Richard Corsale write:

Hi David,

I wanted to point out one team of software developers thats doing this right now, and actually has been for some time.

link here

Thomas and Amy are framework developers that publish some of the most intense and widely used front end javascript frameworks on the web. As I'm sure you know every framework is released under the most liberal license that can be found, usually MIT or BSD and it would appear that its next to impossible to sell a copy of any framework these days. They seem to have found a really ingenious way to make a bundle selling ebooks! if you go to link here or link here you can see their ebook prominently displayed at the bottom.

I think this is a great way to profit from your endeavors without forcing your customers to pay up throat under boot. As a bonus, the level of notoriety they have reached in the framework community has brought them to speak at numerous conferences as well as co-author books.

I'm currently developing software that works on an alternative business model myself. It's based on affiliate offers, where in a user of my software is asked to use one of my affiliate links next time he/she buys something. We then unlock some minor feature that could also be had for free if they wanted to download the source from SVN and compile it.

--Richard Corsale

With Paul's permission I'll simply reproduce his very clear email on the subject

Hi.

I'm writing to you guys because you've been the most active recently on the copyright thread of the Against Monopoly website, and as I'm only an occasional visitor, I'm not sure how else to send a heads-up to the site.

Anyway, with apologies for this unsolicited email, I thought you might like to know about these batik makers in Solo. The point is that here's a community of artists who are thriving without copyright, and without even resorting to Creative Commons or any other legalistic solutions. Of course, they're now starting to get a lot of pressure -- but hey, wouldn't it be great if their inspiring attitude could be emulated (and encouraged and expanded and exported) rather than suppressed...??

The story surfaced for me in this Boing Boing post

Original Jakarta Globe story here

And yes, I've blogged about it.

I hope this is of interest to you. Please do with this information as you will. Keep up the good work.

Best,

Paul Barlow

For better or worse copyright is dead for music, and shortly for books and movies as well. This obsoletes existing business models. What will spring up to replace them? An interesting experiment is taking place over at TechDirt. They are selling of complementary goods - for example, for $150 you can buy a package of books signed by the authors...including of course Against Intellectual Monopoly. Go take a look.

I previously noted that NTP used the patent system to wring over $600M out of RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone. As noted by Mike Masnick, now RIM has coughed up another quarter billion dollars to another company, Visto ("coincidentally" a licensee of NTP). A quarter billion dollars--everyone yawns. Masnick asks, why did NTP have to pay Visto?

For being the loser in the market place. This is a tax on innovation. The loser in the marketplace forces the winner to hand over a nice chunk of profits. It's bad for everyone (except some lawyers and Visto shareholders).

Masnick is right: this is yet another tax on innovation. Patents are killing innovation (see Yet Another Study Finds Patents Do Not Encourage Innovation). This is the age of technocide.

[Masnick opined that one reason NTP invested in Visto to get it to take out an NTP license was: "That certainly looks like NTP paying a company to license its patents, just to make it looks like there were some legitimate licensees."

This may be right, but as I explain in "Impact of Patent Licensing on Patent Litigation and Patent Office Proceedings" (available on my legal site), "a license under the patent may be offered as persuasive evidence in rebutting a prima facie case for obviousness." In other words, one reason patentees seek to license their patents is to build up the case that the patent is not obvious--to use it in litigation later to help defend the patent.]

[Mises cross-post; SK cross-post]

ROBERT X. CRINGELY opinionates that the competition between Google and Microsoft is real but is mainly in defense of existing positions and won't change the industry link here. I think he ignores the competition Google offers Microsoft in several dimensions. Its competition based on the web--the cloud--won't drive Microsoft from the field, but will constrain it, giving consumers an alternative. I have several friends and my wife who only want a computer for access to the web and I expect that will grow with technical improvement. That makes a market for netbooks that will be perfectly useful using open source operating system software and that will change the market place for computers and for operating system software. Microsoft's Bing web search program appears to be offering Google search a run as well, though it may mainly damage other search providers. Still, I sense that these competitors are driving technological change and that consumers will benefit in both better software and lower costs.

In an email someone mentioned to me a particular key invention from a few decades ago, which was responsible for a number of other high-tech innovations that we now enjoy, and asked me to "show us how any of that could have happened if there were no patents." My response is below.

Why is the burden on me to show how it could have happened without patents? The question is itself question-begging, as it assumes the patents played a causal role, which must be either explained away or for which a substitute incentive effect must be found.

I'd say that almost any invention that comes will come eventually--maybe even sooner, absent the patent system, absent the state (see Yet Another Study Finds Patents Do Not Encourage Innovation). In my experience, this view is almost universal among inventors and engineers. We would have had transistors by now without Shockley, Planck, and Schrödinger; we would have had light bulbs without Edison; and one-click purchasing on web sites without Jeff Bezos. Maybe a bit later, but eventually. And maybe even earlier--patents slow things down too, after all.

And we cannot forget that a huge factor in innovation is wealth. Wealth is needed to provide spare time and resources to engage in research and development. And wealth is no doubt hampered severely in a society that has a state, which any patent society must. Without a state there would be no patents, but a far richer world, and more innovation because of that factor alone.

Finally--so what if we wouldn't have had invention X, Y, Z, as early, or even ever, without a patent system? After all, a patent system undeniably has costs in terms of both rights and money. How can it be shown that having invention X is worth the violation of rights incurred as a result of the patent system necessary to generate X? Utilitarianism is a bankrupt doctrine, after all. And even if you approach it from a utilitarian, wealth-maximization angle: how can it be shown--who has shown?--that the cost of the patent system that generates X is less than the value of X?

[Mises cross-post; SK cross-post]

Study Finds Patent Systems May Not Be an Effective Incentive to Encourage Invention of New Technologies reports:

A new study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review challenges the traditional view that patents foster innovation, suggesting instead that patents may harm new technology, economic activity, and societal wealth. These results may have important policy implications because many countries count on patent systems to spur new technology and promote economic growth.

The study is: Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, by Dr. Andrew W. Torrance & Dr. Bill Tomlinson, Colum. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 10 (2009): 130 (Published May 15, 2009).

As those familiar with my libertarian and IP views know, I'm not a utilitarian (see my There's No Such Thing As A Free Patent; Against Intellectual Property); but almost all IP proponents are, and claim that IP is "worth it" because it generates additional innovation the value of which is implicitly presumed to be obviously much greater than the relatively trivial cost of having an IP system. So it is striking that there seems to be no empirical studies or analyses providing conclusive evidence that an IP system is indeed worth the cost. Every study I have ever seen is either neutral or ambivalent, or ends up condemning part or all of IP systems. Utilitarian IP advocates remind of the welfarist liberals skewered by Thomas Sowell in his The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy--liberals continue to advocate policies long after there is overwhelming evidence these policies do not work, even by the naive, socialistic standards of their proponents; likewise, utilitarians keep repeating the mantra that we need patent and copyright to stimulate innovation and creativity, even though every study continues to find the opposite.