I have been asked by several people if I'm going to patent my work. The answer is "no", and I have both philosophical and practical reasons for this answer.
I know this is going to be difficult to believe, but ideas are living things.
Just what does it mean to be alive, anyway? Living things take energy from the environment, and use it to alter that environment. They reproduce. Perhaps they mate (this may be optional, but exceptions seem to be rare). They grow. They die -- although dying, in some sense, is probably optional as well.
Plants and animals are obvious examples of living things. They live, grow, reproduce, take energy from the environment (sunlight for plants, plants and animals for animals), and they die. But I would propose there are less obvious examples as well: cars and houses and cities reproduce (via manufacturing) and mate (via engineering), they take fuel, and they alter the environment -- but these things are only living because, much like every living cell of a human has mitochondria living quasi-independently of that cell, every car, house, and city, so long as the humans inside them maintain them, show signs of life -- and when they are abandoned, they die, no longer taking in fuel or exhaling, no longer being "healed" from wear and tear, rusting away and crumbling from abandonment and neglect.
Can ideas be alive? They live in people's heads, they affect the actions of humans, when they swirl together they can create new ideas, they can inspire the creation of physical objects (some living, some dead). And they reproduce -- when a human shares an idea with another human, two humans now have it, then four, then an entire culture -- and when humans no longer pass them along to the next generation, they die, or at least go into hibernation. Ideas can be dangerous, too, as the existence of Communism has proven, time and time again.
Now, if ideas are living things, it's natural to ask: What makes them thrive? What limits their growth, or even kills them?
I would propose that ideas thrive when they are shared, when they are taught, when they are put in books and on the internet, when they are embodied into physical machines ... and they whither away and die in obscurity because no one thought the idea was worth preserving ... or because no one was allowed to share it!
We have a lost work of Archimedes that was discovered by x-raying a centuries-old prayer book -- at some point, a monk decided to reuse a random book for that purpose, because parchment is hard to come by -- and while we don't know what the monk was thinking at the time (it could very well be "we already have four copies of this, and the monastery the next town over has two" -- or it could very simply be "eh, this is just arcane mathematics, no one would care if I used it for this") -- the monk nonetheless decided the world wouldn't miss one less copy of that work, and, ironically enough, accidentally preserved it so that could be restored in the future, by a culture that would value it!
Now, it so happens we have two entrenched legal traditions that are particularly poisonous to ideas: patents and copyrights. Both versions of idea "protection" can snuff out the potential of of an idea even before life can be breathed into it. Thankfully, they eventually expire, so we don't forever stagnate, but we suffer until that happens.
Examples of how patents have hampered ideas are numerous, but one that's dear to my heart is the airplane. When the Wright brothers successfully made their first flight, they got a patent, and they diligently tried to get everyone to purchase a copy of their first flyer ... and sued everyone who attempted to fly on their own ... including anyone who came overseas from Europe. They never really got any traction, until Congress decided to buy out their patents, and create the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA). NACA then went on to research the heck out of all things airplane, and make it free, available to any manufacturer who wished to make an airplane.
Why did Congress resort to such drastic action? A hint can be found in the etymology of aeronautics terminology: if you look closely, you'll see about half of the words that originated from French! Why French? Because while the Wright brothers were eagerly suing everyone trying to fly an airplane in America, in Europe, the patents didn't apply, so experimentation took off. It got to the point that, with WWI looming above the horizon, Congress noticed that Europe's airplanes were significantly more advanced than anything in America. We needed to do something to catch up! And that "something" was effectively the neutralization of patents for all things aviation.
Another example that's dear: software, which has always been subject to copyright, and has recently (approximately 1980, if I recall correctly) become subject to patents as well. But what is the most successful software company in the world? Microsoft -- a company that spread like a virus because of piracy, just so that people could use their computers. What is the most successful operating system? Linux -- it's on pretty much everything but desktop computers -- and it's a system that has grown by explicitly rejecting the protections of copyright. Patents were harder to deal with, but eventually Linux became popular enough that major companies just adopted the system in their licensing pools, so that no one would have to care about potential liability of using patent-infringing software.
Rather than a boon for inventors and writers, copyright and patent laws strew mine fields across the landscape -- creators always have to be wary of predatory publishing contracts and patent trolls and being accused of stealing story and picture ideas, and what's worse, if you're going to sue someone over a violation, you'd better have plenty of money and patience to do so! All these things are hassles I just don't want to deal with.
What's more, the biggest fear I have in my endeavors isn't that people will steal from me, or pirate my work -- my greatest fear is that I'll languish in obscurity. Every book that's in a library, every Github repository, every blogpost and yes, every book sale (new or used) is an attempt to get away from that obscurity. If someone pirates my work, why should I care? More people get to see it! If someone copies me, it's because my idea is a good one -- and while someone is copying it, I'm already ahead in refining it, and while someone is trying to push a stolen idea, I'm already working on the next one!
That is why I'm not going to patent anything I do. I am going to declare everything technical "prior art" (I call this "patent preemption"), any software will be licensed under the MIT Software License (the one that provides maximum liberty), and any non-software material will be licensed under CC0 (the least restrictive version of the Community Commons License). My only concern about piracy is that companies like Amazon like to demand exclusivity for publishing -- and if they find the work on some pirate's website, that may make them a little temperamental -- but I figure that in those cases, a "Cease and Desist" letter may be called for, if only to show the Amazon bean counters that these things aren't distributed with my permission. And in environments where I may speak with publishers and authors who have every reason in the world to avoid discussing ideas, I may even request people to sign "Free Disclosure and Use Agreements" where I waive any right to sue over sharing my ideas -- on condition that they don't sue me, either! -- and this, so that we could talk freely about anything, and let the chips fall however they may.
What's particularly ironic about the concerns about story idea "stealing" is that it's not particularly unusual for two different people to get a similar idea independently of each other, at the same time ... and even then, particularly for something as unconstrained as story writing (physics can impose constraints that give the creators fewer options), two different people will have different takes for the same idea!
If you find something inspiring on this blog, or in any of my work, grab it and run with it! I will take it as a compliment. It will mean that something I create is interesting to other people!
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