Meeting notice: The 99.11.16 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. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Suggested topic: Nanotechnology and Patents The sentiment that the patent system in its current form (if not in all forms) is broken is quite general, at least in the programming community. This naturally raises the question of the ideal intellectual property environment for the development of NT. Is our current system inhibiting the technology now or is it likely to in the future? If so, is there anything that can be done about that? Patents appear to promote innovation when R&D costs (including marketing and regulatory compliance costs) are high and inhibit it when the 'cost of innovation' is low. The wholesale abolition of patents would devastate the pharmaceutical industry while having only a marginal, or even beneficial, effect on software. It is an open question into which category NT will fall. It might fall into both: in the short term having to lay out significant sums in all the categories mentioned above, if, as seems more than possible, the environmental groups mount a serious effort to shut the enterprise down; then eventually entering a phase in which the entry cost of innovation is as low as, say, painting. At that point patents would do more harm than good (imagine the effect on art of patentable colors or forms). However, it is hard to see how even the worst possible patent environment could inhibit the technology for long. Imagine a world in which companies or individuals could establish patents by simple assertion, by the legal equivalent of jumping over a broom, and patents once asserted lasted forever. (Infringement claims would still be contested in court over the usual criteria: novelty, utility, and cleverness, but any lawyer, or anyone, could send a cease-and-desist letter. They would be generated by artificial lawyer progams.) The resulting confusion would delay innovation but probably not for long, since the fact that license fees are generated from sales gives patent holders a strong interest in seeing inventions reach their market. What it would do is increase inequality (if fire or the wheel had been patented and that patent had endured the parties holding title would by now own a reasonable piece of the world) and the total fraction of the society engaged in parasitical, unproductive, rentier- like, behavior. While this might be offensive to other values, the pace of innovation, the subject here, would probably be slowed only slightly. (For many people, innovating is such a central part of their relation to life that they pay large sums to be able to do it. This behavior is known as having a hobby.) Further, only the commercial side of innovation would be slowed under such a 'patent hell'. There would remain a culture of samizdat innovation, in which creative people would generate interesting artifacts for each other (the analogy to dissident publishing might be quite exact, depending on the how explicit the anatagonism was between the patent cops and technical society). In that case, over time the technological level of the average consumer would fall increasingly behind that of the dissident innovators; the latter would become an elite, known to possess powers and species of exotic property denied ordinary people. People would step aside when they walked the sidewalk and they would have their choice of sexual partners. This would not be so bad, but the world as I know it would not allow such an unnatural distribution of power for long. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Self-Assembling Peptide Systems Research at MIT: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1999/sep01/peptides.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> COMPLEXITY IN ENGINEERING CONFERENCE Co-Sponsored by MIT and the Santa Fe Institute November 19-20, 1999 University Park Hotel, Cambridge, MA The explosion of engineering complexity has been accompanied by efforts from researchers in academia and industry to understand the design, control, manufacturing, and management of complex systems. In addition, recent theoretical work on complex systems holds out the promise of understanding in general the features of systems that must process large quantities of information in order to function. Organizer: Seth Lloyd Plenary Speakers: Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Laureate in Physics: `Simplicity and Complexity in Physical Law.' Alex d'Arbeloff, Chairman, Teradyne and MIT: `Managing Complexity in Industry.' Paul Penfield, Professor, MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: `Making Complexity Simple.' Students and Academics admitted free. Members of the Public are invited to attend for a $50 fee, payable upon admission. If you wish to attend, please email or telephone Susan Ballati at the Santa Fe Institute in order to preregister (email: susanb@santafe.edu, telephone: 505-820-0122). Non-preregistered participants will be admitted on a first-come first-serve basis. Further inquiries can be directed to Seth Lloyd (slloyd@mit.edu, 617-252-1803) <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Announcement Archive: http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> 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 you must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti-spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com