Craig Hockenberry writes at his blog how the coming of the Internet allowed developers to distribute their products online and take small software developers mainstream. Today, independent developers create many of the best-sellers for platforms such as Apple’s App Store.
But there is a dark cloud on the horizon:
But this expanded distribution is also putting our business at risk: there are people in this new market who claim a right to a part of our hard work. Either by patent or copyright infringement, developers are finding this new cost of litigation to be onerous.
The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field.
My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.
A similar scenario is playing out in numerous industries, from books to music & movies to fashion. Entrepreneurs in many industries are battling corporations and moochers who are trying to use the intellectual property regime to either strangle or leech from those trying to push civilization forward.
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“If you can’t innovate, litigate!”
Is entrepreneurship always about innovating ?
Can it not be also about working or providing value through hard work and adopting old or ancient but proven methods ?
This goes on all the time … the lawyers will pick one to five small companies to target for infringement, get settlements out of them because it’s cheaper than litigation, then use the “precedents” of all those settlements to go after bigger game. This happened most infamously with SSL patents supposedly “owned” by one Leon Stambler. They didn’t go after Netscape for making it public domain, they went after any product or service that relied on SSL for securing transactions.
Is there anybody questioning the righteousness of patent in parliament at all?
As Darrow might have said: But are not all laws intended to squelch individuals, pilfer their pockets and enrich the elite? A tragedy.
Could there be a privatized solution to patents ?
You see, people want originality. Of course they will flock to the better product that gives them more value but they don’t want to be associated with copycats and second hand brands.
It’s not always about perfect efficiency and perfect efficiency is not efficient. You have to waste your money and make some follies some times because this gets you attention, contacts and opportunities. If you are just a miser accumulating his money over time and living like a wretch, then you will have very few friends if none and very little opportunities and you will be at risk of losing your only source of income and end up in disaster.
So people want to buy a brand name to show they have resources to spare and attract more success and more contacts. Therefore a world without brand names and without copyrights would make for a world where one cannot use brands, designs and prestige to get himself above the mass.
Some products are more about the name than the product.
How would you cater to originality and specialty in a world without such intellectual property rights ?
Could there be a privatized scheme for such protections ?
If not, me as a customer, how could I buy name ?
Linux is King
Of course you can buy a name. Just send me US$100,000 and I’ll post you a pretty certificate with a name on it. Of course, you may not like the name…..
Sione
all this is what the business risk if we do not take into account from the beginning
Patents are evil. Fractional reserve banking is fraud, patents are slavery.
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