If you want to know what the world would be like without IP: look at the criminal world where they can't easily sue each other for patent and/or copyright violation. Is there software innovation in that world? The virus producers are innovating faster than the anti-virus vendors. Sadly, absence of IP doesn't seem to hold them back. Of course they copy each other like crazy...but what is really interesting is this. Quite the opposite of trade secrecy (which they do have access to) they are open sourcing their code development, giving their secrets away for free in hopes of benefiting from others' innovation.

Aleks Yankelevich drew my attention to an interesting patent case Gore versus Garlock. The Federal Circuit court decided to reverse a lower court reaching the stunning conclusion that prior art doesn't matter if it was kept secret. So if you invent something and keep it secret, someone else can patent it.

To be clear: in terms of promoting innovation - if someone already invented it once without claiming a patent that's pretty good evidence that no patent was needed to provide the incentive to innovate. There is the argument that one of the purposes of patent law is to give incentive to reveal secrets - the problem is that argument doesn't make sense. If patents last 20 years I'll only take out the patent if I don't think I can keep the secret for 20 years - in which case nobody will be able to use the information I revealed until after they would have figured it out anyway.

The ability of Congress to ignore any evidence (see SOPA/PIPA) and the courts to ignore common sense is frightening.

Matt Yglesias link here picks up a story on patents from Steve Landsburg link here.

The patent covers a "portable electronic device with graphical user interface supporting application switching". The effect of the patent seems to preclude any other smartphone maker from doing the same thing.

Landsburg avoids coming to a judgment about this patent, and asks the readers to argue the question. Yglesias has a more reasoned judgment:

"Sometimes critics of over-patenting lean too heavily, I think, on the idea that these abusive patents are somehow overly broad or trivial but I don't think that's the real issue here. The issue is that there's just no sound public interest case for granting monopolies over certain features to the first-to-market firms in this industry. Apple has already gained a very large competitive advantage from the fact that they were the first people to deploy a working touchscreen smartphone and even without patents clearly has a strong financial need to continue investing in improving its product lest lower-margin Android-powered phones eat away at its profits."

But I don't think that goes far enough in this case. We now have an industry dominated by two or at most three huge firms (counting Google). The many small firms are sources of innovation but are simply bought up by the biggies when they are very innovative and successful. The lawyers are running rampant.

The big three should be broken up as dangerous with their dominant market power.

These were collected in the course of other research by Azeen Ghorayshi and put online as a slide show by Mother Jones magazine link here.

My favorite is #6 in the slides called "method of concealing partial baldness" patented on May 10, 1977. Here is the illustration for the patent which should have been denied on the grounds that it was already in wide use among the balding. .

Really makes me feel confident of the wisdom and judgment of the patent office and it has been that way for years and years. What happened to good sense.

Matt Yglesias takes up the patent issued Google on its driverless car link here.

But that characterization isn't quite right. In fact the software patent is on the method allowing the control to pass back and forth from machine control to human control. More precisely, "the use of a predefined landing strip" or "programming a predefined route into a vehicle, or having a computer control an autonomous vehicle that follows a route based on information stored in the computer".

Matt notes that the world gains from this in terms of safety and efficiency. However he questions the patent grant on the grounds that another monopoly has been established by stealth. Fortunately, the patent will be worthless once the world switches to full time computer control of the car. But in the meantime, we will all pay in higher prices.

Via ZDNet yet another example of why we need to get rid of patents on software.