Evidence that we are now witnessing one of the greatest battles in the information media industry is emergent. The giants of the industry is either actively pursuing ever more control or is being pushed to take defensive steps. Through the last century many similar battles has taken place: AT&T, the Hollywood Filmthrust and RCA vs Armstrong serving here as prominent examples.
The roles of the battle is not new: weak and unprepared governments, capitalism serving shareholders, and eager consumers. The goal of the current battle is to dominate so as to cut [exclusive] deals with content owners. As often seen before patents is used by the big guys to limit innovation from competitors, and push around those big enough to pose a competitive threat.
In earlier battles a very limited set of patents was used a weapons. Now the giants has to collect patent portfolios in order to gain sufficient control over/defense against competitors. A large number of consolidated patents is powerful when one tries to suffocate innovation and limit the innovative freedom of others.
Innovation has always been important in the Information media industry. Innovation could make the industry more or less self regulating. If a conglomerate/cartel manages to gain control over innovation that could be a threat and even ultimately replace them, they have also gained invulnerability. The loosers if the battle is the content consumers, that will have less choice. The free market can easily commit suicide, especially in the information industry.
The governments, and especially the USA, has much to easily given the giants the weapon they need: patents. It is maybe a bit counterintuitive, but patents is a construction for limiting further innovation. Governments are also generally weak at regulating the information media industry. This creates the opportunity to create an empire. The more powerful, the easier it is to get allies either by fear or business. But, there is a but, when governments has seen trough it's fingers of this battle yielding consolidated giants, they have also created a soft underbelly on those. The giants knows it, and parts of the governments knows it too. The parts of the governments that has understood, also know how to exploit it. Ultimately the information industry stiffens, only casting static shadows of its former dynamic nature. This is when capitalism stops working.
Recently the US and EU has implemented legislation that let them get access to the giants business records. In the name of the fight against terrorism and child porn, they have adopted draconian laws, that removes our digital privacy. This just get easier the bigger the giants gets, because the stakes get higher with size. No giant wants to be defeated up by an anti-trust case.
The current battle is more destructive than ever. The real stakeholders is not shareholders, but us. Our privacy is at stake. Information media industry collects private information and serves public information. It is a unbalanced game. We loose as consumers because without competetion, the giants will be lazy but almost impossible to replace. They have their patent portfolios. This equilibrium is exploited by our governments.
Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts
Monday, August 29, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Patent dowry
Patents, that are originally meant to promote innovation and protect investments, has become a strategical asset in the game of alliances. For Google it has become an urgent matter to strengthen the Android ecosystem with a patent portfolio, not innovations. I guess it is important to the Android partners that they are "protected" by patents. Not necessarily things they have invented. Just any patents that can be used in the war against the other players.
Google providing a patent portfolio is merely a dowry to make the Android ecosystem attractive and protect it's inhabitants. Innovation has become a minor variable in the equation. Innovating mostly pays off in lawsuits these days, because there is always someone who has bought or patented something the innovation resembles. The genius working alone that need to protect her or his ideas is a myth. Innovation happens in teams and cooperation with other entities, and is mostly empiric.
What really happens now is patents are collected in portfolios and presented as a deck, either to be attractive or frightening. Entities are forced to join conglomerates and consortiums in search of protection. If this game is allowed to proceed any longer it will be hard, and even impossible to enter the market. An idea that competes with the existing products will not have a chance. Innovation and the free market suffers. More or less willingly cartels are born through consolidation as a result of the patent wars.
Apple is already in bed with media industry, network providers, so we already have conglomerate of corporations controlling a large part of media consumption. Now with Google buying Motorola hardware a manufacturer is the same entity controlling the largest switch (search engine) of the Internet. These entities become very powerful. As long as they behave nicely, this is not a serious problem. But this system is vulnerable in two ways. First, how can such powerful entities restrict themselves so that this power is not misused? Secondly they have a soft underbelly, as they will probably be investigated in terms of antitrust. But governments have recently become very interested in how the Internet and electronic communications can be surveilled and even controlled.
Will governments regulate or exploit the opportunity? As long as the patent war proceeds, the conglomerates will not dissolve. It is their survival strategy. But it undermines the original design of the Internet with distributed control. It does not matter if the Internet is technically controlled in a distributed manner, when the information flow is centralized.
The situation will then resemble some of the pre antitrust cases in the information technology industry. But this time it is driven by patents.
To begin with, selling and buying patents should not be allowed as this fuels the patent war. But I guess it is much more complicated to fix this problem now than ever. Big patent owners will not like the idea of their patent portfolio, expensively procured, should only be used to protect innovative ideas for a short period of time.
PS! I listened to the JavaPosse #360 Newscast while writing this. It has some interesting points about these issues, recorded almost a week before Google buying Motorola, and as such is free of speculations over why.
Further reading
Patents, Schmatents!
Google providing a patent portfolio is merely a dowry to make the Android ecosystem attractive and protect it's inhabitants. Innovation has become a minor variable in the equation. Innovating mostly pays off in lawsuits these days, because there is always someone who has bought or patented something the innovation resembles. The genius working alone that need to protect her or his ideas is a myth. Innovation happens in teams and cooperation with other entities, and is mostly empiric.
What really happens now is patents are collected in portfolios and presented as a deck, either to be attractive or frightening. Entities are forced to join conglomerates and consortiums in search of protection. If this game is allowed to proceed any longer it will be hard, and even impossible to enter the market. An idea that competes with the existing products will not have a chance. Innovation and the free market suffers. More or less willingly cartels are born through consolidation as a result of the patent wars.
Apple is already in bed with media industry, network providers, so we already have conglomerate of corporations controlling a large part of media consumption. Now with Google buying Motorola hardware a manufacturer is the same entity controlling the largest switch (search engine) of the Internet. These entities become very powerful. As long as they behave nicely, this is not a serious problem. But this system is vulnerable in two ways. First, how can such powerful entities restrict themselves so that this power is not misused? Secondly they have a soft underbelly, as they will probably be investigated in terms of antitrust. But governments have recently become very interested in how the Internet and electronic communications can be surveilled and even controlled.
Will governments regulate or exploit the opportunity? As long as the patent war proceeds, the conglomerates will not dissolve. It is their survival strategy. But it undermines the original design of the Internet with distributed control. It does not matter if the Internet is technically controlled in a distributed manner, when the information flow is centralized.
The situation will then resemble some of the pre antitrust cases in the information technology industry. But this time it is driven by patents.
To begin with, selling and buying patents should not be allowed as this fuels the patent war. But I guess it is much more complicated to fix this problem now than ever. Big patent owners will not like the idea of their patent portfolio, expensively procured, should only be used to protect innovative ideas for a short period of time.
PS! I listened to the JavaPosse #360 Newscast while writing this. It has some interesting points about these issues, recorded almost a week before Google buying Motorola, and as such is free of speculations over why.
Further reading
Patents, Schmatents!
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Stone age business models
It is sad to observere that patentbased lawsuits against competitors seems to be part of major mobile manufacturers business strategy these days. They have started to bang each other in the head using lawyers equipped with patents.
Nokia sues Apple, who sues HTC on UI technology. They've started to dig trenches instead of trying to beat the competion by innovating. High profile lawsuits like this require a lot of attention from the companies leaders, that distract them from making real business decisions. Especially Apple seems to have already forgotten about how fast they've recently grown in the smartphone market, only because they where innovative (and maybe already had a cool reputation). Well these times seems to have passed, and they've started to protect their innovations.
What Apple and Nokia is forgetting here is that this will force competion to do something uniquely new. Somewhere someone will come up with innovations making the iPhone look outdated. Innovation in this space often happens outside the big corporations, and this is becoming particularly true nowadays. The cloud offer startups vast computing resources, open source provide building blocks to start with and finally social media gives rapid feedback. No patent can protect an investment from this. See more on this here https://sites.google.com/a/webstep.no/openinnovation/Home/news-about-open-innovation/guykawasakioninnovationandthemythoflightningboltinspiration
I think patents in software is an anomaly that must be burried and forgotten. They can not help protect software investments, and only gives the patent grantees a false feeling of safety.
This week a new way of doing UI, Skinput, was presented, and that from the patent borg in Redmond, or at least a Microsoft driven University. I guess this will be patented too since it is a Microsoft-led innovation, but nevertheless it comes from a "unexpected" source, as Microsoft has lately been accused of not innovating much
Update: Very interesting podcast on the Techrepublic on this subject
Update 12.03.2010: Some very interesting and relevant blogposts:
The New Paradigm of Advantage and Jonathan Schwartz on Patent Litigation
Nokia sues Apple, who sues HTC on UI technology. They've started to dig trenches instead of trying to beat the competion by innovating. High profile lawsuits like this require a lot of attention from the companies leaders, that distract them from making real business decisions. Especially Apple seems to have already forgotten about how fast they've recently grown in the smartphone market, only because they where innovative (and maybe already had a cool reputation). Well these times seems to have passed, and they've started to protect their innovations.
What Apple and Nokia is forgetting here is that this will force competion to do something uniquely new. Somewhere someone will come up with innovations making the iPhone look outdated. Innovation in this space often happens outside the big corporations, and this is becoming particularly true nowadays. The cloud offer startups vast computing resources, open source provide building blocks to start with and finally social media gives rapid feedback. No patent can protect an investment from this. See more on this here https://sites.google.com/a/webstep.no/openinnovation/Home/news-about-open-innovation/guykawasakioninnovationandthemythoflightningboltinspiration
I think patents in software is an anomaly that must be burried and forgotten. They can not help protect software investments, and only gives the patent grantees a false feeling of safety.
This week a new way of doing UI, Skinput, was presented, and that from the patent borg in Redmond, or at least a Microsoft driven University. I guess this will be patented too since it is a Microsoft-led innovation, but nevertheless it comes from a "unexpected" source, as Microsoft has lately been accused of not innovating much
Update: Very interesting podcast on the Techrepublic on this subject
Update 12.03.2010: Some very interesting and relevant blogposts:
The New Paradigm of Advantage and Jonathan Schwartz on Patent Litigation
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