Software Patents: Innovation's Quicksand

Eric Maskin is no fan of software patents, and people should pay attention.

Professor Maskin is no technology flower child pushing P2P with his LSD. This Harvard and MIT economist just won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on mechanism design theory. In 1999, he turned his economic eye to the value of software patents. And found them wanting.

His research showed that when patent protections for software strengthened during the 1980s, "far from unleashing a flurry of new innovative activity, these stronger property rights ushered in a period of stagnant, if not declining, R&D among those industries and firms that patented most."

Strong patent protection produced less R&D spending, and slowed productivity growth.

Why?

Technology is an industry of sequential innovation, with advancements built on the preceding invention of others. Imitation breeds innovation. In software, copying ideas and concepts is vital for innovation. Hence, the genius of open source as a software development model -- few barriers to the use of other people's concepts and code.

In dynamic industries like software, patents constrict innovation.

This relates to a larger enemy of innovation that I have blogged about -- content scarcity.

Maybe it is time to stop applying 19th Century rules on intellectual property to post-industrial areas that have an entirely different economic mechanics?


Categories: innovation, software, IP

An Inconvenient Nobel Prize

Al Gore, modern day prophet, has just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise social and political awareness of the dangers of global warming. Gore shares the Prize the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Propelled by the movie "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore has toured the world delivering his PowerPoint pitch on the risks of man-made climate change. The film won an Academy Award. The man is now a Nobel laureate.

The best thing that ever happened to Al Gore was being defrauded in the 2000 election.

Of course, George Bush, the court-appointed winner of that election, is likely too thick to recognize that this year's Peace Prize is a direct retort to his empty, oil-infused rhetoric on climate change and energy policy. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol early in his presidency and has spent the intervening years doing nothing to break the US's "oil addiction" as he called it. Empty words.

Some may question the connection between global warming and peace. It is a short-sighted protest. It is not hard to imagine how severe climate change--bringing the loss of drinkable fresh water, massive flooding, refugees and ruined agricultural lands--could spark major conflicts as people become more desperate to avoid its impact.

Gore will no doubt reject the temptation to run for President this year, despite the efforts of draftGore.com. And why should he? He's on a roll, and the rest of the world beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows it.

Categories: GlobalWarming, AlGore

GSA "FEMAs" California

Life on the Internet can be fragile, as California learned yesterday. While taking counter-measures against a hacker re-directing traffic from a state county's website to a porn website, the U.S. General Services Administration deleted California - virtually.

For seven hours, the entire ".ca" domain -- home to every government agency in California -- was gone. A flick of a a switch and ... No web access. No email. No California.

It started with the discovery that the website for Transportation Authority of Marin Country was hacked, and all traffic we sent to pornographic websites. The fear that its DNS server had been compromised, and could thus compromise the entire ".ca" domain apparently led the GSA to make California disappear entirely -- or more technically de-list ".ca" making it in accessible from servers worldwide.

As more public services become web-delivered, the need for reliable 24/7 access is obvious. Maybe a little more attention needs to be paid to disaster recovery by governments as they pursue e-government.

Who needs an earthquake when you have GSA? Maybe we should get FEMA to take over the ".gov" domain management.

Open Source Gets Himalayan High

It is a rare day when I can mention open source and Bhutan in the same sentence. The beautiful, tiny, mountain kingdom is far from a hotbed of technology innovation. Or is it?

Bhutan represents a great example of the power of open source. Too small to get its language supported in Microsoft products, open source allows Bhutan to help itself. The result ...

Dzongkha Linux (Pronounced like "Zonka"). Its release by the country's Department of Information and Technology demonstrates what open source--and only $80,000--can do.

Developed in 13 months, Dzongkha Linux is bootable on both Mac and Windows systems It is also bilingual, supporting both English and the Dzongkha language for word processing, spreadsheets, PowerPoint, web browsing, even chat. And Bhutan is not done yet. Next they plan to develop local language based, speech recognition and text-to-speech functionality.

All that innovation for an $80,000 investment. Now that is a major return on investment, courtesy of open source.

Categories: Bhutan, opensource

ISO Rejects OOXML - Now What?

After months of political maneuvering and manipulation, ISO has rejected OOXML for fast track approval as an international standard. Approval required a two-thirds majority, or 67% "yes" votes. OOXML received 53%, a few votes short.

Rejection of OOXML is a setback for Microsoft, which wanted ISO approval to help convince customers--especially governments--to accept its usage and speed adoption of Vista and Office 2007.

The loss is likely temporary, though it is difficult to say how temporary. In February, ISO will convene a special ballot resolution meeting to consider changes to OOXML addressing technical objections raised by countries. There are many. And most do not address to core issue -- the need for a truly open document standard (like ODF) without proprietary extensions (as currently fill OOXML).

The real battle continues in the marketplace and in government policy circles. However, Microsoft can do itself (and ISO) a big favor, and follow the advice of France...

Split OOXML into two standards -- one that can be merged into ODF as a real open standard; and one that catalogs all the proprietary extensions needed for backward compatibility with the legacy MS formats (a closed but useful standard).

In this case, splitting the baby will save it (and us).

Categories: ISO, OOXML, Microsoft

Microsoft: Mistakes Were Made in Sweden

Microsoft has admitted that a rogue employee sent a letter to MS partners in Sweden advising that they were expected to join the recent OOXML-as-ISO-standard meeting and vote "yes" in return for "market subsidies" (like paying for their advertising) and "additional support in the form of Microsoft resources." [Article is translated here.]

Microsoft has said that it was unauthorized, improper and quickly corrected. On his blog, Microsoft's Jason Matusow noted yesterday that "The whole point of the process is that organizations with an interest may participate."

He is right. Unfortunately.

In most countries, the technical committees considering how to vote on OOXML have created a process that invites (even relies on) companies -- all of whom have huge commercial interests in the decision -- to vote.

Such a process invites games, and abuses - as I noted here.

Why are governments enabling this? Why are governments abdicating their responsibility for decisions that affect public interests? Yes, technical issues are involved. But they are technical issues with big impact on public interests.

So blame the companies for their underhanded actions, and blame governments failing in their duty to serve the public interests.

[Quick Update: After revelations of improper actions by a Microsoft employee and concerns that it tainted voting on OOXML, the Swedish Standards Institute has declared its vote invalid and decided to abstain in the ISO vote.

Apparently, Sweden is not alone. Hungary's Minister of Economy & Transport instructed the Hungarian Standards Institution to re-do the OOXML voting due to ballot stuffing, arbitrary changing of rules, and exclusion of "no" voters.]

Categories: OpenStandards, OOXML, Sweden, Microsoft

Microsoft Stuffs OOXML Ballot Box in Sweden?

Sweden is the stage for the latest games being played as the ISO vote on OOXML approaches. Last minute arrivals (listed here) at the meeting of Sweden's technical committee tipped the vote in favor of OOXML.

Is this Microsoft's fault? The real problem is that countries like Sweden (and Portugal before this) never established clear, transparent rules on who and how votes take place.

And companies exploit this. Why? Because huge business interests are at stake, and they can. Microsoft gets its business partners to vote. Microsoft's competitors also show up to vote. They all pay their admission fee and vote.

This is what happens when a vote that should be based on technical and public interest grounds is left to companies to decide.

The basic question: why should companies vote at all on a country's position on a standard?

Whether one standard or another best serves the public interest of a country is not an issue that should be decided by companies, which all have huge market and business interests at stake. This is a decision for government -- weighed by technical experts and decided in a transparent process by politically accountable officials.

Anything less is unacceptable.

Categories: OpenStandards, OOXML, Sweden