QRSWAVE vs. Patents and Copyrights
QRS opposes patents, copyrights, intellectual property scams, and monopolies of all kinds.
I asked for clarification.
QRS responded with many reasons I felt were valid enough to share with WUFYS.
NOTE: these are my interpretations of QRS’ message.
If I have misunderstood, perhaps QRS will correct me.
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QRS says patents and copyrights are destroying us. They stifle innovation, and help enslave the masses.
Today the items being patented are more and more ridiculous, yet patents have more and more legal force. This combination has created a feeding-frenzy with all of us as the food.
We award patents to people who are good at filling out forms, rather than to people who invent. We recognize paper-pushing ability, not creativity. An “inventor” is not a pioneer, but someone who files an application before everyone else who had the same idea. This is good for large corporations with monopolies, and for IP lawyers whose attitude is, "If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em.” For everyone else, it's a nightmare.
Large companies use the patent system to crush their competition. Small companies are sucked into the quagmire, since they are forced to take out patents to defend against litigation. When you start a business, you must devote half your money to a legal defense team, since a patent troll could come out of the woodwork at any time with a lawsuit. This hazard goes on forever. There are freelance trolls-for-hire. There are boiler room trolls that churn out mountains of frivolous lawsuits, knowing a certain percentage will pay off. They know their victims will find it cheaper to pay a “royalty” than to go to court. The trolls don’t even have to litigate. They just have to threaten.
By the way, QRS loves the term “royalty.” If you have a patent on looking at the sky, and you see someone looking at the sky, you can demand a “royalty” from that someone, meaning you are the “royal king” of the sky. And since you have patent “rights,” you have a divine “right” to be the king of the sky.
QRS also loves the term “patent
In most cases, patent holders use the system to extract huge licensing fees from victims that have no means to defend themselves in court. This has nothing to do with corporate "earnings” or “innovation.” It is a scam, plain and simple.
QRS doesn’t like monopolies, since they stifle competition, thus causing higher prices, lower quality, and chronic shortages. Patents are monopolies by legal definition. They increase the costs of drugs than can save your life, and the cost of research to make those drugs.
QRS says that most patented ideas are not original anyway. Companies are patenting genes, plants, bacteria, and lots of other things "invented" by nature. This is not "intellectual property.” It's outright thievery.
Soon someone will patent air and demand a licensing fee from every breathing person on earth. If you think that is absurd, then you do not understand the seriousness of the problem. One person got a U.S. patent for an imaginary UFO ! (See http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006995.html). Another clown patented the use of a laser pointer as a cat exercise.
QRS says that both patents and copyrights are evil, but especially patents. A copyright prohibits direct copying, but a patent grants a monopoly on vague "business practices" and "processes" and "techniques." This is a game of smoke and mirrors, analogous to the way the Federal Reserve conjures money out of thin air. It’s an illusion that enslaves millions. It is no different from patenting “existence,” and then saying, “I have a patent on existence. You exist. Therefore, pay me.”
Where does the madness end? Suppose the victim says, “I have a patent on saying, ‘Pay me.’ You have said, ‘Pay me.’ Therefore, pay me.”
The number of patent applications doubles every year, all of which are run past bureaucrats at the Patent Office. A bureaucrat decides whether an idea is novel, useful and nonobvious, and then grants the applicant an exclusive “right” to the idea for 20 years. If you’re a small inventor, it will take you 3 to 5 years to get a patent. If you’re a big corporation, it will take you a fracton of that time, since you have an army of specialists that game the system.
Sometimes important inventions are left on university shelves because businesses interested in commercializing university technology won’t touch it without a patent.
QRS notes that even if you challenge a patent in court (assuming you could get a court date), the laws vary between countries. Thus, multi-national corporations can defer you until you die or run out of money. And since they are the kings, their demands take precedence over your challenge to their demands.
Meanwhile a patent holder in a distant nation can demand payment because you infringed on his “patent rights” when you mixed chocolate Ovaltine with milk. Had you put the Ovaltine in the glass first, there would have been no problem, but since you put the milk in first, you must pay, since it was a “business practice” patented in the foreign nation.
Ridiculous? Far-fetched? This kind of absuridty happens every day in the real world.
Big corporations (for example, pharmaceutical firms) crush any attempt to reform or eliminate the system. They bribe politicians to write laws that favor the corporations.
The patent system cannot be “reformed.” It must be eliminated.
Then the IP lawyers crawled out of the sewer. They regard the Internet as one of their choicest feeding grounds.
QRS says the madness is so extreme, and so global, that it infects everyone, rich and poor alike. For example, Microsoft paid $16 million to license MP3 technology from the consortium that developed the MP3 standard. The consortium filed a lawsuit anyway, and got a jury to hit Microsoft with a 1.52 billion dollar judgment.
It’s eat and be eaten, boys and girls.
We must invent ourselves out of this mess.
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P.S. QRS and I have patented the idea of doing away with the Patent Office. Anyone who agrees with us and says we should get rid of patents must pay us a LICENSING FEE.
They have plenty of time, resources, and motivation to go after kids who download music without a license, but when it comes to finding the zionists who mailed out the Anthrax letters, they're all thumbs - and we know where they keep those thumbs.
for the great summary!
It's just as you say, with the exception that I am not sure which one I find worse - patents or copyrights.
Patents are deadly because they tax useful products and services, basically they concentrate the power of technology and industry into a few corporate overlord hands.
But, copyright is equally nasty because it makes learning prohibitively expensive.
Take for example law books which usually cost over $100 each. Who can afford that crap? However, they charge it because they can - professors require certain books and students have to buy them.
And what's worse about Copyright is the length of its term up to 120 years now, if I recall correctly - or something insane like that. That means people are taxed from cradle to grave on every copyrighted material that they want to read - e.g., first the novel, then the movie, then the sequel, the DVD, etc.
Plus, don't forget that could span over three generations. Meanwhile, the freaking corporations live forever and continue to make money the whole time.
Of course, they then take that money and lend it to others and collect interest - double whammy! They effortlessly get tons of cash through copyright, then they recycle that cash into another lucrative extortion business - moneylending at interest!
The result is that after a few decades we end up with a small number of extremely wealthy corporations (fortune 500) that own just about ALL the IP "rights" worth mentioning.
And, of course, behind these IMMORTAL corporations are real human beings and their descendants, all of whom have been raised to the level of gods with respect to the power and control that they wield.
It's only going to get worse from here on.
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"Money" has no value - people do.