On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 8:41 AM, V. Sasi Kumar <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 00:05 +0530, A. Mani wrote:
>
> > While arguing against s/w patents, nobody should try justifying other
> > forms of patents.
>
> But I think patents also do some good. As RMS says, patents on real
> things are different, and may be desirably because they help to bring
> knowledge into the public domain that otherwise could have been lost. An
> example is the well-known Aranmula Kannadi of Kerala - a metallic mirror
> made from an alloy like bell metal. Only one family knew how to make it,
> and now just one person. If they could have patented the invention, the
> knowledge will never have been lost. Now, we hope this one person who
> has the know-how will teach someone else. Very possibly, there are many
> such examples. The problem, I think, is the misuse of these laws, taking
> them to absurd limits and to domains where they are not applicable.
>
I don't think this is a very good example. It actually points to the
cultural difficulty of maintaining oral traditions in an environment where
only written documentation is respected, although it fails to be accurate.
To take a different example, excellent food recipes are often vague ("add a
pinch of caramelised sugar, just after the mix has reached the point of
light bubbling"). They are meant to be experimented by each chef who uses
them, and not followed blindly. They are also highly dependent on the
ambient conditions: for instance European recipes assume a generally cold
climate, and don't work very well in the tropics, even if the ingredients
are imported as fresh as possible.
But to return to the Aranmula Kannadi, this is equally true of the Rogan
hand-coloured textiles of Kutch, where only one family continues practising
the art. To achieve true Rogan, one will have to mix colours in Kutch, not
blindly follow some recipe in the USA. I visited the van Gogh museum in
Amsterdam, where an entire floor is devoted to trying to figure out how the
artist mixed colours, and this despite the fact that he maintained a diary,
or wrote letters to his brother, talking about his work.
Does anyone think about the pillar in the courtyard of the Qutb Minar? Do
you know it is made of pure iron, that hasn't rusted in over 1,000 years?
Can you imagine a single casting of that weight today? No-one knows how to
do that, and certainly not how to cast stainless iron. What has this to do
with patents? Patents are only documentation. They mostly (and deliberately)
conceal the precise methods of duplication.
>
> --
> V. Sasi Kumar
> Free Software Foundation of India
> http://swatantryam.blogspot.com
>
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--
Vickram
http://communicall.wordpress.com
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