Friday, May 19, 2006
In defense of patents
His argument, if I understand it, is as follows:
- Patenting inhibits further research in the field.
- If GAs had been patented originally, the field would be worse off.
- Patenting creates an incentive to only tell the good things about an idea.
- Patenting is unethical and a bad attitude.
These ideas are simply wrong, as some simple reasoning reveals.
First, the idea that patenting inhibits further research goes against the very idea why patents are granted. Governments issue patents (a property right in an idea) to encourage inventors to disclose their secrets so that others may improve upon them. The property right is granted for a limited time, and during that time the inventor has a monopoly on the idea represented in the claims of the patent. After the limited time (a rather short time when viewed in historical terms), the idea passes into the public domain. At the time the idea is revealed, others may improve upon the idea and seek patents on their marginal contributions. In this way, patents encourage, not discourage, invention by permitting inventors to achieve monopoly rents on their idea for a limited time. Of course, these profits are not without costs and risks (not the least of which are the legal costs of obtaining and defending a patent), and the granting of a patent is not a guarantee of a life of riches. Many patents never make a nickel, a Euro, a Yen, or a Cruzeiro.
The idea that the field would not exist had genetic algorithms or other forms of EC been patented originally has been proven wrong by another example from the field, genetic programming. John Koza's original work in GP was the subject of numerous patents very early in the game, but genetic programming has been one of the hottest areas in the field over the last decade. Our seeking and obtaining a patent on hBOA has not slowed estimation of distribution algorithm research in the least, nor do we believe that it will slow it going forward. Inventors generally seek only to license their work to commercial applications of their ideas and academic research generally progresses unimpeded. Moreover, because commercially viable ideas are protected by patents, other academics also have an incentive to improve on the original idea and seek patents of their own.
The idea that patents create an incentive to tell only the good stuff about an idea has it exactly backward. Academic papers have almost no incentives to tell the bad stuff. The academic literature is full of comparisons that put method X in the a good light on problem Y while ignoring problems Z that show the method in a bad light. This continues and only gets corrected when other authors happen to come along, but seeking the truth in some abstract sense is a very weak corrective. On the other hand, when ideas are commercialized they are scrutinized vigorously by potential investors who want to know the strengths and weaknesses of an idea before placing hard cash on the line. If you have every had your ideas scrutizined by venture capitalists you know that VCs as a group have some of the best BS detectors on the planet. Having a PhD and a good reputation does not prevent you from being ripped to shreds by a potential investor who does not understand or accept your weak answer to his good question.
Finally, my critic has said the following:
What I want to say is that, as you have the full permission to modify and research/investigate your patent, you also have the right to show us, the audience, only what you want! Yes, it is a very unethical and bad atitude, but that can happen and would be very nice to sell your patent for other persons, making money ($$$) with it!!
I would prefer that my critic use namecalling somewhat less and make reasoned arguments somewhat more, but like the other parts of his series of comments, his words are baseless and wrong. Although I cannot know the inner workings of the mind that writes these words, I think I can speculate on the wellspring of my critic's confusion. The heart of his criticism is that my critic believes that academics work for the public at large and that the product of academic minds is a public good to be shared freely by all. Academics do perform much of their work publicly and freely, but the traditions of the academy have always encouraged outside consultation and publication of for-profit books (Should I not receive royalties for my books or consulting fees when I do consulting?). Therefore, the implicit agreement between academics and their universities has always recognized that academics can pursue outside interests that receive funding from private parties. Patenting by universities and faculty has a somewhat more recent history, but the principle is the same. Academics do not forego the right to profit from the products of their minds.
Moreover, it seems to me that my critic's words are also based on a bias against free markets, business, and commerce generally. I do believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of GAs and free exchange among free people is an important way to guarantee those things. The record of the 20th century shows unquivocally the superiority of markets over government planning when it comes to advancing and spreading advanced technology. My critic believes that patenting the ideas behind hBOA will somehow slow the spread of the idea, but in fact the opposite is happening. Because Martin Pelikan and I have patented hBOA companies are interested in using and licensing the technology in commercial applications because they can obtain a license to the patent, protect themselves (temporarily) from their competition, and gain a competitive advantage in their niche. And this is exactly the point of intellectual property in general. If you give people a property right, they can exploit it, gain a foothold, and the idea will get traction in the marketplace. By this market reasoning, as good academics interested in the spread of our ideas, Martin and I would have been wrong NOT to patent hBOA and seek licensees for it. We would have committed malpractice against maximizing the influence of our thinking.
In short, none of the arguments made by this critic stand up to any scrutiny at all. A more reasoned understanding of our times, I believe, is leading and will lead others in our field to transfer their ideas into the real world where they can make important differences in everyday life. The logic of that technology transfer is leading universities and academics closer to commerce, and thus inexorably to patents. Choosing what to patent and what merely to publish is a tricky decision, but over time more of us will be led to conclude that patenting is increasingly right if we wish to maximize the influence and practice of our ideas.
Gosh!! I still do not read your long post about my critiques, but I found some mistakes, to be honest, only two mistakes (but I guess there should be more!):
First Mistake:
"Patenting is unethical and a bad attitude."
In which planet do you live, Dr Goldberg? In a highly Capitalist World, an engineering student thinks that is the same of committing suicide for his/her professional career. I do not told that!! Let me explain it to you. Here you are what I wrote:
"What I want to say is that, __as you have the full permission to modify and research/investigate your patent, you also have the right to show us, the audience, only what you want!__"
That argument (mainly the underlined words) is what I called unethical and not the atitude of patent something!
Second Mistake:
"Cruzeiro"
Again: In which planet do you live, Dr Goldberg?? If you told about the currency of my country, Brazil, I must tell you that you are, at least, 13 years late in time, because Cruzeiro is not the currency of my country since 1993, when we changed to Real. You should read more newspaper, Dr Goldberg.
I am going now to a class, when I come back later I comment all Dr Goldberg's post. I hope he had answered the question I asked him, if you do not know what is that question, I put it here ONCE more:
(Again!! :/) Please, tell us, Dr Goldberg: If you had invented/created the Genetic Algorithms, would you patent them (the GAs)?
It is an easy question! I do not know why Dr Goldberg does not answer it!!
Até Mais!!
Marcelo
I was right when I said that there were more than two mistakes in Dr Goldberg's post. The main mistake I found was that Dr Goldberg did not understand what I wrote. But... anyway.
Here we go!!
I would like to begin by the points you told about my critiques:
"1 - Patenting inhibits further research in the field."
I still consider that it is true for some cases, such as hBOA(TM) (I cite hBOA(TM) because I consider it as a general procedure like GA, ES, EP, GP, AIS, ACO, LCS, etc), but not for all. Now I explain the reasons:
"The property right is granted for a limited time, and during that time the inventor has a monopoly on the idea represented in the claims of the patent. After the limited time (a rather short time when viewed in historical terms), the idea passes into the public domain."
I guess that time you said can be considered short in historical (principally geological/cosmological) terms, but not in academic/research terms, mainly nowadays that technology evolves very fast. For example: How much the Evolutionary Computation field has evolved since last 20/30/40 years? Do you think that the current state of EC would be the same as today if the main Evolutionary Algorithms (Evolution Strategies, Evolutionary Programming and Genetic Algorithms) had been patented? PAY ATTENTION: I am not saying that someone else DOES NOT HAVE the permission to produce and patent some software/product which uses EAs methods (such as Natural Selection and NuTech Solutions' softwares), but what I am saying is that would be harmful (for the further development of the EA) if that person would like to patent THE EA ITSELF, surely if
that person had had the insights to create the EA!
You told about John Koza's Genetic Programming (GP) and the patents he got USING that EA. Very normal! But, I guess (correct me if I am wrong), he did not patent his EA (Genetic Programming), but only some solutions he got using that EA.
Let me continue about that "short time" you, Dr Goldberg, said.
I consider the EC field would not have developed as we know it, if the main EAs had been patented, because 20 years is a long time in research/academic terms, since 20 years is the time that the patent's owner has to monopolize his/her creation. Let's consider your field of activity, the Genetic Algorithms. Take a paper from 20 years ago about GAs and, being fair, tell us: What did we know at that time? We did even not have the "complete" explanation" about the way GAs works, that is, BBH + Schema Theorem (ST) (I know, ST dates back to Holland's investigations). Even worse, 20 years ago we did not have works that could go against those two main ideas that try to explain the working of GAs, since the critiques made by David Fogel, Hans-Georg Beyer and others would only be published some years later (mainly along the 1990s) (NOTE: I guess that, at that time [20 years ago], Grefentestte had some works that criticized GAs). Now, please, tell me: What would we know about GAs if they had been patented (let's suppose 20 years ago)? Do you think that all those works we have today would be possible if GAs had been patented? I suppose that, if GAs had been patented, your BBH + Schema Theorem explanation for the way GAs work wouldove. never have existed and we would not have all those papers that critic the couple BBH + ST that tries to explain the GA working, since the authors of a patent have the 20 years monopoly upon their creation.
You said:
"(1) At the time the idea is revealed, others may improve upon the idea and seek patents on their marginal contributions.
(2)In this way, patents encourage, not discourage, invention by permitting inventors to achieve monopoly rents on their idea for a limited time."
The (1) is correct, but that searching for patents that other persons may do, would only be possible if the authors of the main patent allow others to do that. The (2) is a little contraditory, since the monopoly nature of the patent would restrict the full use and research of it to few persons, principally the patent's authors.
2 - "If GAs had been patented originally, the field would be worse off."
Yes! I consider that GA field would be much more different as today if they had been patented, as explained above.
You said:
"Our seeking and obtaining a patent on hBOA has not slowed estimation of distribution algorithm research in the least [...]"
That's right, cannot slow the research in estimation of distribution algorithm, but for hBOA(TNT) itself, the research only will be made by the authors and persons from your group. So, the hBOA(TM) research will be, a priori, trapped in a restrict set of persons. But, if hBOA(TM) is not of the same nature of an EA, which we can research fully without the permission of anyone else, since the EAs I studied are not patents, then feel free to do what you want with your patent, because it is not anymore a subject of research, but a product, such as Mach 3, Coca-Cola, Jontex Condoms, Cottonelle, etc.
3 - "Patenting creates an incentive to only tell the good things about an idea."
Yes! A proof to the "to only tell the good things about an idea" can be your list of publications about Genetic Algorithms and other Genetic-like/-based methods (of course that GAs are not your patent - Thanks Heavens!), where you want to sell us your ideas about them, such as the BBH + Schema Theorem explanation for the GA working and often tell, directly or indirectly, that your explanations are the "truth", as you said here in your blog in a previous post, and want to put in our minds that GAs are the best thing in this Universe. If someone only reads your books and papers about Evolutionary Computation (GEC, as you prefer to speak), that person would consider very nice your ideas about the working and other stuffs related to GAs, since you frequently do not show any argument that can go against your brainchild (BBH+ST) and GAs. Once I cited here some papers published by the group of Professor Schwefel from University Of Dortmund, in Germany, mainly Hans-Georg Beyer paper about the way GAs DO NOT work, that is, without ST and BBH. I read that paper, that was refused at the 6th ICGA (we should remember how close ICGA is/was of you, the same is valid for GECCO, and how far you are from CEC and PPSN), and found out how unfair the reviewers were when judging Beyer's paper, since he was doing critiques related to your BBH+ST explanation. So, what do we can learn from those things? A lot! First: If the patent gives the monopoly for its author for a range fo 20 years, the author has full liberty to research and show only the results he/she thinks must be shown; Second: As the author has that monopoly, it is a little hard to someone else try to research the same subject of the patent with full permission and, thus, shows results that were not achieved and that can explain the drawbacks of the patent; Third: Why did I cite your case related to GAs? Simple: If already is hard to go against an idea that is not patented, imagine how much harder would be go against the results of research related to a patent? Would be much more difficult! (Some final words about Beyer paper that was refused at 6th ICGA: Reading the paper and the final comments, in which Beyer criticizes the critiques made by the reviewers, I consider that two of the three reviewers did even not understand what Beyer wrote in his article. It also made me think about if nowadays papers like that would be accepted in the contemporary conferences about EC with a strong relation with Genetic Algorithms and with you too, such as GECCO - I consider they would not. It is very strange how other types of well established Evolutionary Algorithms, such as Evolution Strategies and Evolutionary Programming, are not too much spread inside U.S.A Universities. It seems that USA Professors of Evolutionary Computation only know Genetic Algorithms, of course that there are some exceptions.)
You said:
"The idea that patents create an incentive to tell only the good stuff about an idea has it exactly backward. Academic papers have almost no incentives to tell the bad stuff. The academic literature is full of comparisons that put method X in the a good light on problem Y while ignoring problems Z that show the method in a bad light."
Interesting! What I read so far about those papers that compare the results of "method X in the good light on problem Y while ignoring problems Z that show the method in a bad light", all those methods were not a patent! Funny, isn't it? :) Now, tell me: If those methods were patents, do you think would be possible to make those comparisons among the methods? I bet my soul that you also read papers very similar to those I read (I know, I should not be betting my soul, since you are not, until the current moment, a VC).
Thanks Heavens that we have NFL! :D
You said:
"(1)This continues and only gets corrected when other authors happen to come along, (2) but seeking the truth in some abstract sense is a very weak corrective."
The (1) is what has happened and I consider it is good to a given field of research, but this is only possible, with full liberty, if the subject of research is not a patent, else the research would be much more restrict and we could not have the same amount of results we would have if that subject was a patent.
The (2) is much more of philosophical nature than good Engineering.
You said:
"(1) If you have every had your ideas scrutizined by venture capitalists you know that (2) VCs as a group have some of the best BS detectors on the planet. Having a PhD and a good reputation does not prevent you from being ripped to shreds by a potential investor who does not understand or accept your weak answer to his good question."
About the (1) I only can say that I am not used to deal with hungry wolves and famine vultures (I guess would be much more interesting to call "VC" "Vulture Capitalists" and not "Venture Capitalists").
About the (2): Let's see when you show hBOA(TM) to them. :D
You said:
"I would prefer that my critic use namecalling somewhat less[...]"
Could you show me, please, where I used namecalling?
"and make reasoned arguments somewhat more[...]"
But I made very well reasoned arguments! I explained each point of them. If you did not understand what I wrote, so, read the text again.
"but like the other parts of his series of comments, his words are baseless and wrong."
Could you prove that? You should stop to use that dirty way of argumentation, because you only classify what I wrote without proving your words. Now I can see why BBH + Schema Theorem have survived until our days. You play in a very dirty way - strange for a man who wrote a book about Ethics in Engineering!
You said:
"Although I cannot know the inner workings of the mind that writes these words, I think I can speculate on the wellspring of my critic's confusion."
Who made confusion here was not myself, but you, that did not understand what I wrote.
You said:
"The heart of his criticism is that my critic believes that academics work for the public at large and that the product of academic minds is a public good to be shared freely by all."
I DID NOT WROTE THAT AND I DO NOT BELIEVE IN THAT! Let's play a fair game! What I wrote was that if a general procedure (such as GA, ES, EP, GP, ACO, AIS, LCS, etc) is patented, its further development and research _MAY_ be slowed, because only the patent's authors have the full permission to research and modify their creation. I guess this is the situation of your patent, the hBOA(TM).
You said:
"Academics do perform much of their work publicly and freely, but the traditions of the academy have always encouraged outside consultation and publication of for-profit books (Should I not receive royalties for my books or consulting fees when I do consulting?)."
If the work is sponsored by public money, then it is not right to let people privately earn money with their already paid work.
Of course you MUST receive royalties/money/souls/whatever for your books and consulting fees when you do consulting.
You said:
"Moreover, it seems to me that my critic's words are also based on a bias against free markets, business, and commerce generally."
Could you show me where I said that? I am not against free markets, business, and commerce generally, since I live in a
Capitalist World. If you do not have anything useful and intelligent to say, would be much more sensible to keep your mouth
closed, because you only say drivels when you told that I am against those things. Very Funny!
:D
It seems that Dr Goldberg lost himself inside his (baseless) "arguments", since he is saying words he cannot prove and seems
also he only wants to attack me at any cost. I do not know if andropause has something to do with that.
You said:
"I do believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of GAs and free exchange among free people is an important way to guarantee those things."
So, let hBOA(TM) free of patent and let other people research it without the necessity to ask for permission to any University Office and/or author/owner.
You said:
"The record of the 20th century shows unquivocally the superiority of markets over government planning[...]."
My GOD!! Where did you study? Did your teachers teach you History? So far you were saying a lot of drivels, which I could stand, surely with a little of effort, but I consider your words you told about Economy, they were the Worst argument until the moment.
The 1929 NYSE Crash is a good example of how "superior" is the planning made by markets.
You said:
"My critic believes that patenting the ideas behind hBOA will somehow slow the spread of the idea[...]"
I did not tell that! I guess you have some reading problems. What I said was that the ideas behind hBOA(TNT), as hBOA(TM) is a patent, would not be FULL/COMPLETELY availabe for other researchers investigate it, but only its creators, Dr Goldberg and Dr Pelican.
"[...]but in fact the opposite is happening. Because Martin Pelikan and I have patented hBOA companies are interested in using and licensing the technology in commercial applications because they can obtain a license to the patent, protect themselves (temporarily) from their competition, and gain a competitive advantage in their niche."
Very nice for your pockets! :D
You said:
"By this market reasoning, as good academics interested in the spread of our ideas, Martin and I would have been wrong NOT to patent hBOA and seek licensees for it. We would have committed malpractice against maximizing the influence of our thinking."
But, what a about academi research of hBOA(TM) by others? I am not saying in market terms, but in
academic/research/investigation terms.
You said:
"In short, none of the arguments made by this critic stand up to any scrutiny at all."
Of Course!! Principally if the person who made that scrutiny did not understand what the critic (myself) wrote.
You said:
"Choosing what to patent and what merely to publish is a tricky decision, but over time more of us will be led to conclude that patenting is increasingly right if we wish to maximize the influence and practice of our ideas."
VERY FUNNY!! I wonder what would be of all those Evolutionary Algorithms we have today if their respective authors had patented each one of them (the EAs). I do not consider that if those authors had patented their EAs, they could maximize the influence and practice of their ideas. What the History of Evolutionary Computation shows us is just the opposite: As those
authors did not patent their creation (their EAs), they could maximize the influence and practice of their ideas. A crucial proof to that argument is the way the EC field developed, that is, with the contribution of so many authors/researchers throughout the History of Evolutionary Computation, and not only with the contributions of two or three authors.
Some final words: You, Dr Goldberg, should be fairer in your arguments, since you said things that I am not. I just speculate about hBOA(TM) and the reasons that you had to patent it, but I did not call you of this and that. Surely, only in my subsequent answers I was a little ironic with you, since you almost never answer the MAIN question I asked you:
If you, Dr Goldberg, had invented/created the Genetic Algorithms, would you patent them (the GAs)?
But I should remember that you only do consultation when you are paid for. If I pay the U$ 5000 fee to become an Adamantium IlliGAL Friend, would you answer that question to me, since the Adamantium level would give me a personal consultation with you ?
I guess if I offer some money to you, you would answer that question to me. And if I offer you some alcoholic beverage you would answer everything to me!
But I do not drink alcoholic beverages.
Até Mais!!
Marcelo
P.S: About the 4th point, let me say some words.
4 - Patenting is unethical and a bad attitude.
Where did I wrote that, Dr Goldberg? Do you have some way to prove that? I did not wrote that and I do not think like that.
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