Discover Top Posts Tagged with #means-plus-function

They're handing out patents for "inventions" that don't exist

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Patent trolls produce nothing except lawsuits. Unlike real capitalist enterprises, a patent troll does not “practice” the art in its patent portfolio — it seeks out productive enterprises that are making things that real people use, and then uses legal threats to extract rents from them.

One of the most prolific patent trolls of the twenty-first century is Landmark Technology, whose U.S. Patent №7,010,508 nominally covers virtually anything you might do in the course of operating an online business: having a homepage, letting a customer login to your site, or having pages where customers can view and order products.

Landmark shook down more than a thousand productive businesses for $65,000 license-fees it demanded on threat of a patent lawsuit.

But that reign of terror is almost certainly over. When Landmark tried to get $65,000 out of Binders.com, the victim’s owner, NAPCO, went to court to invalidate Landmark’s patent, which never should have issued.

A North Carolina court agreed, and killed Landmark’s patent. Landmark faces further punishments in Washington State, where the attorney general has sued the company for violating state consumer protection laws in a case that has been removed to federal court.

Landmark’s patent contains “means-plus-function” claims. These a rentier’s superweapon, in which a patent can lay a claim over an invention without inventing or describing it. These claims are almost entirely used in software patents, something that has been blessed by the Federal Circuit, America’s most authoritative patent court.

A means-plus-function patent lets an “inventor” patent something they don’t know how to do. If these patents applied to pharma, a company could get a patent on “an arrangement of atoms that cure cancer,” without specifying that arrangement of atoms. Anyone who actually did cure cancer would have to pay rent to the patent-holder.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

#technofeudalism #rentiers #class struggle #capitalists hate capitalism #unity #patent trolls #means-plus-function

Unity's feudal gambit as class struggle between rentiers and capitalists

The outcome of this struggle is what determines whether the digital society is capitalist or feudalistic. Think of the recent grab by games toolsmith Unity, who have long extracted rents from the capitalists who used their tools to make games. Unity is “software as a service,” which means that you have to buy again it every month, for so long as your capitalist enterprise is in business.

The capitalists who rent Unity’s tools had resigned themselves to this, but then Unity went one step further, and demanded a royalty (a word with decidedly feudal origins!) every time a game made with Unity’s tools was distributed. The outcry was ferocious, and Unity eventually backed down, but even as they did, company executives insisted that they would continue to pursue a “sustainable system” for “shared success.”

“Shared success” is a pure expression of feudalism. Unity was not proposing a joint venture, where they would supply the capital to produce games and share the risk of that capital being competed away by a better games-maker.

Instead, Unity wants a rentier’s bargain: if the capitalist it rents do does well, so does Unity. But if the capitalist does badly — if a games-maker loses out to a competitor who is also a tenant of Unity’s IP — then unity also does well. Heads capitalists lose, tails the rentier wins.

When Unity speaks of this system being “sustainable,” they mean that they will seek to maximize the total amount of profits made by capitalists who rent its tools. Because the higher the total profits are, the more rent it can extract.

Profits are highest where competition is lowest. It’s in Unity’s interest for a single company — or a cartel of companies — to control entire genres or modes of games, and to be protected from innovators who might enter the market with better offers. Unity wants to pick some winners and bind them to its fields.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

#technofeudalism #rentiers #class struggle #capitalists hate capitalism #unity #patent trolls #means-plus-function

Capitalists hate capitalism

When we think of class struggle, we rightly focus on the struggle between workers and bosses. Class struggle is held back by “false consciousness.” We’re told that American workers are allergic to socialism because they view themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” who throw their lot in with their bosses because they want to join their ranks.

In reality, America has virtually no upward social mobility; an American who changes class is generally a middle class person who becomes poor, or a poor person who becomes homeless.

But there’s another important class struggle, within the ruling class. That’s the struggle between capitalists and rentiers. Capitalists want to own the means of production and utilize it without paying rentiers, both so they can enrich themselves and so they can invest in superior production.

Rentiers want to own the things capitalists must use so they can cream off the profits without doing anything to produce them.

The struggle between capitalists and rentiers is rife with false consciousness. Capitalists hate capitalism. Not every worker sees themself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, but every capitalist sees themself as a temporarily embarrassed rentier.

Capitalists loathe competition. That’s why Peter Thiel says “competition is for losers” and Warren Buffet continuously salivates over investment in firms with “moats and walls” that prevent competitors from entering the market.

The landlord who owns a building with a coffee shop does well even if that coffee shop goes out of business when a competing shop takes away all their business. Indeed, the landlord benefits from this situation: having a vacant storefront to rent just as a neighborhood is blowing up thanks to a hot new coffee shop is an opportunity to raise the rent. “Passive income” is income that is protected from competition.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

#technofeudalism #rentiers #class struggle #capitalists hate capitalism #unity #patent trolls #means-plus-function

A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers

Rent is income you get from owning something, rather than utilizing it. Under feudalism and manorialism, a hereditary lord owned land. Owning land provided a steady stream of income, in the form of rents.

Like profits, rents came from workers. Peasants were bound by law to the lord’s land. By default, a peasant born on a lord’s estate couldn’t move elsewhere without permission, and neither could that peasant’s descendants.

Peasants owned the capital used in their work. A peasant might own livestock, agricultural instruments and other tools and factors that went into making the land productive.

Feudal lords didn’t have to worry about competition in the form of superior peasant production on neighboring estates. If your neighbor’s peasants invented a better way to make the land productive, you could have your peasants copy it.

What’s more, feudal lords didn’t think much of peasants. They didn’t re-invest some of the rents their peasants paid by buying them better tools, or by offering stipends to peasant workers to go off and experiment with better production methods.

When it came to production, feudalism was stable, or, less charitably, stagnant. There were fallow years and fair ones, but there was no goad that drove a feudal system’s powerful people towards investment and improvement.

A feudal land grew richer by conquering another land, not by inventing new ways of producing. Feudal invention is focused on conquest, not increasing capacity.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#technofeudalism #rentiers #class struggle #capitalists hate capitalism #unity #patent trolls #means-plus-function