[PLUG-TALK] Software Patents

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005, Russ Johnson wrote:
> Jeme A Brelin wrote:
>> Trade secret law is nothing more than the abuse of state power on 
>> behalf of monied interests.  There is no public benefit whatsoever. 
>> Patent gives the public full disclosure in exchange for the restriction 
>> of natural rights (free implementation of ideas).  Trade secret has no 
>> such barter. The rights of the people are restricted for the benefit of 
>> a few.
>
> In plain english, I'd like to know why, if I know something, you have a 
> "right" to the information.

I didn't write that I had any such right to your knowledge.  That's pretty 
absurd.

Trade secret law typically allows a company to sue those who disseminate 
information that the company would prefer to be kept secret.  Consider 
DVDCCA v. Brunner et al. in California.  This was a case the DVDCCA 
brought against several people (most of them not California residents with 
no significant business contact to California) who shared information 
about the DVD CSS algorithm in articles on websites.  The algorithm was 
not patented because a patent would have required the organization to 
disclose the algorithm to the public and the sham would have been unveiled 
(the sham involved convincing folks that the thing actually controlled 
access, which it does not).  Instead, they claimed it was a trade secret 
and tried to use the law to silence those who would share the information. 
People's rights were impinged upon through force of law for the benefit of 
a private company and the public got nothing in return.  That's wrong to 
my way of thinking.

I believe that if a person knows something, they should be free to share 
that information with whomever they choose and the impact of that 
knowledge on the profitability of a particular industry should have no 
bearing whatsoever.  In fact, I believe that sharing information is a 
natural right of all people and exactly the freedom Jefferson intended to 
be protected when he drafted the Amendment I.

[This gets to the crux of another issue I ignored in my longer message on 
the Constitutional basis of copyright and patent law -- namely, that the 
Bill of Rights were never properly treated as amendments to the 
Constitution.  Amendments change that which came before.  Every amendment 
after number 10 is handled that way.  But the first ten amendments are 
somehow weaker than the others in that they must be balanced against that 
which is written in the main body of the Constitution instead of simply 
rendering the prior null and void.  For instance, I think a strong 
argument could have been made that the first amendment makes the Copyright 
Act unconstitutional.  Of course, such a legal argument would be shot down 
today not because it lacks merit as a legal argument, but because 
tradition has sanctified the status quo.]

Leaving aside all discussion of rights and the law, I also believe that a 
person has a moral and ethical obligation to share generally useful 
information with mankind.  All information is synthesis of input and 
nearly all of the important input a person receives comes from other 
people.  In a sense, we all have a kind of "information debt" to the whole 
of humanity which we can never adequately repay.  The least we can do is 
share our potentially unique synthesis with those who gave us everything 
we ever learned.

> Why should you benefit from my time and effort to gain said knowledge?

I can't parse that sentence.

How would I benefit to gain it?  Wouldn't I have to sacrifice to gain it? 
There's a wrong word in there somewhere or you put them in the wrong 
order.

J.
-- 
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      Jeme A Brelin
     jeme at brelin.net
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  [cc] counter-copyright
  http://www.openlaw.org