| Thursday, March 17, 2005 |  |
| What if patents applied to literature |
Software patents is a crazy obstacle in software development. In many jurisdictions one can "patent" some operation one does in software, like being able to sell books by one click, or using two clicks to select something. All of which makes it very difficult for a programmer to just solve some problem the logical way, as one in principle needs an army of lawyers to first verify that one didn't accidentally violate somebody's patent. Now, one way of seeing the sillyness in this is to consider what would happen if one could acquire patents on literature. Kuro5hin article here.Arthur Conan Doyle's patent on detective fiction would have expired long ago, but not before preventing Agatha Christie's career. C.S. Lewis' patent on the fantasy novel would have discouraged Tolkien's already reluctant publishers. Without this inspiration, the fantasy trilogies that fill an entire wall in every bookshop would never have been written.See, that's really the same thing. The idea of a patent made some sense when we were talking about physical devices, and it was reasonable to give the inventor a few years to develop it themselves, before their competitiors could just copy it. But it becomes insanity when we're talking about simple and obvious software development techniques. Just like it would be crazy if I could patent a sentence in the English language, or a plot point in a book. [ Information | 2005-03-17 13:14 | 6 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Float |
 Dee Hock Interview via Synergic Earth News.You can probably remember the days when a check would often take weeks to find its way through the banking system. That was called "float." This float was used as an early form of venture capital. Now, stop and think about other kinds of float. Think about information float (this is what Beck is speaking about): if you go back just a few centuries, it took, for example, almost a century for the knowledge about the smelting of iron ore to cross one continent. That brought in the Iron Age. When we landed on the moon, it was known and seen in every corner of the world in 1.4 seconds. Think about technological float: it took centuries for the wheel to gain universal acceptance. Now any microchip device can be in use around the world in weeks. Think about cultural float: it used to take centuries for one culture to even learn about or be exposed to a tiny bit of information about another. And now anything that becomes popular anywhere in the world can sweep through other countries in weeks. Consider space float: in just one long lifetime, a hundred years or so, we've gone from the speed of the horse to interstellar travel. People and materials now move in minutes when they used to move in months. And even life float - the time it takes to evolve new life-forms - is collapsing with genetic engineering. What all this means is the loss of change float - the time between what was and what is going to be, between the past and the future - so the past then becomes ever less predictive, the future ever less predictable, and everything is accelerating change with one exception: our institutions. There has been no truly new concept of organization since the ideas of nation-state and corporation emerged several centuries ago.That's probably about right. But, now, *float* was a lag between when something supposedly happened to when it actually happens, and, in particular, the advantage somebody can have from the in-between state. You put a check in the bank, and at some later point the money becomes available. And in the meantime the bank has some extra money available. And the person who made out the check has the money still available, even though he apparently has paid you. And they can do stuff with it, even though it in principle isn't there. Dee Hock is trying to make some other point there, of acceleration. He's more talking about lag than about float. Really, the float thing is more interesting in itself, I think. Like, I'd say there's a life float between your birth and your death, which we certainly get a lot of milage out of. From the perspective of the evolution of nature it might be more interesting that we move on to the next, slightly improved, generation. Whereas, for us, the interesting part is the float in-between, not the end point. If you travel from one place to the other, the in-between part is the float, if you use it for something. And maybe the journey is the best part. If we could teleport from place to place, there'd be no float, and we wouldn't experience journeys the same way. Lots of things in our society are based on the advantages we gain from a float. Lots of economic activity is just that. You can have a job mainly because there's some space in between some kind of manufacturer or provider and their ultimate customers. If the owner of the operation could get rid of you, they probably would. But you earn a living from the steps in-between. You can enjoy a movie or a book because there's a lag between the conception of that work and you "getting" the result of it. If you could just swallow a pill and get it all at one time, you'd be missing out on the real enjoyment, which is in the float, rather than in the result. I once took a speed reading course that allowed me to read 200-page novels in 15 minutes, with greater retention than before. But it was no fun at all, so I dropped the technique. To be a float, the lag must be a good thing for somebody. Sometimes it isn't obvious. In the old days, where people had conversations over snail mail letters, it would maybe take a letter a week to reach me. That might make me impatient, or on the other hand, it might give me breathing room, as I'd have no obligation to write my next entry before I've received the next answer. I could get a lot of things done in that time. And I'd treasure my letters more. So, in the speedy internet and cell phone age, there's much less float available. So, despite the obvious advantages of more instant communication, we're missing all the stuff we could do with the float or in the float. It is in the spaces in-between stuff that life often happens. In the gaps, in the cracks. The good parts often happen as side effects. What happens in the periphery might be as important as what happens in the focus of attention. So, it is important that we don't weed out all the gaps in the name of progress. Or there's no float for life to happen in. [ Patterns | 2005-03-17 13:59 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |