There’s an interesting thread on MR about software patents. In recent years “patent trolls” have become a parasitic industry all to themselves.  Companies are created to acquire patents from the holders so they can then shake down whoever may be using them in their product. It’s not much different than what Jesse Jackson does for money. He makes a pest of himself and gets paid to go away. The practice goes back a long time to when travelers would take over an inn or a private home and you had to pay them to leave. of course, they tend to pick on little guys lacking the means to fight back. This from EFF is a good example.

The idea of a patent or license is to encourage and direct the behavior of the creative. Instead of offering a prize, the inventor is granted exclusive rights to his invention for a fixed period of time.  The world gets the invention and the inventor gets money, maybe lots of money. The assertion that patents are necessary to spur invention is a new idea. In fact, the idea of patents for intellectual property came under heavy assault in the 19th century.  That was an age of industrial growth and an explosion of innovation. For most of the last 500 years, starting from the advent of the patent system in Venice, patents were limited and temporary.

What we see today with patent trolls is how the law is easily turned into a weapon by the rentier class. In a prior age, the rentier had to be rich before he could extract rents. Today, you get rich by finding a way to freeload off the system in some way. The better you are at it the richer you get. Perhaps you get so rich you can buy land and rent it out. Our entire financial system is a rentier operation where well connected firms skim from the productive class in order to finance the political class who offer protection to the the financial class.

The current morass is just another example of why schemes to correct some aspect of the human condition always fail. There’s a fraction of every human society that seeks out ways to live on the labor of others. It is their one skill and their sole focus. Some become salesman or lawyers. others go into banditry or illicit trade. They are always with us. if try to protect the rights of the honest with patent laws, for example, the parasites will find a way to use that as way to lever money from the honest. Since they are really good at being parasites, they can never be out foxed by new laws. They always win in the end.