Kinsella: Intellectual property hampers capitalism

Author and patent attorney Stephan Kinsella talks on the incompatibility between intellectual property and capitalism.. or put another way - why patents and copyright are bad for business....

Aristotle on ideas...

"It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world."

Patents enslave my creativity....

What price MP3? The hidden cost of streaming music.

MP3 is widely associated with web distribution of music, and the movement to free music from the constraints of physical delivery. Free music is often considered synonymous with MP3. But MP3 is not free.. There are patents on MP3 so if you want to sell hardware or software to code or decode MP3 you need to pay a fee.. and if you want to run a commercial streaming music service based on MP3 you also need to pay a fee.

Looking just at the latter case… a quick look at the MP3licensing site shows that if you gross more than $100 000 dollars a year you need to pay a 2% licensing fee. Now MP3 is really nifty stuff so you might think two percent is not that unreasonable… but let’s think about my streaming business. Let’s say after all my costs are in I might be aiming for a profit of ten percent on turnover… That means that a two percent license cost eats a fifth of my profit. Or put another way… four days a week I work for my shareholders, and one day a week I work to pay off the MP3 license fees.

So… Free music anyone?

“Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.”
So why isn’t everyone using .OGG?

And don't forget.... The Pirate Party & Piratpartiet are working for patent reform

(NB: I haven’t checked out the norm for profit levels for streaming music businesses.. treat this as an example, and if you have real numbers let me know)

Patents: I take my hat off to the man in red

The European Patent Office has a referral ongoing to the 'Enlarged Board of Appeal' covering interpretation of the European Patent Convention (EPC) in regard to software patents. Basically - under what circumstances can a computer programme be regarded as a technical invention and not a programme and therefore be patentable.

Submissions from individuals, companies and governments are now in... and are all available here. As you might suppose they cover a wide range of views with varying degrees of analysis and legal argument.

For a great presentation of innovation and open source, the negative impact of software patents and for a sensible plain language interpretation of the questions put I recommend the input from Redhat... The Piratpartiet input on this occasion I'm sad to say was by comparison somewhat lightweight... Sorry guys

Ideas are for sharing

Creativity is where our ideas meet.. mingling, changing and recreating..

The thing about good ideas is that they have a life of their own - (well strictly speaking all ideas do). We give them birth and send them on their way. We don't own them - not as property. We can't destroy them - the only power we have over them, and that a weak one, is to hinder them from spreading. But we too have the gift to spread them...

Some die... put down and forgotten. Some are reborn. Rediscovered... spread.

Serendipity took me today from Piratpartier.se to Carl Johan Rehbinder's Tantra Blog with well written and insightful articles on 'Love, Sex, Politics & Culture'. It's in Swedish as usual, which is a shame as the latest article is about the UK- on UK legislation giving police powers to ban photographing “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.

Anyway.. Among the comments to this article .. on why he joined Piratpartiet .. was a link to an article on "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights". It's from 1995... which for some is a lifetime ago... but it is nevertheless fresh and relevant to today's debate on the future role in society for intellectual property.

Go share!