Photo by Jon Ã…slund

Summary: An analogy is being used to exemplify the absurdity of patenting ideas for 20 years, coming from the same person who has urged for patents rethink for several years

Rick Falkvinge, a former Microsoft employee whom we mentioned here before on many occasions [1, 2], is a good activist. He moved away from his Microsoft roots and proceeded to making a Pirate Party. He is a reformist.

In interesting news, Masnick draws people's attention to an interesting patents analogy:

Rick Falkvinge has posted a thought-provoking piece that analogizes the patent system to various forms of web caching and their impact on discussions. As he notes, in online discussion forums and blogs, if there's a delay from when your comment is made to when it appears, the conversations tend to be slower and less involved. It gets really bad when all comments need to be moderated and that's because you don't get that immediate fulfillment. Honestly, one of the reasons why I think Twitter took off at the level it did was because it felt so realtime (and became more so over time).

Here is the original piece (from Sweden), stating: "Now, imagine a twenty-year web cache server. If you come up with a good idea, people won’t be able to improve on your ideas and take them to the next level for twenty years. Another twenty for a total of forty years before you could respond in turn. You suffer. They suffer. The exchange of ideas as a whole doesn’t just suffer, it crawls to a near-stop, its velocity measurable only by laser precision measurements."

Is it reassuring to see people who depart from the sociopaths of Microsoft (currently extorting rivals with patents) and see the light. ⬆