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.
