Doc Searls: Patently Absurd?
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Pizzo: Well, don't you think, Doc, that the ball is already in play? The Amazon patent put that ball in play, and even people who feel as strongly and similar to what you just voiced are already back in Washington as we speak talking to the people who are making these laws or planning to make these laws, and are prepared to make compromises.
Searls: Yes, I know, and I come at this in two different directions. One is there is the idealist in me that says in the long run I think this is what's going to happen. This is the direction that nature is going to go with, like predicting the next ice age. But in the meantime, we need to be talking about patents and why they're here and what makes them good and what makes them bad and how we frame our understanding of things. I think for example a problem that Microsoft had is that there are two different metaphors you can use, or that they use, to understand the market. One is sports and the other is war. And I think they didn't know the edge between one and the other. You know one talks about a level playing field, the other one talks about all is fair, and they were in an all-is-fair territory.
| "The Internet would never be here if it was up to companies working alone to do it." |
In a similar way with patents, we need to at least begin to agree that business processes -- these things that are called business processes -- and software itself is something that it is really stupid to patent because it works better if we all own some of this stuff than if only one of us owns some of it. The Internet would never be here if it was up to companies working alone to do it. It never would have been here. And that's the context we need to look back at it and say, "Well, we get these benefits from nobody owning this stuff. Can we apply that in this case?"
And, you know, the Amazon case is wonderful because -- I happen to think Jeff Bezos is a great guy and he's doing the right thing, and god bless Tim and Jeff for having that conversation which frankly I think is thriving the whole patent conversation since then. It's been, a profound effect.
Pizzo: Now a similar conversation is going on about taxation of the Internet. Some of the same basic arguments are being made that it's a unique environment and taxing it will stifle its growth -- of course that's all on the e-commerce side. But in that particular argument, the solution now being put forward is a moratorium, a five-year moratorium. Would you suggest the same solution here? Just a time out?
Searls: Yeah, I would. Actually, that would be a very good idea. I hadn't thought about that, but I think it's a terrific idea. Have a time out, like you give a three-year-old. [Laughs.] I've got a three-year-old so we're threatening him with timeouts from time to time.
Pizzo: Because in the brief conversations I've had with the Patent Office it's become very clear to me that this whole explosion has caught them up short. They didn't see it coming. They really don't understand -- they understand it's serious, very clear, they're very sensitive about it, but they really don't understand its parts and pieces.
Searls: And the degree to which they do understand it, it's framed in essentially material terms, which is made even more complicated by the, you know, the State Street versus who ever it was decision a couple years back which just opened the flood gates in patents -- though to be fair both, the Amazon patents in question and all of the Priceline.com patents that have been issued so far I think were all prior to that, but suddenly there's been this land rush into a wide open space, and I think a moratorium is a good idea because, you know, we're watching a world build itself and it's still all volcanoes, you know. I mean, where is the land going to be? Where is the water going to be? Is it going to be land and water? I don't think it is.
A friend of mine had a great metaphor for it. He said that the Internet is like a giant sphere where every molecule looking across the inside can see every other one, and you don't want anything in the way. It's a space that's ours in the middle, and the clearer it is, the better we can communicate with each other and the more we can do in there.
Pizzo: Well, of course all of this could have been avoided if Al Gore had just patented it when he invented it.
Stephen Pizzo is an award-winning non-fiction author, and newsman for the O'Reilly Network.
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