Patent nutters revisited

It getting bigger – I am now getting hate mail based on my one little article published on patents.

I do believe that I am going to have to get to the bottom of this. And to do that I will have to write an article on patent haters.

But, ahead of genuine inquiry, I am wondering about the personality types that hate all things patents.

They are an odd thing to hate, patents. But I suppose they can’t punch back, nor are their promoters likely to punch back. Patent attorneys and their ilk are a gutless bunch in general. So it’s a safe target at which to vent. To be fair its much easier to puff up the silly examples of patented inventions, say one-click purchasing, than it is to explain the system-wide benefits from investment in, and communications of technology.

The haters all seem to be academics or software engineers. Isolated introverts, possibly seeking some externality to blame for life’s ills.

They see the patent system as something that threatens their implied right to do any research or engineering at a whim. Not that these guys will ever get the resources to do anything meaningful – one of their ills.

The patent system also threatens their implied right to exploit their work product – not that they have any. If they did they might be thinking patent rights were a good thing. Indeed many of them support free access to all technology so, logically, they could just give away their work product and many do in the form of code that hardly anyone cares about or papers that nobody reads.

They may be believing that they are acting altruistically – trying to pull down the scaffolding of the patent system for the greater good by making technology cheaper and more readily accessible. It’s here where the real argument starts – if there were no patents the key question is, would there be less invention? This is simply unanswerable and, I can assure you, we aren’t about to find out any time soon. So the whole argument is moot and the process is Quixotic.

As a colleague points out, this is the perfect breeding ground for esoteric arguments because there are so few people that really understand the whole patent system (including most patent attorneys). Therefore the academics can lament to their hearts content in the absence of anyone with the skills to rebuff them. Cleverness confirmed sans factual perforations.

It is possible that hating patents is a cover for hating their own lack of success in their endeavours. Or, getting ahead of the curve, making excuses before failure occurs.

To put it another way, their extreme hatred of an innocuous government mandated invention system suggests they are transferring self-loathing. And you can’t win arguments with people that are lying to themselves; they have a metaphorical glass eye and you will be confused as you follow the diverging optical paths of dissimulation.

For some of them the hating of patents is just a badge of entry into the clubs of the voluntarily disenfranchised. They probably have to wear scarves and black beanies and drink cider as well. One does have to look and feel the part in order to fit in. Fuck logic and individual thought, despite any pretences to the same.

Fortunately, for the rest of us, they reveal their nuttiness in their communications and are hence ignored by all policy makers and sane folk. Except of course the journalists – they love a short cut to interesting copy and usually have no genuine ability to adjudicate between useful and useless opinion.

Now I will go and talk to a few of them – they have self-selected themselves by sending me emails. I will use the above as a starting hypothesis and try to prove it wrong with first-hand data. This will be interesting. And fun.

Evil fucker…