Tag: Troglodyte

Epilogue: Troglodyte is not dead even though it is buried

This is a comment related to Jakke’s post about ramping Troglodyte down as a project.

When I face a mirror, I see the person to blame. My personal input was never on the required level.

I have a lot of started ongoing studies, but it is really tedious work. I believe one shouldn’t report much before knowing the results. It is also a reason why one needs to be fully committed. In spirit I am, but seemingly not in flesh. Not enough.

I have an excuse. That excuse led me to a project with a monthly salary. Hopefully we can build something great there.

Money and salary is the dilemma we have faced several times with Jakke and Niko during the last two years. There is so much work to be done, helpless to help and projects to start. And still we are in a situation where we all have to decide what is important and what is not.

We do it everyday, each of us.

An old car salesman told me 29 years ago that money is such an old innovation that everyone must have it by now. Or by then, since it is almost 30 years later now. There must be even more money to go around.

But in the areas of Humanitarian IPR or Humanitarian Work we don’t see it. Perhaps we need more old car salesmen there.

We and many others are not asking for much or for something impossible. But even that is too much. Big part of it is due to institutional problems (not challenges) buried in the way how they behave. We have touched those in our previous posts.

The system(s) need to see the money coming back and multiplying on its way. Human life is not money, even if it multiplies over time. The systems do not encourage to focus on something that would be important and could be done. They focus on what can be done and what makes money.

Yes, I am whining and am selfish.

I am not desperate enough or driven enough to forget everything else and drive just this one thing. I am in too good a position that food and shelter are not my problems. I too am thinking how to accumulate wealth to get me over the next dry season.

My dry season is related to work with salary, not a physical draught with famine.

I am ashamed, it is only the image in the mirror and the ones near me that I value high enough.

It is not impossible to try and continue to change the status quo. To use effort and money to build something good and humanly valuable. Something that is not valuable only in monetary terms and measured in monetary terms.

Such work takes time.

We, together with APO and humanitarian IPR, are on a path to something we do not know where it leads us. It does not have a name.

We just know we can do more.
And we will.

I am sure we are not alone.

We will continue to change the thinking one sentence and a comment at a time. It just takes longer.

Once in a while we have regular jobs, but the face in the mirror reminds us that we have possibilities to do something good with the tools we have been given and have gathered.

For us it is evolution over revolution, affecting the system with its democratic rules. Respecting our societies and everyone around us.

I don’t think the world is ready yet, we have potential for so much more.
All of us.

Ramping down Project Troglodyte

“On a personal level, I may have found a niche which I will need now that I have been “liberated” from my previous job and am “facing new challenges”: humanitarian IPR. “

Last year we decided to make a spinoff from Zygomatica, focusing on “hunting for bad patents”. We called it Project Troglodyte (www.project-troglodyte.org) and found new collaborators. We gave it about six months to evolve. The six months is now up. The readership and core team did not grow enough, so we are ramping it down. We will rewrite and republish some of the material here on Zygomatica.

I do not really consider this a failure, as we learned a good many valuable and interesting things. On a personal level, I may have found a niche which I will need now that I have been “liberated” from my previous job and am “facing new challenges”:  humanitarian IPR. There is plenty of humanitarian activity going on; for the most part, patents and IPR are not considered at all relevant in that world. Yet, they can be relevant — and almost never in a good way. Someone needs to understand the risks and also the upsides.

Our initial interest was in fighting “patent trolls” — entities that file and buy patents purely for the purpose of litigation. A major eye-opener was the possibility that trolling could quite quickly lead to trampling of basic human rights: See Trolling on the human rights. See also “How farmers were punished for using a shovel” and “The trolling triad“. The risks are real.

We came up with ideas that might actually genuinely have worked, in particular “antipatents”. Simple concept:

  • It seems to be possible to patent almost anything.
  • If something has already been “invented”, it can no longer be patented. (In technical terms, there is “prior art” that prevents it).
  • If so, why not “invent” everything trivial before someone else has time to patent it?
  • This collection of “inventions” could be called the “Antipatent Office” (APO).

This sounds flippant, but in fact this could be technically doable. I will summarize some of the better antipatent ideas in later postings.

However, in the end we ran into a major wall of demotivation. It might be possible to fight patent trolls in the United States with the antipatent strategy. However, the craziest features of the US patent system are not really being exported to the rest of the world, so mostly this is a US issue. American companies are suffering greatly from patent trolls; as Europeans, we really could not care less, as long as we are not contaminated. Antipatents might work if someone is motivated; we are not.

I found that the patent systems of developing countries are far more interesting, as are questions related to the use of IPR in humanitarian situations. However, I did not manage to drum up sufficient enthusiasm in the rest of the team. So, it makes more sense to pursue them as a solo project here on Zygomatica.

I wish to thank our collaborators (Kalle Pietilä, Viv Collins, and Florian Lengyel) for their contributions to Troglodyte.

 

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