Can patents and intellectual property rights put a deadlock on the information society?

What is information? Or what does information make us capable of doing? Information put into context is knowledge. Information exchange is the basis for empiric evolvment and great inventions. Without relatively free flow of information society can not evolve and prosper. Historically things would have turned out pretty differently of the alphabet was patented, or mathematics was protected as intellectual property.

During listening to a podcast interview with Robert Laughlin, that (I thought was only) about carbon future and climate, the talk also mentioned the topic of patents and intellectual property rights (at 50:35). Protection of informaton has restricted US to some extent to empirically evolve, and jobs is outsourced to e.g. Japan and now China. The patents is kept by American companies, but production is not in the US. It is however unclear how this affects employment and innovation in the long run, but there is a high probability that a connection is present. It started my thinking on how such protective measures affects our society. Laughlin mentions a book he has authored: Crime of Reason that rationalizes over this subject.

Just think how some cities and whole nations became recognized mariners in the era of sailships. By sharing knowledge, and demolishing the churchs false demagogy saying the world was flat, they conquered the earth. Little or no knowledge was patented before industrialization. At least not commodity knowledge.

The invention of the internet has let loose massive flows of information. Our society and daily lives is packed with technology. Information technology is ubiquitous and indespensable in the parts of the world calling themselves information societies. What disturbs me is that the tools we are so dependant on is illegal to tinker with to an increasing degree. Apple is the forefront of this development, but they are not alone. Given that a lot of smart people, buying products, sees ways to improve them it is a waste of talent not to let them. The knowledge of how the tools that we depend upon works should be available. Reverse engineering should not be am act of crime. The products themselves is just as valuable with the knowledge available, if not even more. When products can be extended in ways the manufacturer did not think of, the usefulness and usablility increases.

This is especially true for software, that increasingly becomes the inner workings of our tools. Did you know that the average car has software with over 10 million lines of code? How many knows how that code works, opposed to traditional home mechanic doing maintenance works on his own car? Recently it has been shown that wireless pressure sensors are vulnerable for malicous hacker attacks. Patents can not protect you from criminals, but people with good intentions (and I am fairly convinced they outnumber criminals) could reveals such things. The most capable could even provided fixes. Software should not be patented. The value is in goods that can be traded and valueadding services using the knowledge. Using information correctly is complex (instantiation of knowledge) and will always be in demand.

My point with arguing that knowledge about how our tools works is that this is how it has been most of the time during our civilization, and probably before that too. When there are too many patents and intellectual properties protected from reuse and tinkering, the information society may be deadlocked. If this is true, it is a slow process. It is like the story of boiled frogs, that do not recognize that their beein boiled when let into cold water slowly heating up.

The issues of protecting knowledge may eventually restrict desired and needed innovation. In the context of the interview with Laughlin, one can derive that it slows down or prohibit much needed concensus over what environmental challenges we are really facing and how they can be solved. To make it clear where I am going with this: Environmental challenges are global, the internet is made for global information exchange. The tools we use, that largely is the cause of (our perceived) environmental challenges, are protected from tinkering. Information protection and patents is not helping us in figuring what we have to do.

Has Oracle killed innovation on the Java platform

Most of the innovation the software world is derivative works. The whole software innovation ecosystem is empiric, and new offsprings sees the daylight with knowledge originating from other successes and failures. Further, a lot of innovative products is based on commodity software, that saves innovators from the tedious and costly work of doing everything themselves. If these mechanisms breaks apart, the whole innovation ecosystem in the software world would crumble. I think this article explains how innovation happens today, and it lists som famous everyday innovations that where never patented. Things everyone of us uses almost everyday. Had they been patented, some things would be quite differently today.

So, Oracle sues Google over some patent infringments and IP rights. Because they own Java they can do just that. Google has been clever omitting these patents and IP rights and Sun did not see any interest in pursuing any possible infringements in court. I guess they saw Googles works as strengtening Javas overall position, even if the code was not portable, but knowledge is. And knowledge is very easily transferrable. Further, it can result in new offsprings and innovations.

The Java Virtual Machine is a commodity that a lot of business and open source projects relies upon. The desktop and server editions are open source under GPLv2. The mobile edition is not fully open source, and it is here that the Oracle lawyers (hyeanas are more appropriate me thinks) are seeing legal meat to dig into. How they axactly will argue is not yet revealed, but it could be they will argue lost business. I would say it is downright unethical to sue a another party on such basis. Just as Apples iPhone would not have had Androids market share, if it did not exist? There are no other real competitors to Apple just now, and is Oracle producing phones? Can they show a prototype? Can Oracle provide any proof that Java ME has lost any market share (as far as I know Java ME has not played any significant role in a market sense)? They are just hurting the JVM and Java language as a commodity by inserting insecurity and fright into the ecosystem. Maybe this will be the event that triggers completely new programming languages or strengthenes some new ones in the pipeline? Languages with absolutely no patent strings attached and potential misuse by the "owner".

The consequences could be devastating for innovation on the Java platform. Those who want to use Java the platform must from now on be extremely careful to not irritate Oracles lawyers. What does the Scala people think now? Will Oracle try to sue them for lost revenues on Java IDE's or do some ridicoulous changes to stop Scala?

In addition to damage innovation on the Java platform, this lawsuit will drain energy and time from managamenet at Google and Oracle. Who gains on that? Yes Apple and Microsoft. While Oracle bashes Google with stone age business models, competitors can exploit their distraction from the scene where innovation happen.

What feels so completly wrong with this lawsuit, apart from totally missing the point of the software industry works, is that Google has probably been one of the biggest contributors to the diffusion of Java language on the mobile platform, namele Android. Android provides no or little revenue for Google, but sees at as mere innovation and business platform that suits them. I think Oracle will have a hard time arguing for any economic losses as Google does not make money on Android directly and Oracle is certainly not in the ad-business.

Friday 13th  , August, 2010 is a sad day in software history, and James Gosling did foresee it in the aquiring negotiations with Oracle. He must have felt like Albert in We, the drowned by Carsten Jensen. Albert can see war victims beeing killed in his dreams before it actually happen.

Update 18.08.2010
Charles Nutter has written a thorough blogpost on the issue.