Software Patents

There was an article last April about Microsoft being sued on the claim that Word 2007 & 2003 violated someone else's patent (ht Jeffrey Tucker):

Microsoft "unlawfully infringed" on a patent that describes how programs go about "manipulating a document's content and architecture separately."

The ruling is absurd for a number of reasons.

First of all, it's a clear case of judicial tourism. The plaintiff sought out this court specifically because they are friendly to plaintiffs.

Second of all, as a commenter suggests, this court's friendliness to plaintiffs has been attracting many cases, and is probably motivated by a desire to bring revenue to the town (since the legal teams must travel there and spend money while there).

Third of all, it makes one wonder why one should even be having patents on software to begin with. The plaintiff, i4i, Inc., is suing over a technique of writing documents using xml format. The company didn't invent xml (which is non-proprietary) nor did Microsoft steal it's method of actually writing xml documents. It just stole the idea of simultaneously editing the content and architecture of a document. Such a patent should never have even been given, and almost certainly will be thrown out by a higher court. Yet, it's a fairly typical example of a software patent.

I'm not too sympathetic to patents in general, but at least a case can be made for patents in certain areas, like pharmaceuticals and chemistry, where a lot of real research and innovation goes into developing patentable technologies. But patents on software is absurd. Software is already protected by copyright. Adding patent protection in addition is intellectual-property overkill. Patenting software is like patenting literature or fine art. It'd be like if someone took out a patent on the flashback, or the first-person narrative, or ending a chapter with a cliff-hanger. Imagine if authors had to pay a percentage of their royalties every time they ended a chapter with a cliff-hanger because some non-writer had nabbed the patent on it.

In addition, so much software is produced, that it's impossible to determine prior art. And unfortunately many software patents are granted for techniques that add very little new to existing techniques, even if they don't violate prior art.

Software patenting should be scrapped.

Stealing blog posts

Mark J Perry, author of the blog Carpe Diem just today posted a problem he's been having with another website stealing his posts. The website Death & Taxes automatically reposts articles by Mark Perry, attributing them to Perry, but not linking back to his site and thus implying that he works for Death & Taxes.

The funny part is that the post in which he complains about this, also has been automatically posted. I guess it's one thing to be too lazy to write a blog post and simply take them from someone else. It's even worse to be so lazy that you just steal it automatically without even checking what you're stealing.

Review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

I just finished reading through Atlas Shrugged a few days ago. I have read a little of Ayn Rand's non-fiction works before, and she definitely has some interesting ideas. Her defense of capitalism is good, her intention of trying to transvaluate values to better favor capitalism is well-meaning but a failure since her alternative of more selfish-orientated values is both very unsophisticated and fairly unappealing to most people. And she out and out fails to understand the positive role of charity within a free market system and the long history of beneficial voluntary charity throughout economic history.

Ultimately, her main problem really is that she doesn't have that many ideas. You go reading one essay to the next and she's just saying the same thing over and over again. I should've born this more in mind before I started her 1000+ page magnum opus, since she certainly does not have enough ideas to justify such a lengthy work.

The main complaint I have is that the book is simply repetitive, both ideologically and plot-wise. The same things happen again and again: a policy is passed and the business scramble to adjust under it's burden. Her heroes are constantly eying each other admiringly while her villains keep on making backroom deals to run the whole economy. Ayn Rand's villains keep on presenting the same justifications of socialism while her heroes defend her philosophy ad nauseum, even though they're just repeating points already made. The worst of it is John Galt's speech near the end. John Galt hijacks the radio airwaves at 8 pm one evening to spread his message of Randian Objectivism. The speech goes on for 3 hours (I was listening to the audiobook, and it took 3 hrs, 18 minutes). By 11 pm when he finished, most of his audience would probably be long asleep, thankful to Galt for his pleasant soporific, but she portrays it as this electrifying clarion call. His speech is a nice consolidation of the ideas presented in the book, but it's incredibly redundant. The ideas presented have by this point (about 1000 pages into the book) already been beaten into the head of the reader with a jackhammer.

Her writing style is also weak. Her ability to describe is both limited and used excessively. And character development is very weak. Her heroes are all bold, confident, independent and very intelligent. Her villains are all cowardly, conniving, afraid of responsibility and parasitical. This can hardly describe the typical statist or bureaucrat of the real world, and makes one wonder if she'd ever read about the "fatal conceit" of central planners, via Hayek (namely, the problem with central planners is not that they're afraid of responsibility, but are way to assured that they can run things better than the vastly complex self-organization of the market).

On the other hand, the degradation of the US under socialist tendencies in her book is poignant and bears not a little resemblance to events of today: the nationalizations, the forced cartelization, the purported attempts to encourage competition or "fairness" (a fairly flexible word). Socialism has always been parasitical on the productivity of the market, and one need look no further than the Soviet Union in the late teens and early twenties (before it reintroduced individual ownership) to see how quickly socialism left on its own can implode. Rand provides many illustrative examples that extend this point.

It's unfortunate though that doesn't confine herself to describing this situation, and condense the story down to its core. Instead, she draws it out through repetition of the same scenarios over and over again. If she had managed to do a much more economical task of efficient and pointed writing, instead of this long and luxurious overblown waste I'm sure I would have been much more pleased. One can't think of a more ironic similarity to government waste, that Rand manages to do in 1200 pages, what a better writer could've easily done in 200. Nonetheless, if you've got a hankering for a long read, it can be worth your time, and its recent upsurge in popularity is understandable.

Positive & Negative Rights

Somebody I heard mentioned FDR's so-called "Second Bill of Rights" recently, something which I'd never heard of, so I decided to look into it. It was a list of rights, including right to a home, a job, medical care and others that was proposed by Roosevelt in 1944, but fortunately was never enacted. It's a rather distressing list, and a radical departure from the original Bill of Rights.

How it's such a radical departure can be summed up by the difference between "positive rights" and "negative rights." The first Bill of Rights constitutes mostly negative rights. These rights constrain the Federal Government so that it can't impinge on certain freedoms. In short, negative rights are the rights not to have something done to you.

Positive rights, on the other hand, are rights to have something. Since none of these things are things that simple fall from the sky in overabundance like manna from heaven (all of them have to be produced) this means if you lack something, then someone is obliged to provide it for you. For example, if you don't have a house, then if there is a right to a house, then somebody is forced to provide you with that house.

Sometimes there can be confusion about the positive and negative rights because it's not always clear in the way the rights are expressed whether it's positive or negative. For example, if I say that there is a right to property, I could construe it as both a positive or a negative right. As a negative right, it is a cornerstone of economic development, and simply means that if you own something, then no one can take it from you. For example, if I have a home, no one can seize the home without my consent. We could construe right to property as a positive right also if we say that if I don't have something, then someone is forced to give me something. So, if I own no home, then someone has to build me a home, or give me a home that someone already owns.

In the area of freedom of speech, there is often much confusion of the two. The Bill of Rights only guarantees a negative right to speak. This means that if I have my own venue in which to voice my views, no one can shut it down because they don't like what I say. For example, we read today that in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has shut down 34 radio stations. These various radio operators owned the equipment and materials, the staff and the radio frequency to project their content at their own expense. Chavez decided he didn't like what they said, so he shut them down. This genuinely infringes on the negative right to speech. But people sometimes confuse freedom of speech for a positive right, as if someone is required to provide them with a venue. For example, if tv stations were required to provide every person with 5 minutes per year to express their views, then this would be a positive right. This would be a sacrifice the tv stations would be forced to make. When it is construed as simply a negative right, no one is impinged upon.

The situation can get complicated when we deal with public protests, which use as their venue public roads, sidewalks, and parks. Since these venues are supposed to be owned by everyone (or no one, depending on your perspective) then the protesters thus own them and can use them to protest, but this might conflict with what other members of the public might want to do with the roads, sidewalks or parks. In practice, the public property is owned by a government and it decides who gets to use the space. Nonetheless, this can lead to all types of controversy. For example, when in 1999 the Brooklyn Museum showed the controversial exhibition "Sensation," mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to deny them funding, which led to charges of censorship and restricting freedom of speech because the museum is a public museum receiving public support. On the other hand, when in 1933 Rockefeller decided to remove a Mural by Diego Rivera containing the face of Vladimir Lenin, the issue is less controversial because Rockefeller owned the space and was commissioning the work from Rivera. Rockefeller was not being forced to give Rivera a venue, but the public is in a sense being forced to give some group access to public venues.

Returning to the Bill of Rights the only positive rights in the Bill of Rights, are rights to a trial, which is to say that if the government decides to bring criminal charges against you, they are required to provide you with a fair trial, and citizens are required to serve on the jury. All the other numerous rights of the Bill of Rights are negative rights.

In general, as we look at traditional law through history we'll see a similar ratio of positive to negative rights, with most legal rights restraining people from doing bad things, rather than guaranteeing that they get good things. For example, in the Ten Commandments, followers are asked to worship the one God, keep the sabbath, and respect their parents. The rest is a list of things they can't do, mostly things they can't do to their fellow humans. Similarly, the Code of Hammurabi, also lays down punishment for doing various bad things, primarily setting down restraints on the citizenry, as well as implicitly restraining the monarchs, since they must too abide by these laws. As we go further along in history, the negative rights only grow, and the restrictions on what the government can do to its citizens increase, from the Magna Carta, to The Declaration of the Rights of Man, to the US Bill of Rights.

This is all rather for the best since by restraining people from doing bad things, this brings about more good. Negative rights, restricting bad things, are thus ethically good. One is tempted to think that this similarly applies to positive rights. It's nice to see people getting all types of good things like a home, a job and medical care. But that's until you realize that, as I've said, someone is forced to give them these things. If you don't have a job, then someone is forced to provide you with work and pay your salary.

Thus, while it is clear that negative rights that restrain people from doing a bad thing are ethically good, it is not clear whether positive rights can ever be good. Even if it's quite clear cut to say that if someone doesn't have a job, it's good to give them one voluntarily out of sense of charity, it's not so clear cut when a person is forced to involuntarily give it to them. To broaden the question a bit more, we might ask, "can involuntary charity ever be a good?"

I'd say no. In William Graham Sumner's "Forgotten Man" parable he makes a similar point. Two persons see the sad plight of some third person, but instead of helping him, they force some fourth person to help him. This fourth person is the forgotten man. If some person crusading for home ownership notices that there are people who want to own a home but can't, why would that person petition the government to force taxpayers to give them homes. Why doesn't the crusader simply help them himself? Give them money, start a charity, raise money from others, organize groups to build cheap homes. There are many options.

Positive rights also have a tendency to clash with many critical negative rights. For example the right to a home easily clashes with property rights, if homes have to be taken from others.

Not to mention that positive rights frequently set up some perverse incentives. Why bother to work hard to earn the money for a home, if you can just work less hard, and get someone else to buy it for you.

Then there's that whole problem of force in general. Force is bad, and really can only be justified if we see some countervailing evil that it's preventing.

In short, the moral integrity of the first Bill of Rights certainly doesn't translate to the so-called Second Bill of Rights. The ethical baseness of forcing people to provide for others, exposes the baseness of the Second Bill of Rights, and is why I say it is so distressing.

Philosophical Novels

I just came across this flow chart "How to succeed as an Ayn Rand Character" (ht: Brian Doherty). I've just been reading through Atlas Shrugged, and I can say that this chart is spot on. The last time I'd read Ayn Rand was when Anthem was assigned as reading in my English class in High School, back in 1997. People had recommended to me that I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged during those years, and I've managed to put it off until now. I always thought the books were unbearably too long, and it also didn't help that other people I knew really bad-mouthed Ayn Rand. But now that Atlas Shrugged has been getting so much attention lately and has had a large recent upsurge in popularity, I thought it important.

I'm not exacxtly bowled over by it. Atlas Shrugged is definitely unbearably too long, and Rand has no skill for succinctness. I can't share other libertarians' fondness for her, though I share the same type of resentment towards the man counter-productive programs initiated by the government in the name of the common good. On the other hand, I don't share the profound disgust that my philosophical colleagues have towards her. I think the main reason they don't like her is because she isn't very philosophically sophisticated. Her ideas aren't as philosophically rich as the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, or even lesser luminaries, which makes her far less interesting and worth the time of study/

But also Atlas Shrugged has left me with the impression that I just don't like philosophical novels in general. I figure that if you want to write about or defend an idea you should just write about it, and not try to dress it up in some contrive plot. There have been many idea-books out there that have sold extremely well (like books by Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas L. Friedman, Steve Levitt), so you can't argue that you need to dress it up to sell it to the people. Admittedly, such books aren't as sophisticated as great philosophical classics, and thus probably aren't the road to timeless philosophical glory, but they are quite influential.

I remember I was reading recently (I wish I could remember where) someone saying that all literature (as well as all movies and plays) is manipulative. The author is always trying to get us to feel certain things, or think certain things about the characters or events. But as a reader (or viewer) what we don't like is obvious manipulation. We don't like to feel we're being manipulated. It causes us to rebel. We like the artistry of subtle manipulation. One thing one would be reluctant to accuse Ayn Rand of is subtlety. Her clearly most admirable characters are all pure prophets of her philosophy, and they defend it in long monologues. If you read her non-fiction, she'll frequently quote her characters' speeches as if they express her philosophy better than she could.

I think one of the problems with philosophical novels, in general is that they have to be so obvious. If they're too subtle, then people will miss the point they're trying to make. SO I say, better to lay out your positions in clear non-fiction prose, and confine yourself to some brief illuminating examples rather than stretching it out over a full-length novel.

Price Competition in Higher Education and Health Care

In a market of voluntary exchange, when sellers of goods and services compete, they compete in two primary ways: price and quality. For example, when I buy a computer, it matters to me firstly, the speed of the processor, the amount of Ram, the size of the hard drive, expandability, operating system, and so on (quality) and secondly, the price. And these both matter when I buy a pair of shoes, or a flight to Minneapolis, or a vacuum cleaner, or a 45-minute massage.

If both price and quality competition are strong, the products will generally both decline in price and increase in quality. But of course the relative importance of either price or quality can be be weaker, if consumers don't emphasize one or the other in their buying.

If quality is not very important, then prices will be driven down even more strongly. This is the type of trend seldom see, but sometimes it happens in some raw material.

Vice versa, price can be of weak importance. For example, with Veblen goods, that is, status goods: things like designer clothes, expensive cars, fine jewelry, huge vacation homes, and so on. Quality matters a lot, but price is less important, since the customers buying these products are much less price sensitive. Thus, relatively marginal improvements in quality count for huge increases in price. Thus, price increases are kept unusually high.

But even more relevant these days than Veblen goods are two other important areas or weak price competition, where price growth is strong. In particular, health care and higher education.

In both of these we observe strong price growth because of factors that weaken price competition. In health care, health costs are primarily paid by insurers, Medicare and Medicaid. Only a very small percentage of health care is paid out of pocket, and prices are not conspicuously advertised. And even then health insurance itself is insulated from price competition by being provided by employers. Paying health insurance out of pocket tends to reduce costs. Thus, in contrast to areas of health care where costs are usually paid out of pocket, such as cosmetic surgery and laser eye surgery, areas of non-elective care that are not paid out of pocket see strong long term price growth in excess of inflation.

Higher education similarly is being paid for by loans or by scholarships or by parents' college funds. Very little again is being paid directly out of pocket by students.

When a buyer is putting down someone else's money for a purchase, price sensitivity decreases, especially if it is someone impersonal, that we don't have any emotional attachment to ("Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own"). Certainly, we clearly don't have any emotional attachment to our insurer, to the federal government or the a scholarship organization. We, quite frankly, don't really have a lot of emotional attachment to our future self (who we haven't met yet) who will be paying for the loans, as well.

In health care and higher education there is constant demand for ever better quality. This quality costs money, which drives up costs and without a check from consumer demand, this will increase rapidly. Now, we should recognize that there are many factors that may drive up prices in health care and education. In medical care, there is also dramatic growth in regulation (which grows ever more expensive). With higher education there is also the influence of college ratings and how they are calcuated, as well as that most colleges are not for profit (another short post on the same article). And in both cases there is the simple fact that we can afford to pay more because of greatest prosperity. These other factors are undoubtedly relevant. It's just that all industries have upward price pressure, bot in those cases price competition via consumer demand keeps prices in check and may even push prices downward despite all these factors. Weak price competition thus might be better described as permitting price growth by opening the spigot wide open to other factors.

Of the two, the rise in the cost of higher education is actual the more disturbing trend, since, whereas it is clear the health care has dramatically improved as costs have increased, it is not clear that education has gotten any better while costs have risen.

This is relevant for us now since policies are being pursued that will further weaken price competition. Much talk has been made of expanding higher education through increased lending. Considerations are also being considered of expanding health care by making the government an insurance provider (More health insurance not the answer). The idea behind the latter in particular is that government can control prices simply by fiat, namely through price controls. Of course, this will invite all the problems of shortage that price controls always entails.

Obviously, the way to control health care costs is to expand the amount of care covered out of pocket, with more individuals opting for high deductibles, that merely serves to cover emergencies and not basic health care, and to have more health insurance paid by the insuree, instead of their employer. And similarly, we should be contract student loans or increasing the amount that students have to pay out of pocket if we want to control costs.

The current policies unfortunately will have consequences completely in contradiction to the intentions of their advocates.

Consciousness & Sci-Fi Transportation Technology

I like to use science fiction as a good way to try to reimagine thorny philosophical questions. A good place to me to look at questions of whether there is a non-material part of us—like a soul, a mind, a consciousness—is in the possibility of science fiction teleportation devices.

If we assume that all we are is a body, then something like the transporter from Star Trek is unproblematic. Let's assume that we have a soul that's some sort of free floating thing separated from the body that is liberated after death. In the Star Trek transporter, your body is transformed into pure energy, zapped down to the planet's surface and is reconstituted as an identical material form. Does your soul float along through space and jump into the reconstituted body? Does the reconstituted body even have a soul? Does it acquire a new soul?

We might think it possible that since the same matter is used all the way through—being translated in energy, zapped down, then reconstituted—that the soul might be towed along.

Let's try an even harder case. Let's imagine that transportation works something like in The Fly: the original matter is destroyed, the information to reconstitute the matter is transmitted through electrical signals, and then a separate machine creates an identical copy. Is the copy going to somehow acquire the same soul?

I think the movie that best raises this point is the film very of The Prestige. In The Prestige, there is a machine that both transports and replicates the subject. When the subject steps into the machine, a second version of him is created in a different place. So, what happens to his soul? Is it duplicated, bifurcated, split? Let's look at it from his perspective. He steps into the machine, looking out at the audience; the machine warms up and there is a flash. Now, what does he see after the flash? Is he 1) still looking at the audience as the trap door opens below his feet? Is he 2) looking out over the audience from the balcony? Is he 3) seeing both simultaneously? Or is he 4) seeing nothing because his soul has blinked out of existence? I think the movie suggests it is 1), which is why the ending is so poignant. This also seems like the more plausible scenario given the situation.

To return to Star Trek, we might imagine what it would be like from someone using a transporter. I step into the transporter, looking out the room as someone prepares to transport me down to the planet's surface. Is it a) just a blink and now I'm looking out over some strange alien planet? Or is it b) the room disappears and then there is nothing, since I've blinked out of existence; meanwhile, simultaneously, a new man has been generated on the planet's surface, a new man physically identical to me, who bears all my memories, all my self-identity and who is in every sense convinced he is me. This new man remembers being up on the spaceship and everything that happened to me before and is convinced that he has done and experienced everything I have, even though he was just newly created only two seconds ago. This presents a problem since you can't decide whether it was scenario a or b that happened just by asking him.

If we think of the transfer in any of the cases when we are merely recreating the matter, and not reusing the same matter, then it is difficult to imagine the soul being conserved. It seems like the only reason to destroy the original is to preserve the illusion that the person hasn't simply been copied and that the copy is an entirely different person. Destroying the original before the copy is made allows us to think that it is merely the same person. But just like in the case of The Prestige, where there is a lag between the creation of the copy and the destruction of the original, the consciousness doesn't seem like it would find its way to the copy.

This is all to say, that if we develop technology like the above, then it will present real tests to help us better understand the nature of consciousness. And, in addition, it's possible because your consciousness or mind or soul cannot be transported with your body, these technologies will be things that most of us would prefer not to try.