Via Clickable Culture comes word that Microsoft has patented something having to do with in-game spectating. From Tony’s post (Link):
Microsoft has just scored its 5,000th patent in the U.S., covering “technologies that allow people to not just play video games against each other online, but to join the game as a spectator from anywhere in the world,” according to an official announcement yesterday.
As I mentioned in a comment, I think this is related to some emerging forms of digital entertainment similar to what I recently suggested we might see in the near future (Link).
When I have time, I’ll try to find the patent and give it a read. Unfortunately, that might take a few days. However, I have to remember to continue posting any ideas I have to ensure that I do my part in keeping the obvious stuff from being locked up by deep-pocketed corporations.
Hell yeah! That idea philosophy should be propagated via some sort of a Manifesto. I’ve intuitively been doing the same stuff, particularly with VW technology that I feel is crucial to bottom-up development in these spaces. I.E., while I cannot yet pay for the startup of a 4-D idea market company or non-profit, I have posted about it exactly because I hope it will be collective property, rather than corporate property. And so forth…
My fear is that due to lack of experience with VWs, the US patent office can’t appropriately analyze the originality of many new concepts. Something like the Microsoft patent listed above (which I’m intuitively sure nerds like us have discussed hundreds or thousands of times before) may just be a generally intuitive idea that’s bound to pop-up. I haven’t yet read the patent, but overall this type of patent activity presents a danger to the free an open development of this space. And it needs to be addressed.
IMO what needs to be assembled is an ultimate open-source online innovation database that catalogues all information structures and shows which humans worked on those ideas: a bottom up patent website. (Anyone seen anything resembling this?) Something free, easy to use, and most importantly designed to work in a bottom-up manner. Ideally, the structure would also harness brains and software to sift through previous web posts and incorporate those innovation dates and names. That way certain patents could be revoked later on, which could prove to be a very important social ability/behavior in the future. This may be the ONLY way to accurately quantify the massive, widespread and highly complex development of human innovations in the near term.
The EFF or Mozilla might be good organizations to get interested in this.
Is there a patent war brewing?
I’ve not seen the kind of thing you’re describing. I would, however, expect that there might be some website set up to simply collect prior art submissions for questionable patents. Perhaps the EFF has something set up. If not, they should. Anyone know?
I don’t see Microsoft succeeding in consideration of their main goal. They may establish some patent on basic virtual world behavior, perhaps how goods and services are exchanged, very similar to pay pal, but as far as owning everyone’s behavior, it sounds like a tactic and an anti-bottom up technique.
Microsoft may view people in general as computers that run their own software, and they may be right, but people, most people will not give into their idea as virtual worlds will extend the very nature of the human to romanticize their life into a story.
DOWN WITH MICROSOFT!
I think where there are going to be the most problems are in patents for business practices. The idea alone rubs me the wrong way. Intellectual property laws were set up to encourage innovation by ensuring that investment in research is rewarded with some period of exclusivity. But where’s the real investment in coming up with some of these ideas?
The IP system is being gamed and the entire thing needs a serious review. I support the concept. I don’t support a system that’s modified by industry (either directly or indirectly through back door additions to unrelated legislation) to serve their own selfish ends.
For sure, the IP system is being gamed by big corporations, mostly US and European based. Who knows, perhaps this is also part of some broader national tech diffsuion defense strategy? The bottom line: big corporations and Western governments are naturally being defensive about a power structure that greatly benefits them.
But then there’s the strengthening negative reaction to the Hamstrung System. African nations, China, Brazil, Venezuela and many more frequently find themselves at odds with the U.S. as far as IP right are concerned. The news blips keep popping up. So, as Peltaire has pointed out, I also don’t see Microsoft succeeding at continuing to game this system over the long term, perhaps even the short term, because the bottom-up
Overall it looks like there’s a big-ass conflict brewing. The battle lines are beign drawn as the Metaverse is birthed, the rate of technology doubling shrinks to shorter than one human generation, and (according to Strauss and Howe, the authorities on generations) the U.S. moves into a “Fourth Turning” or revolutionary portion of its life cycle.
— Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. This turning is history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch (of about 80 to 100 years) and begins another. Our nation has experienced four such Fourth Turnings since the beginning of the New World saeculum in 1675 (the Glorious Revolution). If this cycle holds in the future, we are likely to experience our fifth such Fourth Turning, the Millennial Crisis, around the year 2005. It should be completed sometime near 2026.” —
It feels a little weird to talk about “revolution” but it seems like there’s a major paradigm shift brewing as all of the above dynamics converge globally. Hence, I think we can expect IP issues to take a much higher profile very soon as new bottom-up technologies help catalyze the broader tech development process.
As the creation of new software and simulations becomes easy as talking for most people, VW technologies and “proprietary” structures will diffuse, regardless of the old shool law. Because VWs are the most recent interactive comm technology (ICT), they are expected, extrapolating from Rogers history of ICTs, to diffuse faster than all previous ICTs due to the consistently increasing sharpness of ICT diffusion curves. (This is why I think there will be 1,000,000 SL users in 2007.) It’s all going to happen very, very fast.
IMO the key to the entire dynamic is emerging bottom-up Web 2.0/3.0/4-d structures, like wikipedia on cosmic steroids. Fortunately these also make it possible for us Fourth Turners to not “support a system that’s modified by industry (either directly or indirectly through back door additions to unrelated legislation) to serve their own selfish ends.”
I agree. Trying to patent exstensive behaviors that influence business inside of an extremely neo-complex platform sounds a bit constricting. Microsoft, along with other major companies persuing this realm, has superb knowledge of the variables that affect an investment like this. Larry Lessig mentions in his book, “The Future of Ideas,” the three layers that can be controlled in a situation like this. The content layer, the physical layer and the code layer. These are the variables Microsoft has extensive knowledge of. If they can manage to gain control of these layers harmoniously with the paradigm shift, in which major business behavior emerges spontaneously within virtual worlds and gaming environments, then their plan will work flawlessly.
We will definitely see what looks like a Human Stock Exchange as a sympton of these technologies and what they allow humans to do on a group and individual level. These technologies are enabling humans, on a mass scale, without the limitations of geography, to create, own and exchange their personal value for real money. Since it is captured within a system that quantifies statistics on a massive scale, we will be able to see group behavior through numbers, like google. This behavior is what Microsoft is after. Linden Lab, the little San Fran company that started Second Life, also knows what is coming. The CEO, Philip Rosedale once said at a conference almost under his breathe, “humans are companies too.” He laughed, knowing that only a selection of people would actually understand what he meant. I did.
Unfortunately the “Free Culture” idea has been turned into the “Everything’s Free” culture afaic. More than once I’ve stated that I dislike what the corporations are doing but don’t dislike the concept of intellectual property rights. The concept is good. It’s the corruption that’s bad.
So what governments like those in Brazil are doing is great; I’m all for supporting open source and empowering people. But I can also say that last month I blocked a huge range of IP addresses coming out of South America because I was getting swamped with defacing attempts using code residing on servers in Brazil. A lack of respect is not what Lessig has been preaching. Based on where the attempts come from, I wonder if someone translated Free Culture to Free-for-all. And based on some recent comments, I think Lessig is beginning to realize this.
Lessig points out – rightly so – that corporate over-protection of IP is often detrimental to their own interests (Sony’s ongoing screw-ups are a perfect example; starting by losing the mp3 market to Apple and culminating with their recent DRM fiasco) as well as society’s. But he was also clear when he said (and I’ll paraphrase bc I don’t want to look it up), “Free doesn’t always work” and “Creators should be able to choose” if they want to make their work available for free. Without intellectual property rights, there is no choice. So he’s not promoting piracy and disrespect for intellectual property, he’s only saying that it’s not always the smart thing to do.
The key here afaic is to end the corporate stranglehood while respecting the concept. It can be done. But it requires that people become educated in these matters (and drop the increasing sense of entitlement; “I deserve” crap). Sadly, far too many people don’t know what a Copyright is, or how it differs from a Trademark. Or what a Patent is. In a capitalist country, this lack of understanding is crazy. To me that’s a sign of a population that has become too accustomed to working inside a corporation and depending on someone/something else. If they were out there on their own, they’d know these things.
Of course, as people become “companies” (again) they’ll learn. They’ll also learn that Reputation is becoming hugely important. There was an article a couple of years ago about how Chinese businesspeople conduct their affairs without legal protections. Simple. They rely on Reputation. And when Westerners realize how reputation impacts their future lifelihood, they’ll want to protect theirs so much they’ll want their own Trademark!
So with any luck IP will diffuse and spread out to the masses… because it’ll become meaningful again.