[cc-community] The Copyleft Office

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Thu Aug 26 01:47:26 EDT 2004


Nathan Jones said:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 03:06:37PM -0400, Greg London wrote:
>>The other incentive should be that an author who is
>>willing to contribute their code should be excluded
>>from patent restrictions.
>
> Patent holders are likely to say, "they shouldn't have a different set of
> rules just because they are releasing their rights". The concern would be
> that anyone could easily rip off someone's invention by copying it and
> registering the copy with the copyleft office.
>

The constitutional grounding only demands that any law enacted
by congress regarding Writers and Inventors must "Promote Science
and the Useful Arts".

there is nothing that says profit is the measure of what is a
good patent law or copyright law, therefore "impact" by itself
is irrelevant if "Promoting Science" is lost.

The copyleft office would only apply to "Writings", and therefore would
only affect software patents. Any patent that can be implemented in purely
software form could just as easily spring out of a large gift-economy
as it could out of a mega-corporation. Linux proves that a gift-economy
can produce massively complex software that works better than any proprietary
system. Therefore encouraging software patents via a market economy is
unneccessary when the same advances in Science and the Arts could be
Promoted by creating a legally sanctioned Gift Economy.

The rule for intellectual property laws in general should be
"secure only enough rights for the author/inventor such that
they are encouraged to promote science and the arts. Any more
rights is unconstitutional corporate welfare."

So, if science and the arts can be promoted by creating a gift economy
and securing only the right to attribution, would that not be a better
solution than a market economy of patents?

> While there may be little gain for the person making the copy, there
> could be a significant impact for the person with the patent.

it might not be ex-post-facto. Any patent registered before the
Copyleft office is enacted would be honored. Any patent registered
after the copyleft office is enacted would not apply to any software
registered with the copyleft office. That would allow companies to
recover costs for their past research. Any future corporate research,
would have to be re-focused with the understanding that a software
implementation might be placed under the copyleft office, and would
be excluded from patent restrictions.

The GNU-GPL has built in patent protection for a reason.
While your concern is that a copyleft office would impact
a patent holder, it is clear that a software patent holder
could kill a copyleft office attempt to create a gift economy.

Making it apply to future patents only would reduce any
significant impact on current patent holders, but future
patents can not be imposed on the works in the copyleft office.
Corporations would simply have to redirect their research to
inventions that require patentable hardware/equipement, and not
rely on software tricks.








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