Innovation in Technology

Reading Wired's recent interview with tech mogul Tim O'Reilly and he makes a couple of important points about innovation, growth, and the patent/copyright system in the tech industry.

Excerpt:

TIM O'REILLY: Everybody wants to foster entrepreneurship, but we have to think about the preconditions for entrepreneurship. You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation. [...] Pursing this path is not only altruistic. If companies don't think systemically enough--if they try to capture too much of the value--eventually innovation moves somewhere else.
WIRED: If you could pick a company that needs to hear this, which would it be?
TIM: Apple. They are clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim nobody else can make a device with multitouch. But they didn't invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball forward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, "OK, we got value from someone else, but it stops now." That attitude creates lockup in the industry. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo precisely because they try to own too much.

Although I'm sure he has put it more eloquently than I have, it's somewhat validating when an industry expert with the pedigree of O'Reilly shares your point of view.

My issues with the patent and copyright system (and how it relates to and is being practiced in the field of technology) isn't some socialistic, anti-Ayn-Rand/Atlas Shrugged, free-for-all where nobody's work is protected... the problem is that the current copyright and patent systems were modeled and established on a purely analog world which is now being super-imposed onto a radically different digital one. User interfaces and lines of code are far different from the engineered mechanical innovations the patent system was designed to protect. Patents were meant to protect a specific method of implementation, not the end result.

Take the mouse-trap, as an example: The USPO has issues over 4,400 patents for mouse traps. Each of those devices patented has the exact same end result (more or less): capturing or killing a mouse. Those patents meant that competitors had to come up with and develop new ways and methods of achieving the same results. The modern, tech-industry patent equivalent would be ONE patent for "a device which traps, captures, or ensnares rodents or other small household pests," and there would then only be *one* manufacturer of mouse-traps on the market. Would that *one* mouse-trap manufacturer have to make the best, most effective, and least expensive mouse-trap possible? Of course not. Why would they?

Monopolies--whether they're legally sanctioned or otherwise--stifle innovation, and innovation means economic growth. It's time we update the patent and copyright systems for the digital ages before things really get out of control and the damage cannot be undone.