Best among equals

Originally published here.

In 2001 the Australian government introduced the Innovation Patent to protect lower level inventions which wouldn't normally meet the requirements of a Standard Patent.

This was a fantastic concept for fueling innovation for one simple reason:

The test of an Innovation Patent is that it must show a "substantial contribution to the working of the invention", even if the contribution is an obvious one that could be made by anybody who's skilled in that particular area.

Basically, this means an Innovation Patent holder can say, "Yeah, anybody could have done it, but I was the one who actually did". But because fewer resources are required to make something worthy of a Innovation Patent, the patent holder only gets eight years to exploit their invention instead of the normal 20 years.

As we still live in a "closed" intellectual property based world, this is a great step in giving entrepreneurs and inventors a reason to keep doing their thing. They can take the inventive process one step at a time. By shortening the length of the patent, there's actually a bigger incentive to keep working on the invention and this will be especially beneficial to developers of complicated works such as stem cell based medicines where there may be 40 years worth of work involved before a product is ready for market.

The idea of shorter periods for people to exploit their inventions has actually been coming along quite nicely for more than a decade in "open" intellectual property circles, and it's proving to be damned effective.

In the "open" world the challenges are bigger, yet they're met more often. Developers are constantly helping their competitors, and yet they can still be market leaders. A bright newcomer can destroy the major players with one new concept, while the defeated stalwart can claw its way back to the top just as fast.

Take the eDonkey network.

When MetaMachine released the first version of eDonkey 2000, it was a stunning piece of software and was steadily improved upon. The idea was quickly borrowed and the eMule Project came into being soon after. Being open source, eMule developed at a faster rate and development continued at a frantic pace until it became the dominant client on the eDonkey network.

MetaMachine responded with Overnet, a decentralized version of their network. Again, the concept was borrowed and the word "Kademlia" started working it's way into the online vocabulary. The Kademlia Distributed Hash Table network was jumped on my eMule users and coders alike and not long after it was declared to be "fairly stable," the developers of the popular Azureus BitTorrent client announced they'd worked a Kad-based searching method into their client. Then the official BitTorrent client was quick to announce the implementation of a similar system. Not long after that, poor old MetaMachine announced they had worked out how a user could group a bunch of files together.

In the world of "open" intellectual property, a developer doesn't have to hide his or her work from competitors. "Protection" comes from simply being the best among equals.

Some say that war is the greatest stimulant for innovation, but this can't be true. The US military had more than 30 years to develop the DARPA network, a period during which a bitter Cold War was waged and threats against America multiplied dramatically. The end result was a communications tool that could only be operated by highly trained and exceptionally skilled technicians.

Enter the CERN academic who wanted a convenient way to organize his research notes, and HTML was born. Ten years later we can communicate with anyone, anywhere. And thankfully, even the traditional "closed" intellectual property system is working its way towards a more open working environment.

Where fast moving development is the key to success, an Innovation Patent is an excellent option. However, in the place where ideas really take on a life of their own - the internet - open development will always be better both for innovators and for everyone else.