[Keith_McClary]

It seems like Keith has a hankering for discussing patent law, and more specifically, a recent decision by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to review a case known as Alice versus CLS.

Not specifically US patent law. In response to:

The Great Question, to me, is: "What are the elements that drove what had been a relatively small ideology/culture that sprung up mostly in about 18th c mostly in England to become so large and powerful as to now threaten the whole of complex life on earth." Was it merely the accident that they stumbled into fossil fuel and figured out a way to use it to dominate other human and non-human communities?

you wrote:

Well that's easy:
(1) The steam engine plus accidental easy access to coal
(2) A culture that encouraged innovation (one having a patent system that James Watts exploited)
...
Although not first, the British developed a patent system that allowed inventors (e.g. James Watts) to reap some reward for their inventive efforts. If you look at the Constitution of the USA you will see that the Founding Fathers found this idea to be highly appealing and they called for the US Congress to institute laws for securing to inventors the exclusive rights in their discoveries. This was highly successful (cotton gin, Fulton's folly steam boat, etc.) and soon almost every country in the world copied the concept.

You seem to think that patents were important in the rapid development of the FF economy and you also seem to hold a belief that patents are a Good Thing.

Do you think patents are part of the solution to the resulting resource depletion and environmental issues?

[Keith_McClary]

Keith has changed the topic again. OK. Fair enough:

[What things] were important in the rapid development of the FF economy [for example in 18th century England] and you also seem to hold a belief that patents are a Good Thing.

Do you think patents are part of the solution to the resulting resource depletion and environmental issues?

My take on it is that definitely the extant "culture" plays a role in how fast and how much of Fossil Fuels (FF) and other resources are exploited.

Here "culture" includes the economic, legal and religious institutions in place and what the citizens are taught as being the "successful" things they should be doing

"Legal and religious institutions" includes patents?

[Keith_McClary]

I should have perhaps explained better that the current title of this post (UVN) is an outgrowth of a search between myself and Keith_McClary for a way to describe how our current "culture" drives the way we attack or see our "problems" versus the way that other cultures do or do not see things and deal with them in same or different ways.

(in your other thread)

PO.com has had property rights discussions ("Tragedy of the Commons") and IP related discussions such as gene patents.

Property rights started with some king decreeing a monopoly on pieces of land. Now, if I use my computer to perform some function I may be violating someone's monopoly.

Proponents of patents and other IP like to talk about the independent inventor who invents the "greatest thing since sliced bread", creating great benefits for humanity and getting rich in the process.

Others think that patents are just a form of "claim staking" which allows corporations to accumulate portfolios of thousands of patents. They suggest that the independent inventor, or anyone doing anything innovative, must employ patent lawyers to ensure they are not going to be sued by "patent trolls", and that this has become a disincentive to innovation.

IP and property rights in general are basic to "Western" culture. Since you seem to have opinions on this, I thought you would have something to say about how they relate to PO and other resource depletion issues.

[Keith_McClary]

Actually, the claim to property rights originates in Nature ... in territorial animals of ... declare via perimeter markings, what areas of land they consider to be their regions of exclusive control.

I don't think any other critters have anything like the state granted and enforced monopolies that we refer to as "property rights".

[Keith_McClary]

I don't think any other critters have anything like the state granted and enforced monopolies that we refer to as "property rights".

Sure they do.

Just try doing a communal "share" with a grizzly bear in "his" cave.

Yah, I'd be in trouble with the Smokies & EPA, but the bears' monopoly rights are human state granted.
BTW, where I live we share the outdoors with grizzlies (mostly black bears & cougars, tho).

(BTW, patents are not "monopolies" --but that is a whole other issue )

I guess you have your whole other dictionary.

Full Definition of PATENT
1: an official document conferring a right or privilege : letters patent
2a : a writing securing for a term of years the exclusive right to make, use, or sell an invention
b : the monopoly or right so granted
c : a patented invention
3: privilege, license
4: an instrument making a conveyance of public lands; also : the land so conveyed
5: patent leather

[Keith_McClary]

Yes I do (have and use different dictionaries).
Just because "it is written" and the book calls itself a 'dictionary' doesn't mean that the understanding you extract from it is a correct understanding.

In the case of modern day, patents to inventors; these are definitely not "monopolies".

Maybe this link will help you:
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/patent/nonprovisional-utility-patent/

I know how patents work (and how the US system used to work, tho I understand they have monkeyed with it recently).

Sure sounds like a "monopoly" as described in the OED, which has the temerity to call itself a dictionary.

[Keith_McClary]

Enlighten us with your definitions of what is a "computer", what is "software", what is "general purpose".

Not to mention "as such".

[dissident]

Intellectual property as a legal construct is nonsense designed to feed variants of patent trolls. For example, if you torrent some TV show you are engaging in IP theft and illegal distribution. Really, what rubbish. It's the fault of the cable oligopoly for putting up barriers to distribution of said shows via forced packages. You also pay a fee for watching commercials. Commercials are designed for free over the air TV and not for cable. There is no real free marketplace for TV shows and having someone face jail time and massive fines (i.e. tens of thousands of dollars) for "ripping" off TV shows is absurd.

Stealing software is a different thing altogether but it is the case that you can get away with it but can be busted for "stealing" TV. The software companies are not as aggressive as TV and film studios in their zealous fight against "piracy". None of these zealously defended TV shows contributes any value to society. The ones that do are freely accessible anyway.

Rambus is another fine example of patent trolling. The joke called the US Patent Office allows the filing of empty patents with a long grace period to provide the details. Totally absurd and it allowed Rambus to sit in on JEDEC committee meetings defining the SDRAM standard. Rambus then ran off and filled in the details in its place holder patents and proceeded to sue every memory manufacturer it could get at for "stealing its technology". The real theft was by Rambus.

Major corporations spend lots of money acquiring as many patents as they can in a preemptive attempt to defend themselves against patent troll attacks. The notion that some innovator is protected by the US Patent Office is a joke and a fairy tale. They are more likely to be sued into the ground by some patent trolls for violating BS patents granted by said office.

[Keith_McClary]

Well, apparently somebody has a negative view about the whole IP thing.

You really don't want to defend your positive view (correct me if that is not your view).

[Keith_McClary]

The Great Question, to me, is: "What are the elements that drove what had been a relatively small ideology/culture that sprung up mostly in about 18th c mostly in England to become so large and powerful as to now threaten the whole of complex life on earth." Was it merely the accident that they stumbled into fossil fuel and figured out a way to use it to dominate other human and non-human communities?

If you look at the stationary steam engines that the British had designed and then their agents would install in central and western Europe, especially in the Low Countries, from the 1720s onwards, they are the coming together of three different but related technologies. You needed technology that was capable of building very long, very robust metal cylinders. And that technology comes from gunnery. So exactly the same technology that you would use to make gun barrels was used to make the big cylinders for the steam engines. Secondly, you needed technology that could produce a regular and controllable source of heat in a large container. And that’s a distillery, right? And thirdly, you needed wheelwork. You needed a system of wheel-driven, geared balances that could turn circular motion into vertical motion, and vice versa. And that comes from the clock trade. So like a lot of perpetual motion machines, steam engines were absolutely dependent on clockmakers.

And putting together distillation, clock making, and gunnery limits, to put it mildly, the number of places where these stationary steam engines are likely to be designed. You need to be a warlike, whiskey-drinking (or at least alcohol-drinking), clock-making, time-sensitive, ingenious bunch of blokes. And that kind of means England in this period, because it’s hardly anywhere else that you get all those things in the same place at the same time. And for that reason, foreign observers found them puzzling; not magical, but certainly mysterious.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5 ... turner.php

[Tanada]

Actually the skill for turning angular momentum into reciprocal motion had nothing to do with clocks. The Dutch monasteries way back in the early middle ages built Windmills and by 1400 they were converting the circular motion of the windmills into pumping action to drain the lowlands. Steam engine gear trains came from Windmills and Watermills, not clocks. Not to mention that the clocks of the day were either weight or spring driven and either energy source pulling on a gear is circular motion to start with. The bulk of the gear train in a time piece is to get all the hands to move at exactly the correct pace despite the fact that the energy input varies a bit as the spring winds down. That is a matter of escapement devices that only allow a tiny fraction of the stored energy to be released at the design pace giving the clock its tick-tock rhythm of clicks as the escapement assembly rocks back and forth.