This year’s Nobel prize for physics went to Andre Geim for the development of a process for creating a sheet of graphene 1 atom thick which has useful electrical and physical properties. 1 Apparently Geim approached an electronics manufacturer about his discovery and whether his company would be willing to sponsor their patent for the next 20 years. Here’s the guy’s direct quote:
We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.
That guy just epitomizes all that is wrong with intellectual property laws. Believe it or not, most lawyers aren’t all that bad. They’re basically tools, robots, if you will, when you think about it. You tell them what you want and they go about trying to make it happen. It’s not all that different than using a computer to do something for you. You don’t care about all the zeroes and ones that change hands, you’re just happy that Facebook now reflects that you like puppies who think they’re people. 2
Someone approaches you because they think you might like their idea and you respond with:
I will sue you. I will sue you until your life is nothing but a smoking crater. I will personally see to it that everything you have ever loved or that has ever loved you is burned. The very earth under each of your footsteps since birth shall be salted so that every living thing on this planet will know in their bones that you have lead a cursed life. Your words will be twisted by soulless ghouls until even your own memory betrays you. And, after all of that, you will look upon today and this moment as the least painful thing you have ever experienced.3
Why not just say, “Oh, no thank you.”
I mean, maybe we’re only getting half the story. Maybe Geim just said something about this guy’s wife. Maybe Geim said he was going to sue this guy. Maybe Geim is a mean drunk. But I tend to doubt it.
As much as I love open source projects, I also think intellectual property laws can be a very good thing. If you have a great idea, why not get paid for it? That said, I’m in favor of very short terms for copyright and patents. Let a big company make a huge breakthrough – and let us, the guys in the garages, take it farther once the patents are up. That certainly happened with Stratsys’s patent on FDM.
Profit and compensation are not bad things. Intellectual property laws allow people to devote themselves to great ideas, advancing science and understanding. They also allow people to make a living based on the quality of their ideas, rather than the quantity of their ideas. This is to be encouraged. But, ,making terms too long allow for crazy abuse scenarios – and incentivizes jerks who are willing to hire a hundred automatons to file a hundred patents and tie up a scientist in a nightmarish litigation hell for the rest of his life.
</rant>