Intellectual property is a disaster

It is difficult to know the best way to make a positive impact on the world. We spread our beliefs through our conversations and, hopefully, through our work as well. I often contemplate going to law school because it would be so meaningful to be able to influence the rules of our society.

Intellectual property law has become particularly contentious. Technology companies are in an arms race to accrue such large portfolios of patents that their competitors are unable to compete or sue them based on other patents. A recent New York Times article used the following graphic to depict the lawsuit mayhem that has erupted in the mobile device space.

The New York Times article was written in response to the news that Apple has threatened to sue HTC, Motorola, and other mobile device companies for infringing on iPhone-related intellectual property. Apple acts as if they invented the touchscreen phone and they are trying to intimidate rival companies from including features like multitouch and gestures on their devices in the United States. I find this sort of behavior to be slimy, selfish, and short-sighted. It makes me seriously doubt that I would purchase another iPhone in the future, even if it happens to be the best phone for my needs at the time. I’d rather buy from a rival handset maker like HTC or Palm that is trying to improve upon recent ideas instead of using threats and lawyers to stop innovation from happening.

The Copyright Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) of the Constitution empowers the United States Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” I believe that there is a logical basis for this and I would expect software and “business method” patents to exist for this purpose. In practice, however, people seem to think that they should be able to patent ideas so that they can own them forever, completely control how they are used, and get rich quickly by licensing them. This certainly was not what the founding fathers had in mind when they instituted copyrights “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

Additionally, notice how the Copyright Clause states that copyrights should be for “limited times.” In one of the most disastrous Supreme Court decisions that I can remember, the court ruled in Eldred v. Ashcroft that there was no limit to the number of times Congress could extend the lengths of existing copyrights. This means that Congress can effectively make copyrights last forever in spite of the language of the Constitution which clearly indicates that they must have “limited times.” This means that older works are not becoming part of the public domain, where we are all free to use them, even though many of them are out-of-print and no one is making money off of them anyway.

In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn’t find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn’t know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark. (the NYTimes)

It’s going to be worth the fight to make sure that important ideas aren’t locked up for the rest of time.