[ExI] Lessons from Tesla?

[Kelly Anderson]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 4:30 PM, Dan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, September 29, 2014 2:28 PM, Kelly Anderson <
> kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 2:48 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> I am pretty tired of Tesla hype. Yes, he was awesome and quirky,
>
> but the one main reason he failed seems to have been lack of
>
> business sense.
>
>
> The Wright brothers also lacked business sense. Airplanes came
>
> of age quicker than patent law and courts would have allowed
>
> only because of the onset of WWI and laws that made their
>
> patents "national interest". It is one of a very small
>
> collection of examples where I grant that the government did
>
> the right thing in pushing technology forward.
>
>
> It is common among inventors to be poor at business. It may be
>
> my own failure as well. We shall see.
>
>
> I'm inclined to question the example, and not simply because of its broken
> window fallacy implications -- i.e., what roads (even outside the aircraft
> industry) weren't taken -- but because patents themselves are an example of
> government intervention. It's not like it was a free market in aircraft
> development and manufacture. Instead, the patent system granted [temporary]
> monopolies. Yes, the government altered the policy during the war, but this
> sounds a lot like the old saw about the government breaking one's legs but
> then providing a really fine wheelchair, then touting the benefits of said
> wheelchair.
>
> (Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying absent patents everything would
> move faster and all of us would get our deepest technological desires to
> come true. Even so, there seems to be much evidence that patents do more
> harm than good. See, for example,
> http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/press/view_press?id=89 )
>

Yes, I did think of this while posting. However, in the days of mechanical
invention, I think patent law did far more good than harm. Today, software
and DNA patents do more harm, but pharmaceutical and mechanical patents by
and large seem like a good idea to me.

If you read "The Most Powerful Idea in the World - A STORY OF STEAM,
INDUSTRY, AND INVENTION" by WILLIAM ROSEN, I think you may end up agreeing
with his hypothesis that the British patent system was one of the most
influential elements promoting the industrial revolution.

Yes, I'm a libertarian bordering on anarchy. But one of the prime roles of
government is that of protecting property from thieves. The only difficulty
here is whether you see intellectual property as a valid form of property.
And if it is, then you must concede that the government has a legitimate
interest (or rather the People have a legitimate interest) in protecting
that property (life, liberty and property in the original) from others.

Now, I don't think software patents serve the same purpose today. A
software patent would be like Douglas Adams saying, "I want to patent the
phrase 'For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing
continued to happen.'" And to patent all phrases that are even a little bit
like that. Thus also protecting, "I began walking to the store. After a
moment, I continued to walk to the store." which I Kelly Anderson just
wrote somewhat independently of the great said Adams.

Thus software should be protected, IMHO, like authorship, by copyright law,
but not by patent law.

If you disagree that intellectual property is actual property in ANY case,
then we have a different argument on our hands and in that case, I will
side with Benjamin Franklin, who has sufficient libertarian and
capitalistic cajones for my purposes.

-Kelly
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