Writing 09: Intellectual Property

Ultimately, I feel that intellectual property should be given fewer protections than physical property. Intellectual property laws have been abused to exploit the rights of users and loosen the definition of ownership by equating services and products. Of course, the idea of protections for creative and inventive work is important. However, these protections must be proportionate to the amount of effort and time taken to achieve the creation.

In the case of patents, these protections are usually reasonable. 20 years is a suitable amount of time for mechanical and procedural innovations that often take 5-10 years to research and bring into production. Software, on the other hand, is a very different story. Oftentimes, software patents are created for very generic and abstract "designs" that take little time to invent and cover a wide area of software development. Worse still, many of the regulators approving the patents understand little about the modern software industry and are more likely to think that frivolous software patents contain true "inventive value."

Another cause of abuse is the transfer of patents and ownership of patents by corporations. Invention should not be a transferable object. If you invented something, than you, and only you, own the intellectual property for that invention. It seems absurd to me that you can transfer "ownership" of that intellectual property to another entity that has contributed nothing to the creation of the invention. Having the ability to transfer intellectual property contributes nothing to promoting creation and invention and only allows opportunistic companies to exploit other people's work for profit.

Copyright is perhaps the tool that is most often used to disregard the rights of consumers. The very idea of the modern copyright is absurd: the protections last beyond the lifetime of the creator, can be transferred to heirs or corporate entities, and can be used to prevent derivative work. Furthermore, companies use copyrights to redefine "ownership" by boldly proclaiming that users, despite having purchased the copyrighted work, have no right for copying, modification, or transferal of the work.

While streaming services act as a "band-aid" solution to the problems with copyright, I see them as ultimately supporting a system that abuses their users. I want to have ownership to a product, not be a member of a "service." As a member, I have no control. I have to abide by whatever rules the corporation sets, and I have no say in the way that I am treated. Additionally, the content I want to view could be locked behind different streaming services, all with their own rules, restrictions, and pricing.

For these reasons, I think that the distinction between open source software and free software is important. We need to frame the discussion in terms of the natural "rights" of the users, rather than "privileges" granted to them by corporations. Open source software represents a push against the threats to innovation brought about by corporations. By making many elements of software development open source, software development has been able to speed up tremendously by forcing collaboration and sharing rather than petty squabbles over intellectual property (think Java vs Google).