Conversation with Andrew1300
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Andrew: Well, the other thing to dispute is that not always the best solution is rewarded
Andrew: I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but often it's whoever can patent it first, even if it's not a actual implementation, just a concept.
Andrew: That is whom we reward. And that seems silly also
Andrew: The other problem that your example shows, is how would 10 teams that came to the same conclusions (or similar) be properly rewarded. How can one say what they did to contribute to it.
Me: *cough*windows*cough*
Me: actually though
Me: when i said "best"
Me: i didn't specify by what measure that is determined
Andrew: Hehehe
Me: i mostly meant whatever the market decides, or more poignantly perhaps, which one awards the IP owner the most money
Andrew: True
Me: but to address the issue of how do you credit the runner-up
Me: like, we already have a lot of government programs to fund all kinds of research
Me: i see no reason those types of programs can't be adapted to this sort of scenario, where the money awarded is not necessarily fixed before the fact -- but for that matter, maybe that isn't even relevant
Me: like, the issue is really this
Me: if there can be shown to be a significant reward for everyone in adopting an IP system which dissolves the notion of IP
Me: in other words, a research-centric model rather than a winner-centric model
Me: then we can eliminate the "gambling" or "speculative" aspects of the development of intellectual property including patents and multimedia
Me: as a second reward
Me: like, my question is, would this system actually be better? would it be better to, instead of trying to find a type of IP you can produce to make you rich, to just research that IP, and develop a reputation for being a valuable researcher, and then be monetized preemptively
Andrew: Hmm...
Andrew: I don't know that that would work
Andrew: There would not be any major driving force
Andrew: Getting to the market first is a huge driving force right now
Me: which is the way a lot of scientific research happens -- we have social programs in our government that are designed to pay for research that is considered valuable, but has one or both of two critical business-centric flaws
Me: potential flaw #1: a technology that is useful to society, but cannot be made into a profitable business model
Me: "free energy" for example is an entire category of technologies that might suffer from this sort of flaw, depending on various costs and things
Me: potential flaw #2: a technology that is useful to society, but would be much more useful to society if it was available to all business and all people free of charge and restriction
Me: the Web and the Internet are great examples of this category of technologies, and we all know who invented those things
Me: my question is fundamentally this: have we undervalued aspects like freedom (flaw #2), cooperative businesses (flaw #1), and research stability?
Me: on the subject of "research stability" i'm talking about the elimination of the "gambling" or "speculative" aspects of R&D
Me: let's look at two facts about these things
Me: gambling/speculation fact #1: look at who has historically developed some of the absolute best technologies. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are both companies who are now just dumping money into letting developers work on whatever they want (Google even gives its employees one day a week to do whatever they want on the company's dime) and historically companies like AT&T did the same thing and produced really good technology (like UNIX).
Andrew: That's true, very true.
Me: gambling/speculation fact#2: look at who invented the internet. DARPA is fundamentally a socially-funded R&D company owned and operated by the public -- a "cooperative company" like the food coop in my neighborhood that is owned by its customers.
Andrew: Nice, and true
Me: i'd say that fact #1 demonstrates that sometimes the private sector is very good at achieving the "stability" i mentioned by using their deep pockets to, effectively, buffer an R&D lifestyle for engineers and hackers. the quality of life for those researchers, thanks to companies like Google, does not depend on any race or competition or other unstable circumstance. another big advantage of this is that this type of research is not targeted at end-users -- where conventional capitalistic monetization of R&D typically targets what can be sold to customers, this type of R&D tends to target infrastructural technologies that improve the way people live their lives and the way businesses and governments operate.
Me: i believe what may be changing now, and what started about ten years ago, is that the gap between customers and businesses is diminishing: since the advent of digital technology, more and more ordniary people are doing things in their own spare time that were previously the domain of paid professionals and businesses
Me: and i think that as that gap shrinks, the worth to the public of the freedom i mentioned in Potential Flaw #2 grows exponentially
Me: i mean to draw on a relatively rudimentary R&D process, the "mashup," let's just say that every pair of technologies (which we'll pretend are atomic for the purpose of this basic evaluation) presents a new chance for a useful "mashup"
Me: every time, then, that you add a new technology to the pool of unencumbered (patent-free, low-cost, wide-access) technologies, you increase the number of potential mashups by the size of the pool of technologies
Me: you should totally check out Processing and see some of the crazy shit artists are doing now that they've learned how to program and use computers
Me: i think this conversation is going to be the first entry in my IM blog