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16 September 05.
So the book is almost done, leaving a vacuous hole in my life which I could ostensibly fill via social relations with my fellow man, or maybe trying to find a real job. But instead, I'm focusing on the usual `what am I gonna do with all these twenty-four hour days' question. development IPSo I've been thinking about moving on to intellectual property law in developing countries. It's pretty easy to find reports on developing nations that say something like `stronger IP laws are necessary to foster a better business climate.' I was involved in writing such a report for [name of international development organization] just the other day.But that's a placeholder sentence for the actual question of how one does that. For a small, open economy to declare that as of Monday it will have strong IP comparable to the USA would be shooting itself in the foot. To recognize patents in the US or Japan or Europe would be to simply take what used to be in the public domain in your country and hand it to foreigners. Many argue that the USA has laws which are so strong they are verging on stifling progress: for example, I think I've mentioned Madey v Duke before, which basically eliminates the `experimental use' exception to a patent. Would a country really be better off if its universities have to pay royalties to a foreign country for all the technology its students build? So when we say `these guys need stronger IP protection' we don't mean infinitely strong protection, but some balance between the two extremes. Which already gives us a contrast with software patents, where the right answer was not some wishy-washy compromise. I couldn't say with a straight face that all developing countries are better off with no IP protection of any sort. Software patents are a tiny slice of nothing, but IP for developing countries is a topic that could absorb the entirety of my life. The returns would also be greater, I suppose, in that doing it right would affect more people's lives, but that brings us to point number 3. Part of why I know the computing world so well, part of why its ethererality appeals to me so, is that I've spent most of my life below the poverty line. As a kid, there really were days when I didn't eat because all we had was rice with bouillon cubes, which I'd been eating for the last three days. We moved frequently, while my dear mother tried to find a job. You ever see Rent? The musical about poor people, whose end of Act I consists of a big kick line of people singing about how great it is to be poor and delighting in La vie Boheme? Let me say, as one who is actually half Bohemian and who has been poor, it's not actually like that. In reality, poverty sucks. You don't get fun toys, and when you do, you're reluctant to play with them because if you break them a replacement is too expensive. Given the capital constraints, living in front of a computer makes sense. As a kid, there are always the school PCs, and when you're older, you're done after one initial capital investment in your neighbor's castoff. All the software you'll ever need is out there on the network. In college, during that year where I was once again losing weight from too-infrequent meals, I had three floppy disks with all my writing and all my requisite software, so I could show up anywhere and work. That was also the year that I really started to get good with the delightful world of computing. The novel really wasn't very good, but it was TeXed up perfectly. When you have time and energy but not money, which is true of all kids but especially the poor ones, information technology makes a lot of sense. Every seminar on info tech in the developing world has some inevitable anecdotes about how they put a computer somewhere and were amazed at what the neighborhood kids worked out to do with it, from which we garner two possibilities: the speaker either has absolutely no imagination or is a condescending arse. Of course info tech has appeal to kids, because it's easy to build things that work, and of course it has appeal to poor kids, because all the resource constraints just don't exist. Scripts don't wear out and break. Getting back to me, I'm not entirely sure where I fit. I imagine that learning BASIC at the Champaign Park District's computer lab is pretty different from learning cgi-bin scripts from time stolen from an Internet cafe in Nicaragua. Or so I imagine. Playing right now: "The way we are", by the Cure. Here is the source for the lyrics. I actually do have an income now---I'm even landed gentry---and am a pretty long way from when I first gained popluarity in my fourth grade class because I found out how to change the cursor on the TRS-80 to a rocket. The experience of trying to feed a family by starting a tech-oriented company is one I've never had.And why do I insist on talking about software? What do I know about the provision of drugs or the building of factories? I always made fun of academics whose topics of interest are wholly predicted by a few life experiences. There was the woman who studied migration between Sierra Leone and southern France; you'll never guess where her family was from (hint: two places, actually). But I'm even more wary of those who write about those things they have no experience in at all. Me, I can barely build up interest in my own problems, let alone those of people whose lives I can only vaguely imagine. I can write up theoretical models all day long, but whether I can breathe life into them when it's not something I've lived myself is another question.
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