Meeting notice: The 01.06.05 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: When we think about cultural or social obstacles to NT we tend to think first of the sorts of objections raised by anti-biotech activists -- such as that nanotechnology violates the 'precautionary principle'. (Which is true enough; practically every time we meet we think of new ways in which thrusting so much power into the hands of the insane, fanatical, or -- far more frightening -- the incompetent might work out poorly.) However there are other obstacles that bear watching. One is that current trends in the institution of intellectual property might be fundamentally incompatible with the technology. The cost burden on innovation increases with the density of patentable procedures per 'unit of innovation'. This is increasingly an issue in biotech, where commercializing a given innovation can require negotiating with dozens of patent holders. The genes are patented, the insertion vehicles are patented, the repressors and operators are patented, the markers are patented, and so on. When a consortium sprang up recently to assure access to 'golden rice' (rice engineered to address Vitamin A deficiency) by poor farmers it had to get permissions from 70 patent holders. If just one had dug in its heels the project would have foundered. While none did in this case, the risks are obvious. Even when the licensing gets hammered out, organizing such numbers imposes a real cost in time and skilled labor. This trend is aggravated by the apparent increase in the willingness of the patent office to lower the 'grain' of patentability to ever more trivial manipulations or techniques, and its growing acceptance of 'follow- on' patents, which have the practical effect of extending the lifetime of a patent for far beyond its putative twenty years. Both of these trends increase the patent density of the average innovation, as does the natural tendency of technological development to move to ever- higher levels of complexity by incorporating the innovations of the past. By its nature nanotechnology will almost certainly have a very high patentable procedure density -- far higher than biotech. (For one thing NT devices will contain onboard computers, which means they will have software patents to worry about.) The costs of this licensing load might easily suffice to crush the technology. But patents are not the only problem NT might have with the law: looked at from the point of view of an intellectual property lawyer, an assembler, or any technology that approaches assemblerhood, like advanced solid modeling with good materials handling, is a universal piracy tool. Such devices will allow anyone to "steal" the design of almost anything. The IP lawyers have done amazing things considering that up till now their clients have been such financially marginal players as recording companies and movie producers. What they could do if, for instance, General Motors and General Electric were to start throwing real resources behind their efforts is daunting to imagine. NT might well survive, but it would be seriously dented. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.