Copyrights, Patents and Lawsuits

I'm sure you've heard the fights in the news. Apple got a patent on rectangular smartphones with a touchscreen and rounded corners. Amazon got a broad patent on scheduled home delivery of perishable goods (think the milkman). It's illegal to play most DVDs on a linux computer. You can buy a movie, but can't change its format or edit it for your own use. You know what I'm talking about.

There have always been frivolous lawsuits; recently there was a girl who sued her grad-school for a C+. People can be stupid and greedy, but when a company does it, it's something else. It can be destructive to competition, innovation, and small business. Capitalism falls apart and destroys the market when people get out of hand with lawsuits and corporate greed. Let me give you an example:

I'm going to tell you about Monsanto Chemical Company. You may not know the name, but they have been in your life. Some of the plastic you come in contact with was made by them, maybe even parts of the device you are using right now. Had something with wheat, corn, or another crop in it lately? The crops were very likely grown from Monsanto seeds, fertilized with Monsanto fertilizer, and sprayed with Monsanto insecticide and weed inhibitors. They make RoundUp and grass seed for your lawn. This is one big company. Like any big company they attract a lot of hate. In this case, it's not all unwarranted.

Monsanto has copyrights on living things and is using that to control most American farmers. Remember how I said they sell seeds? Now, in some ways it makes sense to copyright that. If you spent millions to genetically engineer a corn seed to grow fast and strong with hardly any water in a record time, you'd want to make your money back. You wouldn't want someone to make their own copy of your product that you worked so hard on and sell it. But Monsanto is not just protecting themselves.

There are a lot of opinions about GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) crops, and I'm about to afflict you with mine. I believe careful responsible gene manipulation to be beneficial. As long as we are careful not to create a monoculture or an invasive hybrid, it's fine with me. Many are more healthy and nutritious, use less water and fertilizer, and can't be grown accidentally. High-yield crops grown on little land is better for the environment too.

As soon as genetic engineering was invented and the gene sequence copyright created, Monsanto started copyrighting and patenting seeds. Not just what they made, either. They would find strains of seeds and if they could (they usually could), they would make it their property. There are certain sequences in DNA that are owned by Monsanto that used to be used by farmers for hundreds of years. Farmers would save some seed each year to re-plant next year. Now you either need to buy a license to grow your own seed (only the big farms can afford that) or buy new seed every year. Even if you get the license to grow crops from saved seeds, you'd need special chemicals to germinate many of them. They are not like natural seeds. All this cuts into profit big time. Every year they have to pay Monsanto (but the gains of using super-crop can help offset this cost).

There are still open pollinated crops: non GMO seeds that are in the public domain. Some of these are strains that are hundreds to thousands of old. If you have one of these, in theory you should be safe... in theory. Some of these have had their DNA copyrighted by Monsanto, either by accident or design. There is another issue as well.

Let's pretend that you are a farmer. You grow millet, just like all your neighbors. Some of your neighbors sell out to a Monsanto super farm. One day, out of the blue, you get a summons to court for copyright infringement. They not only want you to pay millions in fines, but back pay for 10 years of crops! You have no idea how it's possible as you have always used your saved seed stock, direct descendants from seed your great grandfather bought. You've never used Monsanto crops, but your neighbors did. There are several ways your crops might have been marked with genetic markers:

1. Cross Pollination: Bees can travel miles with pollen on their legs. Any field within 5 miles of yours is a risk.
2. Birds: A bird might eat a seed from another field and poop over yours.
3. Wind/Shipping Spillage: Strong wind may move seed or trucks may lose seed while passing your farm.
4. Erosion: Water might carry seed from one field to another. 

Bad news for you. How did they even get a sample of your crop? It turns out that they do random tests in non-affiliated fields, without knowledge or consent of the farmer. They trespass. As a huge company, they put legal pressure on your small farm. There's no way to win. Debt looms. Will you sell or hold out and pay Monsanto every year and deal with debt and profit loss? You could buy new non-GMO seed that's not contaminated.

This is not a random example; it's a true story.

The industry as a whole is becoming a battle-ground of lawsuits. The difficulty of entry into the markets is now also measured in the capital needed to survive an onslaught of lawsuits. Economies of scale dictate that big companies are more durable in a war of legal attrition. If some small firm wanted to sell new smartphones, they'd need to weather lawsuits from LG, Samsung, Apple and HTC. They don't need to win, just starve you. Innovation is stifled by this.

Luckily there is a counter-movement. It all started with a frustrated MIT student named Richard Stallman.

Richard Stallman is almost considered a god by many programmers. He has been responsible for some of the greatest changes in software in the last century, and for starting a movement that changed the world forever. Good beard too.

He was a computer programmer in the early days - a real pioneer. In those days they would change programs to suit their needs. Suddenly companies started making it impossible to access the source code, mostly to protect their intellectual property, but this meant that sometimes without modification the software would be unusable. If you used somebody else's code, even a friend's, you could be sued. He had a flash of inspiration. What if you had user-driven software creation? A community developing software for everyone can make a powerful and constantly up-dated tool. Being free, it could dodge some industry pit-falls. With help, he created the GNU license, a brilliant piece of legal gobbledy-gook that protects the producers, users, and modifiers of any free product. It spread like mad.

Have you ever used Mozilla Firefox, Linux, Android OS or Netscape? GNU. There is a staggering amount of free programs on the internet, everything from smartphone apps to software to run UAVs and industrial robots. The model of the system spread to non-product related fields. Wikipedia is free. It's even leaking into the physical world.

3D printing looks like the next revolution. A 3D printer takes a computer file and turns it into a  three dimensional physical object, usually in plastic, but metal and ceramics are starting to appear too. A file with a cup will produce a plastic cup. A 3D picture of your head will make a small bust of you in plastic. Free drawings are available all over the internet. An astonishing 70% of a 3D printer can be made in a 3D printer. Self replicating machines. Welcome to the future.

Many of the great advances and innovations started as a free product. Innovation flourishes where there is little chance of lawsuit. For the sake of our country and our world, I hope that the big guys lighten up. Play nice and let's get better together.

Cybernetic Implants and Prosthetics

We live in the future. It doesn't look how we thought it would; there are no flying cars or house-keeping androids, but there are robot vacuum cleaners and we can use our cell phones for anything (but are mostly used to play Angry Birds and look at pictures of cats). Dreams of yesterday are the realities of today, and if not today, there is always tomorrow. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. I say - not necessity, but desire. What humans desire is power, life, pleasure, love, and ease. Whatever we want, from a desire to save a life, to protect our children, or to feed our family can be traced to these basic goals. All innovations have been for one of these goals in one form or another, this includes what we term the necessities. These desires are central to what we are. Our works and our dreams hinge on this.

Today our focus is on life and power, in particular the ways we try to change ourselves to something beyond our natural state. Humankind has always had fictitious super-heroes. Demigods, legendary warriors, gods, demons, and Marvel Comics all have one thing in common: they reflect the dream of being more than human. We want more strength than our frames permit, better healing to recover from any injury, the ability to fly, to see in the dark, to move things with thought alone, and even immortality. We have bent our strength to these ends.

The Etruscans were making false teeth out of animal teeth or adding gold to fix their teeth in place as early as 7000 BC. This is one of the earliest examples of body improvement by the surgical introduction of non-natural materials.

We have been finding ways to modify the human body, replacing what is weak or lacking with man-made replacements. This is nothing new. We have always sought ways to make better bodies as far back as history tells us. People have been adding bits of metal, leather, and bone to their bodies to hold back the march of physical decay for thousands of years. Sometimes we add bits of metal and leather for purely cosmetic purposes (think piercings). Over time we have become better at re-building ourselves.
Our recent advances would stun our ancestors - the progress has been absolutely stunning. Enhancement has become common place. We've even advanced into integrated cybernetics. Cybernetics is defined as command (thought), action (motor ability in muscle), and feedback (senses sending input to command centers) working together. So, you are already cybernetic. Your body works as a well-oiled machine, unless it breaks. When we break down, we've got two main choices which I'm going to call the gardener approach and the engineer approach.

A gardener will graft branches, use fertilizer and chemicals, prune or train branches into new shapes to cure - basically most modern medicine today. This is a topic for another time.

An engineer will find a faulty part and either remake or replace it. An engineer looks for ways to update the design and lives for a good upgrade. The best upgrades network devices together for increased inter-operability.

There have been some problems historically with this method. Infections where flesh and foreign objects meet. Lack of control and functionality. The new parts never worked as a part of the body. That has changed. So let's get to it!

Hypoxyapatite: Used as a coating on metal surfaces, bone and flesh can bond to it like an antler bonds to the skin of a deer. This can allow the body to attach to a piece of metal as if it were a natural part of the body. A titanium bone can be as firmly linked to muscles and other bones as you like. Ports and protrusions can pass through the skin with no fear of infection.

Nervous System Control: Artificial limbs and control devices have come a long way. The C-Leg has archived well-deserved fame helping wounded warriors walk again, but a man with a C-Leg can't wiggle his foot. The sensors in the leg can guess how he wants to move but can't read his mind... yet.


The woman in this video has a device implanted in her brain (note electrode on her head) allowing her to move the arm as she wishes. Reading the brain like this is easier and more mainstream than many people think. We've advanced to the point where we can record sound by using readings from the hearing centers of the brain instead of a microphone. The electronics in the video above can be cheaper than an iPhone because of the simplicity of it (not the arm, just the mind reader thing), but the human research needed to produce it, the sterility standards needed to certify it as human safe, and the skill needed to implant it put it way beyond the reach of the common man. Lucky for us, that isn't the only way to read the mind. More on that below.

Haptic Feedback: Close your eyes and touch something for a second. Several remarkable things happen at once: your skin comes in contact with the surface; nerves at the surface send back information on the surface (texture, temperature and size). Your skin deforms as you press against it; nerves throughout your skin telling you how much pressure you are exerting. Nerves in every joint relay information on the position and angle of each joint giving your mind knowledge of your current posture (known as proprioception), letting you know the position of the object you touch relative to yourself.

This is far harder than reading the mind. Giving signals back to the brain has proved very, very difficult. Pain is easy to produce, but imagine the complexity of smooth or cold. Even our greatest success in this area, the cochlear implant, has very limited resolution. New tech has enabled us to link electrical sensors to nerves. This has been around for a while, but limited by the difficulty of  connecting the tiny nerves and the limited time before the body rejects the electrodes. Recent development has refined the lifespan and precision of the connections. Go here if you want to know where we are now.

Microbial Glucose Fuel Cell: Imagine a pace maker that never needed batteries, but drew energy from your body, just like everything else. Your blood contains glucose, refined bio-fuel destined to power your cells. Scientists have figured out how to make microbes turn this into electricity; this can be built into a tiny implantable fuel cell along a blood vessel, powering electronics in your body. Hit this link for the long explanation. Warning: contains words. Lots of words!

Artificial Muscles: Self-explanatory. The name is what they are. These have been around for ages too. Many of them use shape-memory alloys, but the field has recently undergone a revolution.

This century's miracle material: graphine. It has many  uses. Pictured here is a twisted strand of nano-muscle. It's made from nano-tubes, graphine rolled into tube shape.  

They made tiny cords of carbon nano-tubes and filled them with paraffin wax. A change in heat causes the cord to contract. The tiny yarn above can lift hundreds of thousands of times its own weight and resist even more without breaking. This can be used to make bundles of muscle fiber that act like human muscles but are. in fact, many, many times stronger. As long as there is power, they will not tire. Also, they could stop a bullet.

So, where does this all put us? I think we've come a long way. We are almost at the point of creating a perfect prosthetic.

Remember this scene from The Empire Strikes Back? Luke Skywalker's hand is almost possible. It's a fusion of engineering and flesh. Hypoxyapatite could bind it into the body, nerves wired into sensors in the hand, blood powering the artificial muscles

The problem is the cost of the project would rival the Apollo program! The tech is all experimental and costs a lot.

At the moment this is the best we can do.

So, what about optional implants? The idea is not that far-fetched. Each year hundreds of women have stuff packed in to their breasts for no other reason than appearance. I can easily imagine a market for tiny fibers planted in to an arm that give you superhuman strength. How about re-enforced bones? Maybe you'd buy if someone offered to give you a reflective layer on the back of your retina to give you night vision like a cat? One that would serve a good purpose is a system to add oxygen to the blood in case of emergency. There are tiny nano machines called respiracites that doctors are studying. The idea is they will activate if your blood-oxygen level falls too low. They could keep you alive underwater for four hours or so.

Something I'd like is to replace the canals in the inner ear. The canals are lined with tiny hairs; when you turn your head, the fluid in the ear pushes the hairs. The vibration of these hairs gives us our sense of balance. Now, the problem is if we move too much, the fluid just sloshes around and the signals get confused. Our brain can't compute that, so we just feel dizzy. Imagine if we replaced the whole thing with a couple of accelerometers. You'd have great balance and never get dizzy.

The average reaction time to an expected event is 1/10th of a second. That is how long it takes for your eyes to see it, the signal to travel to the brain, the brain to process it, the brain to send a signal, the signal to reach a limb, and the limb to move. How about replacing some of those nerves with fiber-optics? Could you increase reaction speed?

Another fun one is controlling things with your mind. There is already a commercially available product that can do that without even the need to implant it!

This is the Neurosky Mind controller. Wireless and flexible, you can get one with an SDK  and  go nuts. They are still finding uses for this thing.

At the moment, the Neurosky only has a single channel of control. This can only be used to control one thing, like dim a light or press the gas pedal. You'd need something different if you want a brake.

I'd like to see a Neurosky used with eyeball-tracking and a computer. There are trackers you can buy for a PC. Just look at an icon, and your cursor is on it. No more hand-mouse-eye, just eye. When you press a button it selects what you are focused on. The end result is a computer that is faster than one with a mouse! Now, replace the button with a Neurosky, and you have control with just looking and thinking. This has real-world applications (besides the obvious cool factor) as a tool for the handicapped.

The goal is to make it a part of you. I think the best technology is one that is so natural that you don't even notice it's there. Something so perfect that you just do the impossible without a second thought.

With this kind of tech at our disposal, I imagine it will be only a matter of time before companies start offering implants to the general public. The question is: how far do we go? Can we slow the aging process? Can we be super human? Should we?

If we go ahead with this, we risk widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. They haves would be stronger, faster, smarter with longer lives. The have-nots would not be able to compete. Already it is illegal to enhance your body and compete in sports.

At what point do we stop being human? I don't know the answer to this, or even have much of an opinion on the matter. I do look forward to the need to make the choice. The future is going to be interesting and fun.