From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@ocean.com.au)
Date: Sat Mar 08 2003 - 18:58:03 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker writes:
(Aside: I'm glad the ExI list is discussing patents again. I see patents
as a fact of life and something that might make radical life extension
achievable in my life time because they enable an entrepreneur to
map out a scheme whereby resources and people might be
coordinated over a large period of time, real value might be added
and the various pipers involved in producing the life extending
products might all be paid. I sure wouldn't want to wait for a
government to decide that a Manhattan type project was going to
be undertaken to raise the life expectancy of citizens to 400. I think
I'd die waiting. Yet ironically, at least to me, the very folks who I
imagine share my aspiration to do something about the arbitrary
nature of death and to extend their own life span - because life
is good - often want to attack exactly the apparatus that *may*
make such a feat organisationally possible. I don't get how anarchists
can be extropians, or how international law can be regarded as a
bad thing, or why free speech appears to some to be an absolute.
I don't think for a moment that those who seem to hold these views
are foolish but I suspect that I am thinking at cross purposes to these
folk and that when we talk although our words may be the same
our referents must be different.)
> First .. Patents reduce freedom.
Interesting thesis. Wonder what it means. Seems to me imperfectly
formed.
>
> Second, ......I don't deny for a moment that [patents] encourage
> innovation. Indeed, that's one reason I oppose them: they encourage
> innovation /for its own sake/
But do they? Don't patents have to be useful? Could it be that the
complexity of the legal system is being confounded as a variable here?
ie. Lets say a patent is supposed to be useful and one is approved that
is not, then at some time it might be challenged. But only a person with
sufficient money can challenge it. Ok. But then the problem isn't that
we have patents the problem is that the cost of getting a just ruling on
an improper patent is too onerous. The problem is that our legal
system is not producing justice it is producing only order. i.e.. One can
only get justice in the matter of patents if one can understand the
legal system and/or afford to use it as an instrument.
> over other things like craftsmanship,
> gradual refinement and evolution, collaborative development,
> competition, and other things I think are more important
> than mere innovation. If people invent novel things, that's fine,
> but I also want people to make not-so-novel things, interesting
> combinations, refinements, and customisations of existing
> things.
This I understand I think. Me too. There is heaps of value
that can be added by people doing essentially the same things like
personal services but for different people.
> I want more people competing to find cheaper ways
> to produce things. I want people to find and exploit more
> markets for things than the inventor ever imagined.
Not me. I don't want to either encourage or discourage competition
in any absolute sense. Competition will arise without my assisting it
and I can at best redirect it slightly. But given that decision makers
can choose to cooperate or compete I am in favour of the greater
complexity and nuance in need and want satisfaction that comes
from having societal structures such as laws.
Laws, after all, if these arise between free agents are also an extension
of an aspect of those agents freely choosing not to compete when
competition is wasteful and suboptimal. I could not build a biotech
company to go after anti-aging even on paper if I could not assume
that complex agents and resources were potentially available.
I don't want to have to compete to mine every mineral to produce
every tool whilst also having to chase away every bandit that gets their
eye on some shiny bauble I dig up. Patents enable greater structure.
Sure this means additional complexity. Sure it means that those who
can't handle the additional complexity or can't afford it won't do so
well. But we can't dumb everything down to what the lowest common
denominator can understand all the time.
> The idea that inventors inherently deserve reward is the
> communist fallacy of the labour theory of value: the totally
> discredited idea that the value of a thing is inherent in its
> creation.
There is truth in this statement I think. But its hard to tease out from
notions of what communists might think.
(Aside: The value of a thing, for me anyway is in its usefulness. I find it
interesting that gold is beginning to be regarded as valuable in some
circles not just because it is "pretty" or "rare" but because of its
physical qualities. It can be drawn into a very fine wire. Diamonds
are at least starting to be respected because they are strong. They
are carbon-based and they are biocompatible. Diamondoid in
nanotech engineering speculation at least has some sensible basis
for being valued.)
> That's simply not true, and policies based on that
> idea are doomed to failure, as all socialist systems have been.
> Value is created by /demand/, and so what should be
> rewarded is the ability to fulfil demand, whether by innovation
> or other means.
But hang on. Demand from where? Thieves fill a demand from
somewhere.
> Without patents, innovation will still be
> rewarded /when it fulfils a demand/, but not otherwise, which
> is how it should be.
The problem is that demand for a finished product that may take
years to develop and that may have to go through FDA approval
processes etc is real but distant at the R&D stage.
If we want better medicines and life extending technology (and we
don't have the power to throw out the FDA and the government
and a whole lot of other "structure" some of which is admittedly
very suboptimal) than we have to work with what we have.
Patents afford the ability to raise funds from those who have money
which is needed to build projects which require funding.
I am not blindly in favour of all patents or of all patent systems, but
suboptimal solutions to me suggest a need to improve them whereas
to others they seem to suggest a sort of need for a scorched earth
policy.
We in 2003 sit astride something like 5,000 years of recorded history
in a bootstrapping operation of civilization that goes back at least
10 times that long and arguable to when our ancestors crawled out of
the slime. We don't need to throw everything out that isn't perfect.
We've never had perfect before. The point is to improve on the tools
and systems we have. I reckon we need to be concerned not so much
with illusions of perfection but with goals that are worth pursuing and
which we will willingly pursue together. Then we work out how to add
as much value by drawing on the stock of knowledge already
accumulated and to extrapolate from this and learn new things. But there
is no free lunch from learning. Whilst "we" isn't an exclusive club in the
sense that anyone needs to prohibited from joining, club membership is
still exclusive in the sense that life itself is self-selecting. Those that
don't
want to be a part of the move to greater complexity and won't engage
with the issues of the times don't have to be but move forward doesn't
stop for recalcitrants. And none of us at this stage, so far as I can tell,
have the capacity to drag screaming into the future those that don't
want to go there. We will need structures to coordinate the efforts of
free agents. Patents look to me to be part of that structure.
Brett
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