cable took up most of the day (its hard to stuff 4 wires down 3/4” conduit). Kudos to my dad for spearheading the project and showing me the tricks of the trade.

And although the project isn’t entirely complete yet, I should soon have a gigabit connection into my brother’s Apple G4. Then there will be no stopping iMovie and Final Cut Express from tearing through footage like nobody’s business on my RAID array. Among other things.

I have three cat6 cables down to the router area, and one to my brother’s room for the gigabit hookup. Now, there should never be a lost packet too or from SilverFir again. Whatup!

Happy Forth of July! To celebrate the 228th anniversary of our nation, I created an extremely short video (3,5 MB). Watch Fireworks, or, Cruelty to Children today!

Today was actually rather lazy for me. I woke up earlier than I had to, but then I was sleepy the rest of the day until I slept for hours in the afternoon. And now, of course, I’m wired. After church and sleeping, I went to the City of Bellevue public Fireworks display (where I flimed the footage in my short movie), then I went to Cougar Ridge Elementary (in unincorporated King County, where this is legal) to light off what few fireworks I had left over from last year, because I didn’t make it to any stands this year. It was a good time.