Blog Insights: More on copyrights and patents
What bloggers are saying about the latest in information technology
Cnet's Michael Kanellos unleashed the ire of the blogosphere last week when he defended the concept of patents and copyrights, and the response has been overwhelmingly negative with bloggers all but calling for his public execution for daring to defend the concept of intellectual property. TechDirt even goes so far as to make the claim that CNet's reputation has been damaged by even publishing the piece, and others are making the outrageous demand that CNet remove the article. Strange how anti-censorship bloggers tend to be until someone prints something they don't like. It's interesting to read the voluminous responses to the many blogs that have popped up on the subject, with many people, who no doubt do not own copyrights themselves and do not make their livings creating copyrighted material, calling for the outright abolition of copyright.
Kanellos is correct in his unpopular view that copyrights are a "necessary driver of the world economy," although his claim that open source projects would wither and die without intellectual property to battle against may be a bit far-fetched. Open source is a whole separate creature that just operates under a different set of rules, and for the most part, it works. But, that's not to say that the whole world should be open source; intellectual property created and protected under patents and copyrights is also a valid way of doing business, and it can and must exist in a free society. And yes, it does indeed drive the world economy. Most big companies, especially Internet companies, exist because they possess patents. Despite the Technology Liberation Front's claim to the contrary, even do-no-evil Google benefits from patents.
Kanellos takes on the claim that "patent trolls" exist to prey on others. There are, to be sure, some patent trolls out there, and I've written about this myself in the past . But it should come as no surprise to anyone that people who own patents and copyrights defend them in court when they have the opportunity to do so; whether you are an individual or a corporation, you have a right to defend your livelihood. To say that patents and copyrights should not exist or should be severely restricted reflects a bizarre sort of anti-intellectualism, which when it has existed in the past, did not end well. The advanced state of technology today exists largely because of two things: scientific and intellectual innovation and creation, and the system for rewarding it. Most of us who create eight hours a day do so in hopes of making a living. If this were not possible, most of us would probably get jobs at the post office, and the current age of technological advancement would indeed wither and die.
Watching Eyes attempts to posit that copyright infringement is not theft, claiming that theft can only occur in the case of a physical object. It's a weak and outdated argument, and anybody in the tech industry should realize that property does not necessarily have to have physical form.