| THE CRIME OF REASON And the Closing of the Scientific Mind Robert B. Laughlin New York: Basic Books, September 2008 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-465-00507-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-465-00507-1 | 186pp. | HC | $25.95 | |
Robert Laughlin, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, warns us here of the pervasive and troubling sequestration of knowledge.
People often have trouble speaking about this problem because it's a worldly matter—like the practicalities of having children—that polite individuals don't discuss. Instead they smile and insist that the various ways of withholding knowledge—intentional generation of confusion, stonewalling, lying, disinforming—are obnoxious but not conspiratorial. They then deflect the conversation in a new direction by declaring the concerned person to be paranoid. This denial is extremely irresponsible. The issue is the criminalization of knowledge. It's important. It's something we need to think about. – Page 2 |
What he's talking about is the recent expansion of intellectual property rights, which reserves to commercial or government entities more and more sorts of knowledge that used to be in the public domain. He rightly feels that this expansion of IP trammels ideas that should be free and unrestricted, like the contents of one's genome.
Unfortunately, the area of knowledge he picks as his prime example is that of nuclear weapons design. As a consequence, he departs from the thesis propounded in the first part of the book, which is essentially the desirability of generating and disseminating knowledge for its own sake. From this point forward, his view is that for either economic or national-security grounds, knowledge suppression is justified.
Like the Smithsonian Institution, I support "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." I also think there are certain items of knowledge that it is appropriate to restrict. The detailed designs of nuclear weapons are certainly one sort of knowledge that should be restricted. I don't see any conflict between those precepts. It's merely the principle that increasing the general fund of knowledge and spreading it around has benefits for individuals and society, except for certain specific items of knowledge that would be dangerous if misused.
Laughlin's best chapter is Chapter 5, where he shows how ailing the patent system currently is. Not only are patents too often issued for inventions that are flat impossible, such as perpetual-motion devices,1 but for things which contravene its own code.
Also, patent agencies and courts are notorious for incorrectly identifying who invented things. Legendary cases of injustice include the Armstrong regenerative circuit and frequency modulation patents, the Farnsworth television patents, and the Damadian magnetic resonance imaging patents. – Page 55 |
The U.S. patent system is now being gamed to such a degree that it actually inhibits what it is supposed to foster. Sick as a patented poodle.
The growing efforts of governments, corporations, and individuals to prevent competitors from knowing certain things that they themselves know has led to a stunning expansion of intellectual property rights and the strengthening of state classification powers. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and EU Copyright Directive of 2001, for example, make it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures (understand encrypted communications) and distribute code-cracking devices (tell other people about it). The Bayh-Dole and Stevenson-Wydler Acts of 1980 redefine the mission of government-sponsored research to be the creation of intellectual property. Courts now sustain patent claims for hiring strategies, real estate sales techniques, the discovery of chemical correlations in the body, and gene sequences. Broad areas of two sciences, physics and chemistry, are now off-limits to public discourse because they are national security risks. *
* * More and more, the act of reasoning something out for yourself is potentially a crime. – Pages 4-5 |
This is not to say that knowledge restriction is never improper. It often is, and recent examples are too many to list. Laughlin mentions the case of UCLA geneticist James Grody. His research on congenital deafness was halted because the holder of the patent on a gene related to the condition demanded a fee he could not pay. Genes are laws of nature, and the patent code says laws of nature cannot be patented. Yet patents have been granted on one-fifth of the human genome.2 It is truly a thorny thicket.
So my assessment of this book is that while its Chapter 5 is its most valuable portion, it is worth reading in its entirety because it contains a great deal of information and is very well researched. However, except for that Chapter 5, it is more a collection of interesting and sometimes amusing speculations than a closely reasoned analysis of intellectual-property law and practice. And as regards patents, there are much better sources — many of which are listed in its chapter notes.
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