I’m reading Accelerando right now. It’s a bit of cyberpunk meets technological singularity. Those two ideas have been mined pretty well. It is therefore surprising that reading this book is like drinking from a firehose of possible, short term, technological and social trends.
We start by meeting a guy whose “job” is to wander around, living out of a suitcase, thinking up ideas and patenting them. He doesn’t actually make anything. The “value created” is the idea, and the patent locks it in. It lies fallow until some working business bumps into the same problem and solution. The amazing thing is, given how broken the US patent system is, and the mismatches between old ideas of intellectual property and new ideas of information-commerce … this would have really worked well in the last couple decades. We see it in the real world, in corporations whose sole purpose is to acquire masses of information-related patents, and then sift through looking for ones “co-invented” by active players. In this world, Microsoft or Sun can honestly “invent” an idea, and then end up (decades later) owing $200 million to some guy with a patent at the bottom of his sock drawer.
I’m big on R&D, and think the little-guy engineer deserves a level paying field … but I think the way to do that would have been to narrow down what was patentable. We are instead buried by “patentable ideas” anybody could have thought of on a bus-ride, and burdened by lawyers pursuing those bus-ride-patents.
Update:
As a real-world example, consider software “plug-ins.” The general technique has been around for many decades. The idea is that you write a program, but to allow your users and 3rd parties to improve it, you put in a special kind of hook. You allow them to write small programs (plug-ins) to a specification, and your program runs those programs as sub-routines. I don’t know if they were first, but one early (and famous) example was Photoshop and its plug-ins. Now, here’s the real-world fact: Once the “plug-in” technique was knows, every programmer worth his salt used it when it was applicable. I’ve used it a few times myself (from the 80’s through the 90’s). But, it is a broken aspect of our patent system that every time a “plug-in” is used in a new kind of program (and editor, a web browser), it is considered “novel” and a patent can be filed on it.
The patent system “plays stupid” and says “Oh, no one would have thought to use a plug-in here. That’s brilliant!”
It was totally obvious to use “plug-ins” in a web browser, but that didn’t stop Microsoft from being hit with a $1.2 Billion dollar lawsuit for making this obvious move.
