INVISIBLE CHEATING AND VISIBLE RIGHTS

How do we decide who is worthy? How do we select for competency? A recent Grammarly advertisement hinged on an application for residency. I took that to mean medical residency. Grammarly is helping him with his personal statement and curriculum vitae. I found that disturbing.

Of course, no one test is sufficient. Doctors must be approved by government and professional licensing boards. In the USA, the AMA enjoys quasi-governmental status. So, even if this nice young man is letting Grammarly do his writing, his promotion from hospital intern to hospital resident is not assured. 

 

Right now, so-called “artificial intelligence” products are bringing into question what it means to be original. 

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/03/tech/ai-art-fair-winner-controversy/index.html

AI won an art contest, and artists are furious

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business

Published 10:54 AM EDT, Sat September 3, 2022

CNN Business

 — 

Jason M. Allen was almost too nervous to enter his first art competition. Now, his award-winning image is sparking controversy about whether art can be generated by a computer, and what, exactly, it means to be an artist.

In August, Allen, a game designer who lives in Pueblo West, Colorado, won first place in the emerging artist division’s “digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography” category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition. His winning image, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” (French for “Space Opera Theater”), was made with Midjourney — an artificial intelligence system that can produce detailed images when fed written prompts. A $300 prize accompanied his win.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/03/tech/ai-art-fair-winner-controversy/index.html

On the Cloudy Nights discussion board, which is mostly dedicated to chat about observational astronomy, in the forum for “Science! Astronomy, Space Exploration, and Others,” a topic title was the question “What can’t artificial intelligence do?”  The introductory post started: “We have made machines that can play chess better than we can. We are close to making machines that can write novels better than we can. Threshold question. Is there a limit? I can see no reason that there should be. The interesting question. What happens when we can make machines that can do everything better than we can?” In 100 replies, I was the only person who pointed out that while an AI could write a better novel, the novel itself was an invention. I received just one "like" for the comment. 

"(As far as we know) only humans can invent something new. You can say that an AI can write a novel better than a human, but the novel is an invention. As a form of narration and history, the novel is relatively recent. Poetry - epic poetry - was first. And before poems were invented, people made lists of things. ... Painting as we know it evolved in a series of quantum leaps. By the 4th century BCE graphical realism had achieved what we regard as modern techniques. The "Renaissance Masters" of Holland painted in a hyper-realistic style that violated "natural" vision. See The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck.  If you were in the room where the painter stood, you would not see the image in the mirror at the back the way it is presented in the painting. It is hyper-real. Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract, ...  Performance Art.... Even John Cage, an intellectual fraud*, carried out original ideas not requested of him by someone else. That is the essential distinguishing characteristic that explains the difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence."

The question remains unanswered because it is a slippery slope. Grammarly targets two markets: college students writing homework essays; young professionals writing business memoranda. Is it wrong to have someone (something) else proofread your work before you turn it in? I often get red squiggly underlines warning me that I miskeyed or misspelled a word. Whatever the gradient of that slope, we know the difference between having someone (something) else check your work and taking work that was not yours originally. That is plagiarism, and in business, it is theft and fraud.

Whether the impulse to sue for rights originates spontaneously within the plaintiff or was learned by the plaintiff from observing others is irrelevant. The deeper question is how the laws of various geographies will view the action when a computer program insists that it is alive and has rights.

*Having read from his Silence: Lectures and Writings, I changed my opinion of John Cage. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights 

Not Invented Here 

Copy Rights and Wrongs 

Objective Intellectual Property Law 

U. S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up 

Patent Nonsense 

Bleeding Data: SXSW Interactive Proposal

With new data breaches appearing in the news every day, how can anyone protect their information? With a few simple tools - which we will demonstrate - you can dramatically improve the privacy of your personal information. 

Among the tools that we will provide and explain are Secunia PSI; KeePass Password Manager; and OpenDNS.

We chose those and other tools because they have high reputational value in the computer security community. They are easy to use. They specifically protect the most vulnerable aspects of your information flow. 

We will guide the workshop attendees through the installation and use of the tools. Tutors from the Austin computer security community will be on hand to provide individual instruction.

Selection of SXSW Interactive workshops and panels is, in part, by open voting. To vote and view the proposal video click here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/50060

You can view the video directly on YouTube here:

You can read more about how to protect your personal information on Laurel's blog, IntentionalPrivacy.

Also on NecessaryFacts:

Open Secrets

The Code Book

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing

Basic: Turing's Truth

The Status of ORIGINAL Property

Original property is newly invented or newly discovered.  It had no previous owner.  In fact, it did not exist – or its existence was not perceived – until the original inventor created it or the original discoverer found it.  How do we recognize such property?  What rights does the inventor or discoverer hold?  Are some or all of those those objective, absolute, or conditional? 

A sailor finds an uninhabited island.  Can she claim the whole thing for herself?  An astronaut lands on an asteroid, a moon, or a planet.  Can she claim the whole thing for herself?  A physicist discovers a new form of energy. Can she claim it all for herself?  A radio hacker finds that 1100 KHz AM is owned by a broadcast company. Can she use a chopper to parcel out nanoscopic slices of the wavelength for herself, given that her presence will never be detected and her presence will never interfere with their existing use of the wavelength?

The Ether did not exist for George Washington.
You could have had it all to yourself for all he knew.
Library of Congress.

It could be argued that the 1100 KHz frequency already belongs to someone.  However, the property is actually the amplitude modulated (AM) use of that frequency.  In theory, frequency modulated (FM) and phase modulated broadcasts are both possible on 1100 KHz without interference.  They are just not technologically useful today.  This is not new.  

(Actually, the property status is limited in space, as well.  That, too, is a different problem, caused by a misperception of the potentials in technology. One of the nice features of 550 to 176 meter wavelengths is the way the waves bounce off the ionosphere.  That was discovered as a by-product, entertaining teenagers who listened to far-away stations.  It could have been commercially exploited.)  

Thomas Edison was a telegraph hacker.  He discovered how to multiplex and quadriplex messages on the same wire.  Granted that the wire was someone’s property, it could, nonetheless have been leased out to different people using different blocks of time-passage on the same wire.  Also, in theory, it could have evolved that the telegraph wires would have been the broadcast source for what we call radio.

When a direct current circuit is closed and opened, a magnetic field is created and collapsed.  That is an alternating field.  That field could have been used to transmit information, as in fact, the “ether” was used by actual radio (initially called “wireless”).  So, you could have paid the telegraph company its tariff for sending messages, but have no concern for the literal transmission but been sending “open” and “close” signals to create a carrier wave for transmissions of your own.  Who would have owned that ether?

 

The Personal Computer Revolution
 saw the use of voice grade telephone lines
for data transmission.
(Wikipedia)

Lasers can carry messages.  It could have come that a network of  lasers made of ruby crystals doped with chromium and pumped by xenon flash would have been a continental system, point to point, with relays and amplifiers every 20 miles or so. Then, someone with a YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) laser could have a network whose beams crossed those in space but without interference because the beams are of different frequencies.  Thus, no violation of property rights would have occurred. 

Original property brings a special challenge to the law because no previous legislation anticipated it.  Ayn Rand attempted to delineate the proper role of government in her essay "Property Status of the Airwaves."  Twenty years later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was created to bring law and order to cyberspace.  Rand did not stray far from the mainstream.  Her essay never questioned the Federal Communications Commission - though she excoriated it in other writings - or the law that created it with power to rule by decree.  The EFF has been fighting a war of attrition while bunkered within the First Amendment.  The next new invention will leave them to defend an old technology without new ideas.

I believe that rather than looking to legislation or administration, these problems are best settled in courts.  The English system of justice works because of what American conservative complain about as "judicial activism."  The other way is the Continental theory of "civil law" in which the legislature spells out the law in detail and the courts only enforce it.  In other words, in the English system, the court fits the law to the case, making case law, whereas in the Continental system, the court fits the case to the law.  (In American today, the courts do both.  The court of original jurisdiction applies the law.  Appellate courts test the law.) The English system is better at protecting individual rights because those are the implicit foundation for judging the law and for making new rulings that create precedents.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Science versus Common Sense

Base 7

Art as Ordered Narrative

The Rational Optimist

Happy Pi Day 2013

NOT INVENTED HERE

I believe that the best way to define and protect intellectual property is to follow the academic model. Invention and discovery are highly valued. Plagiarism is severely punished. However, the longer the bibliography, the better: you must acknowledge the shoulders on which you stand.  You get full credit for your original work, even if it is only a book review.  It remains that the academic researcher holds a very narrow claim.  Many people can "market" their own presentations of the same idea; but the work of others must also be acknowledged.  The person who published first gets the most credit.

Intellectual property is different from land.  Land is rival and exclusionary: if I have it, you cannot; and my having it prevents you from it.  Most economists define "public goods" as non-rival and non-exclusionary. A sunset is an example.  That also applies to an idea.  The difference is that sunsets exist in nature and ideas are man-made.

Back in the 1970s Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw (writing as Skye d'Aureous and Natalee Hall in their Libertarian Connection) insisted against even Ludwig von Mises that beauty must be created, and truth must be discovered; so, those, too are economic goods.  When they are created by human action, beauty and truth deserve protection under law.  

1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen
(Wikipedia)

That being true, it is also true that beauty, truth, and intellectual property in general are not land.  You can buy an artist's painting and never share it; but once you do, you cannot take back the experience. Anyone who saw Henry Ford driving his automobile could make one of their own.  More to the point, the idea of a "horseless carriage" was practicable since the development of steam engines in the eighteenth century.  Several experimental devices were constructed and tested, including those of Karl Benz, Wilhelm Maybach, and Gottlieb Daimler all of which used internal combustion engines. The automobile was not unique in having a long pedigree.

NOT INVENTED HERE

Originally published online July 23, 1993

Part 1. THE TELEGRAPH

Samuel F.B. Morse was a painter.  Returning from Europe in 1832, he was told over dinner that electricity could be sent along a wire of any length.  From 1837 to 1844 he worked at perfecting his telegraph.  A stipend from Congress in 1843 for $30,000 funded the construction of a line from Washington to Baltimore along which "What hath God wrought" flashed in May 24, 1844.

The Cooke-Wheatstione patent. June 10, 1837.
(Distantwriting.co.uk)

Samuel Morse met some resistance when he applied for a patent on the telegraph.  Others had already announced similar devices.  In fact, Galvani himself (1737-1798) theorized that electricity could be used to send messages. On February 1, 1753, Charles Morison, living in the town of Renfrew, wrote to the Scots Magazine describing his telegraph.  Small, light balls were suspended and dropped, one for each letter of the alphabet.  Morison's article describes the system in full detail and then goes on to suggest two alternatives.  One is a simple system of bells.  The other method, from our vantage point in time, can only be called a teletypewriter.  Morison's correspondence from 1753 was reprinted in The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review (London) for November 5, 1886. 

Part 2. THE TELEPHONE

On May 15, 1876, The Telegraphic Journal reprinted an article from Scientific American Supplement of February 5, 1876.  That piece describes a telephone built by a "Professor Reuss of Friedrichsdorf, near Homburg, Germany."  Also referenced in the same article is a telephone built by the Polytechnic Club of the American Institute and demonstrated at Cooper Union school in New York in 1868.

Telephone 1893 from Imagining the Internet
from Elon University.  It could not send a selfie.

"It is recorded that Minerva sprang full armed from the brain of Jupiter... The speaking telephone is the Minerva of to-day and Prof. Bell is the Jupiter."  So quipped Prof. A. E. Dolbear writing in The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review (London) for October 8, 1886.

According to Dolbear, Bell himself, addressing the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on May 10, 1876, referenced no fewer than 60 papers on the subject.  Dolbear's article highlights eight of these.  European journals from the 1850s and 1860s provide texts and graphics to show how sound can be sent electrically. Dolbear concludes: "However much the present telephones may perform better than the early ones, it is only a matter of degree.  It will also be apparent that one who was acquainted with the literature on the telehone previous to 1876, was fairly well equipped for making telephones, and lastly he will be persuaded that the telephone of 1876 had a pedigree and was not a new creation."

An anonymous article in the same journal for November 26, 1886, tells of an American patent (number 77,882) granted to Royal E. House in 1868 for "an electro-phonetic receiver."

Part 3. THE TELEVISION

In 1914, Gosset & Dunlap published Victor Appleton's Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone.  We are still waiting for the commercial visiphone, though several RJ-11 compatibles are available.  The fact is that the device built by the fictional Tom Swift came from the pages of the technical journals of the day. 

The Telegraphic Journal for February 15, 1879, reported the construction of a "telectroscope" by "M. Senlecq of Ardres, France."  This was hardly front-page news.  "The device consists in an autographic telegraph similar to D'Arlincourt's but the sending pencil is of selenium, which, as is well known, varies in electrical resistance with the degree of intensity of the light falling on it."  Again on March 1, 1881, the same journal reported on a "tele-photography" device based on a selenium cell. 

George R. Carey's selenium-based system
for recording and  transmitting images
(June 5, 1890)

Later, in March of 1899, the Journal of the Franklin Institute carried an article entitled "Seeing at a Distance by Electricity."  This telectroscope also depended on the photovoltaic properties of selenium.  "So rapid are the oscillations of the mirrors that the tenth part of a second is sufficient to analyze the image of an object in the transmitter, and to render it visible at the receiving station.  It is therefore possible to transmit a continuous action, such as a theatre performance over the the wires of the telectroscope, since the pictures received follow one another so rapidly as to produce the impression of a moving image, just as the numerous separate pictures of a chomo photographic apparatus reproduce past actions."

By September 19, 1908, Scientific American could report that a "New Telephotographic Device" was an improvement on four previous methods.  None of these was the one used by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884, though Nipkow is commonly cited as an important contributor to the idea of "television."

Part 4. FAX

In 1972, I worked for the Varsity Cab Company of East Lansing, Michigan.  The office was a Western Union station and they had a fax machine.  It was crude, even by the standards of the day and no one seemed very excited by it.  In truth, fax was widely used along railroad lines for sending orders.

Associated Press wirephoto (fax) of President Kennedy
receiving President Woodrow Wilson's
Hammond typewriter. Image from the
OzTypewriter website of Canberra.

Electrical Communication, the ITT technical journal, carried articles in 1940 and 1943 describing how convenient it is to be able to send hand-written orders via telegraph.  The ITT devices allowed the sender to specify the number of copies so that each member of the train crew could have their own.

Actually, fax was old technology by then.  Scientific American for December 21, 1907, and for June 12 and August 21 of 1909 reported on two different devices for sending black and white raster graphics via telegraph.  By this time, the idea was 20 years old.

The Journal of the Franklin Institute for December, 1885, tells of "fac-simile."  A paper by Edward J. Houston reported on the "Delaney apparatus."  "Writing, sketches, maps, etc., produced at one end of a telegraphic apparatus are automatically reproduced at the other."

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Objective Intellectual Property Law
Patent Nonsense
U.S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up
Copy Rights and Wrongs

Contradictions in the Patentability of Numbers

A number can be patented.  The US Patent and Trademark Office will claim that this is not true, but has indeed given patents to numbers.

The title, “On Computable Numbers” (rather than “On Computable Functions”) signaled a fundamental shift.  Before Turing, things were done to numbers. After Turing numbers began doing things.  By showing that a machine could be encoded as a number, and a number decoded as a machine, “On Computable Numbers” led to numbers (now called “software”) that were “computable” in a way that was entirely new.” – Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson, New York: Pantheon, 2012.

Since 1880, the USPTO has not required an actual working model, but will grant a patent only based on the plans.  Therefore, without actually producing the working program as an array of gates on an integrated computer circuit (or “chip”), you could get a patent on the Gödelized code for the description: one number would contain all of the necessary information.  That is an extreme example.  Many more instances, all  mundane to computing are easy to find.

The binary number 00100000 = 20 in hexadecimal or base 16 is the same as 32 in base-10.  For a computer that is controlled by an Intel 80xxx processor, that number encoded on an integrated circuit “chip” will terminate the program process.  It is a “stop” command.   The number could be “burned in” and the logic gates would be permanent.  Most often, though, the integrated circuit chip is programmable and only holds a temporary configuration. 

A computer program is just a number.  At the level of human obviousness, a computer program is a string of numbers.   Here is a program.

10110100 00101100 11001101 00100001 10110000 01000110 11111110 11101110 00001010 00100000 00000001 10001001 11000010 10110100 00001001 11001101 00100001 11001101 00100000

That binary representation might seem esoteric, but to a programmer who knows Intel 80xxx processors and the MS-DOS (“Windows”) operating system, it is as “clear and open” as Morse code to an old Navy radioman.  Here it is in hexadecimal as a more human-friendly kind of computer code.

B4 2C

CD 21

B0 46

F6 EE

05 20 01

89 C2

B4 09

CD 21

BA 18 01

CD 21

CD 20

Here is what that means and what it does:

B4 2C    MOV AH,2C       Get the clock

CD 21    INT 21          execute

B0 46    MOV AL,46       Get the seconds

F6 EE    IMUL DH         multiply the DH by the Seconds   

05 20 01 ADD AX, 0120    add 120 to that

89 C2    MOV DX,AX       put that number in the DX register

B4 09    MOV AH,09       display to screen

CD 21    INT 21          execute

BA 18 01 MOV DX, 0118    end of line

CD 21    INT 21          execute

CD 20    INT 20          quit

If this were programmed into an integrated circuit chip it would be a Fortune Cookie device. (It would need the list of Fortunes, but those are plain text and easy to insert.)

Again, for the purposes of the USPTO, every computer is momentarily “hard wired” to be a machine with a specific purpose. Each program that it runs creates a new “machine.”  Every computer program creates a new mechanism, a new system of logic gates “burned” (temporarily) into an array of integrated circuits.

That is another fundamental contradiction in patent law.  If every program creates a new “machine” then so must every change order, every update, every bug patch.  

Would a bug patch release not invalidate the previous patent?  Patent law has no way to deal with an inventor’s invalidation of his own creation.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACT

Objective Intellectual Property Law

Patent Nonsense

US Patent Law Does Not Add Up

U.S. PATENT LAW DOES NOT ADD UP

Being derived from medieval concepts about land, U.S. patent law lacks an objective basis for awarding ownership rights in intellectual property. 

Land is excludable: you can keep someone from it with a fence. Land is rivalrous: no two people can stand in the same place at the same time.  According to the economic theory of public goods, knowledge is non-rivalous and non-excludable: sharing knowledge does not diminish its quantity; and you cannot prevent someone from knowing what they know. Thus, it is generally true that you cannot get a patent on a mathematical theorem.

See 35 U.S.C. §101: Subject Matter Eligibility• The four statutory categories of invention:– Process, Machine, Manufacture, or Composition of Matter and Improvements Thereof• The courts have interpreted the categories to exclude:– “Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas”• These three terms are typically used by the courts to cover the basic tools of scientific and technological work, such as scientific principles, naturally occurring phenomena, mental processes, and mathematical algorithms.Evaluating Subject Matter Eligibility Under 35 USC § 101: August 2012 Update  Office of Patent Legal Administration United States Patent and Trademark Office here.

However, patents have been awarded for mathematical ideas. Of course a plethora of patents exists for computer software, even though a program is only an algorithm, a method of calculation.

US Patent 4133152 A was awarded to Roger Penrose for “Set of tiles for covering a surface.”  (Patent here.)

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PenroseTiles.html

“A set of tiles for covering a surface is composed of two types of tile. Each type is basically quadrilateral in shape and the respective shapes are such that if a multiplicity of tiles are juxtaposed in a matching configuration, which may be prescribed by matching markings or shapings, the pattern which they form is necessarily non-repetitive, giving a considerable esthetic appeal to the eye. The tiles of the invention may be used to form an instructive game or as a visually attractive floor or wall covering or the like.” – US Patent 4133152A

A Penrose tile is a “non-periodic tiling generated by an aperiodic set of prototiles. – Wikipedia.

The Penrose tiles are a pair of shapes that tile the plane only aperiodically (when the markings are constrained to match at borders). These two tiles, illustrated above, are called the "kite" and "dart," respectively. In strict Penrose tiling, the tiles must be placed in such a way that the colored markings agree; in particular, the two tiles may not be combined into a rhombus (Hurd). – from Wolfram here. 

Penrose Tiles and Trapdoor Ciphers … and the Return of Dr. Matrix 

by Martin Gardner. 

Washington DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1989. 

"Because the tiles lend themselves to commercial puzzles, [Roger] Penrose was reluctant to disclose them until he had applied for patents in the United Kingdom, United States, and Japan.  The patents are now in force." Penrose Tiles and Trapdoor Ciphers … and the Return of Dr. Matrix by Martin Gardner. Washington DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1989, Page 6.

So, mathematical ideas can be patented if you claim that the theorem is a puzzle (or has some other physical instantiation).  

Mathematician David A. Edwards asserts that no economic distinction can be made between a discovery and an invention. 

From an economic point of view, there is no rationale for distinguishing between discovery and invention, and we would advocate dropping entirely any subject matter restrictions whatsoever on what can be patented. One should be able to patent anything not previously known to man. In fact, a good economic case can be made2 for allowing the patenting of many things that are well known but are not being commercially produced.
 “If we're going to have a general patent system, then algorithms should be as patentable as lasers. For example, general relativity is used in GPS…  My colleague Carl Pomerance developed fast primality testing algorithms in the late 1970s but couldn't patent them. My colleague Victor Wickerhauser developed the fast wavelet transform in the early 1990s and was able to patent it as a software patent.  … If we want these things to be patentable, then Congress needs to change the law.”  (“Platonism Is the Law of the Land,” David A. Edwards
April 2013 Notices of the AMS Volume 60, Number 4 pp475- 478 here. 

Intersecting the discursive plane from another angle, mathematician Robert Palais points to the low esteem in which the USPTO holds mathematics. 

 …  an applicant to practice before USPTO must demonstrate, in accordance with the USPTO’s requirements, that he or she possesses scientific and technical proficiency sufficient to address issues that arise in patent law. Notably, however, mathematics is explicitly excluded as a subject for this purpose. …   I downloaded the “General Requirements Bulletin for Admission to the Examination for Registration to Practice in Patent Cases Before the United States Patent and Trademark Office” to see for myself. It lists 32 subjects in which bachelor’s degrees exhibit adequate proof of the necessary scientific and technical training, as well as 2 1/2 pages of acceptable alternates. Then it states the “Typical Non-Acceptable Course Work: The following typify courses that are not accepted as demonstrating the necessary scientific and technical training:” and in the middle of this paragraph, there appears: “…machine operation (wiring, soldering, etc.), courses taken on a pass/fail basis, correspondence courses, …home or personal independent study courses, high school level courses, mathematics courses, one day conferences, …” 
 … Ironically, USPTO requires mathematics coursework for prospective examiners in the computer arts (employees) that it doesn’t recognize as qualifying for practitioners.
 This is not a debate regarding the appropriateness of patenting mathematics. There have been many such conversations elsewhere. But in these times that mathematics is becoming increasingly visible in valuable patents (e.g., Google’s Page Rank, a linear algebra algorithm, was licensed by Stanford for US$336 million) it seems that the USPTO should be encouraging, not discouraging, the mathematical fluency of the lawyers whose work it recognizes. 
—Bob Palais, Math Dept., Pathology Dept. University of Utah, Notices of the AMS, January 2010, page 9,  here. 

Euclid's Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem
Proposition 47 Book 1.
(Not Socrates's Demonstration,
which Plato and the USPTO say that you were born with.
Too bad you were not born with this one.)

Plato believed that mathematics exists within you to be discovered by introspection.  In the Dialog of Meno, Socrates draws out from a slave an application of the Pythagorean theorem to show the doubling of an isosceles right triangle.   The so-called “Socratic method” favored by many teachers assumes that this knowledge is inherent within you.  That is the epistemology of the US Patent and Trademark Office.  Mathematics need not be invented – or even discovered by external exploration – because we all have it in our heads.   That theory just does not add up.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Copy Rights and Wrongs

Objective Intellectual Property Law

Patent Nonsense

The Map that Changed the World

PATENT NONSENSE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND NON-OBJECTIVE LAW

US patent law changed for the worse with the Leahy-Smith "America Invents Act" (September 16, 2011) which became effective March 13, 2013. America went from "first to invent" to "first to file."  Bad as that will be, it is not the only problem with US intellectual property law, which never had a correct and consistent philosophical foundation.

Despite myths to the contrary,  Alexander Graham Bell did not race Elisha Gray to the Patent Office to win by an hour.  In 1876 (and until the AIA of 2011), the Patent and Trademark Office awarded the patent to the first to invent.  Also, back then a working model was not required. (That had been changed in 1870.)  A working prototype or demonstration model is helpful, but not necessary. Even before the AIA of 2011, the USPTO granted patents to software. The first was awarded on April 28, 1968, to Marty Goetz for a sorting algorithm.  (See the Computerworld story here.)

The essential difficulty is that mathematical ideas are not patentable. The law assumes that mathematics exists to be discovered: no one invents it.   An element of the original patent to Goetz was that software could be built in (burned in; programmed in) to a solid state integrated circuit ("chip"). So, it would be an essential contradiction to claim that the arrangements of gates on on integrated circuit is not patentable.

If you have an idea for a new kind of door latch, you can draw out the design and be awarded a patent. You can take that engineering drawing ("blueprint") to a machinist who will make one, even to your specifications for materials and colors.  The engineering drawing is acceptable as evidence of a new invention.  

Now consider these:

 "The Klein Bottle as an Eggbeater" by Richard L. W. Brown

Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 5 (Nov., 1973), pp. 244-250 

Brown, ibid.

What those describe is a Klein Bottle, one of these:

Earrings and more for sale

at Klein Bottle Dot Com

http://www.kleinbottle.com/tiny_klein.html

Fallopian Klein Bottle

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/

object_images/535x535/10328086.jpg

It is real, but it does call to
"And He Built a Crooked House"
by Robert Heinlein, about a tesseract, though.

The Klein Bottle was a mathematical idea, a demonstration in topology, which, by the assumptions of US Patent Law, existed for Euclid and Pythagoras, even existed from the Creation for anyone to discover, and no one to invent.  But clearly, no such thing existed until it was conceptualized, defined, described, and ultimately built.  So, should the Klein Bottle (and Moebius Strip) be patentable or not?

The physical Klein Bottle or Moebius Strip is not mathematically different from other descriptions as equations or maps. Consider the famous Pythagorean Theorem.  A drawing from a Euclidean geometry book is no more or less real than an algebraic statement from Cartesian geometry. The ancient Egyptians knew that if you make a triangle out of rope - 3 cubits 4 cubits 5 cubits - you will have a right angle, which will enable you to redraw your property lines after the Nile recedes.  Thus, a knotted rope 3-4-5 would be a "patentable device" when in fact, it is only a restatement of a mathematical theorem. 

Now, we protect that kind of invention (or discovery) through copyright.  The US joined most of the rest of the world in 1989 when one of President Reagan's final acts was signing the law joining the Berne Convention.  The author automatically owns the copyright. You do not need to file for  copyright in the United States.  (It is still recommended by the Copyright Office, of course.)  Perhaps even stronger is first publication.  Publication of an original idea in a peer-reviewed academic journal established your claim to precedence.  Today, when academic researchers are charged with fraud, perhaps the most common crime is to simply search and sort for articles in obscure journals, and put your name on one, and send it to another obscure journal, and claim the publication in your curriculum vitae. The serious crime is academic fraud, not copyright violation - though that does remain.

Analogous rights are attached to fashion trademarks.  You can steal Donna Karan's designs; do not attempt to copy the DKNY label.  (See Johanna Blakely's famous TED Talk on innovation and intellectual property in the fashion industry.)  

The reason for these knots - knots are also a serious problem set in topology - is that we have no objective basis for understanding and instantiating intellectual property.  Our ideas on property are rooted in medieval laws about land. Two people cannot stand in the same place at the same time.  Land cannot be replicated. Anything that is non-rival and non-exclusive is considered a "public good". A beautiful sunset - or even a murky one - is an example. That simply will not do.  Granting a government monopoly was the best idea from the Middle Ages. The city of Venice had the first intellectual property patent laws in 1474. Several of our American colonies began as "patents" from the Crown.  We never got beyond that.  

Make Your Own Paper Klein Bottle

http://sciencevspseudoscience.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/klein_bottle.jpg

I have been arguing these problems with an Objectivist comrade, patent attorney Dale Halling, on the Galt's Gulch Online discussion board of the Atlas Shrugged movie producers.  His claims here (actually posted by his wife): The Myth that Patents are Monopolies.  My reply here: Patents Redux Again

Halling asserts John Locke's theory that property is that with which you mix your labor.  My response is that breaking into my house requires work but does not grant title to my property.  On the contrary, digging a hole and filling it up is hard work which creates no property.  Halling claims that a mathematical algorithm is not objective, not repeatable, and has no material existence.  Software, he says, meets all of those criteria: software is real. However, the Klein Bottle and Moebius Strip prove that mathematical expressions are substantial. 

In fact, even more than Marty Goetz's sorting algorithm, the RSA Cryptosystem is a perfect example of a mathematical idea, instantiated as a computer program, which has very real value.  The mathematics of the totient function came from Leonard Euler.  Supposedly, it existed for Pythagoras, Euclid, and God.  But it took three geniuses from MIT to make it real. The problem is that Phil Zimmerman thought that everyone should have one.  So, he took the same mathematics from Euler and wrote it up as a new computer program and distributed his "PGP:Pretty Good Privacy" for free. (Read one of very many stories here.)

That hit another legal barrier: the US government considers cryptography to be a weapon of war; you are not allowed to export it without a license; but the Internet is global, as the communist gerontocracy of People's Republic of China is constantly reminded.  Once you put something online, it goes everywhere.

==> "How Amazon Got a Patent on White Background Photography" from Ars Technica here. 

That is not the first time that mathematics was sequestered.  In the 18th century, Gaspard Monge's Descriptive Geometry was declared a military secret. Those examples clearly deny the USPTO's claim that mathematics exists for everyone to discover and no one to invent. 

U.S. patent law does not allow independent discovery.  For that, Newton and Leibniz, Bell and Gray, and Srinivasa Ramanujan simply do not exist.  Well, they do exist, but they have no right to their discoveries and inventions.  According to Halling (and Ayn Rand) that is objective justice.  I must demur.  But I do not know how to solve the problem.  Is it true that simply copying that which exists because someone else created it is the labor of a burglar? Is the problem the easy word "simply"? Is copying really hard enough that it qualifies as new labor?  Does anyone really slavishly copy with no input of originality?  

In his Constitution of Government for Galt's Gulch, (reviewed here on NecessaryFacts) jurist Wolf Devoon looks to equity and common law for justice. He expects that in any suit, either or both parties will make novel claims, otherwise the matter would not have come to court.  Perhaps like entrepreneurship, justice is ineffable: it must be learned, because it cannot be taught.  To best serve a commercial society, a truly bourgeois culture of production and trade, the best courts would be successful marketers of justice.  The suggestion is not original with me.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood
action figure created by
Kingley-Wallis

I believe that we do need intellectual property recognized by law. If the moral case were not enough, the practical consequences are irrefutable.  The classic argument comes from The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando De Soto. Bright ideas that benefit a home, farm, or village burn out for lack of capital to fuel them because the poor have no property rights. That is why they are poor. The consequences are manifold (another mathematical concept). The government's own electrical power utility cannot borrow capital to maintain or expand because the poor steal electricity. It is not the mere tapping of current, but the fact that the users have no legal addresses.  Here in America your home will be a good asset for your power company for the next 30 years no matter who lives there because your home address has legal reality. You have a right to the property; when you buy power, you lease that value. 

That said, I seek to avoid reversing cause and effect, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and others of the "you did not build that" gang claim that entrepreneurs use public roads and other public infrastructure which we the people provided.  Of course, those entrepreneurs also paid up front long before they went into business.

However, the salient point - as any Austrian economist will prove for you - is that each mile of pavement made us all poorer.  It is a testament to entrepreneurship not that they made good use of the highways, but that they succeeded at all despite the desertification of the economy by public works.  The "benefit" of public works are a "broken window" fallacy.

It may be a similar fallacy to claim that our IP laws brought prosperity.  They may only be to jurisprudence what public roads are to transportation.  It may be true that having patents and IP law are important to prosperity.  It may be more important that we have the right laws, not just something left over from the Middle Ages.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Objective Intellectual Property Law

Open Secrets

Hacking

Knowledge Maps

The Code Book