Slashdot Mirror
Against Intellectual Property
danny writes "Australian academic and activist Brian Martin has written
a detailed paper Against intellectual property. This is an accessible presentation that covers the area quite broadly." Excellent paper - more than the typical slogans in this subject area, and well worth reading in depth.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Sure, it was a well-written paper and it raises many interesting points. But I wonder just what this guy's grounding in the real world is?
Well, he is a professor, and while people in the private sector like to sneer at academics for not having a job in "the real world", the fact is that academics generate a constant stream of intellectual property (that's their job), and so I rather think in terms of intellectual property, academia is the "real world".
You are free to keep your work secret if you wish to retain control of it. But if you publish it, you lose control of it, both practically and theoretically.
Intellectual property does not work like physical property because, unlike most physical objects, ideas reproduce themselves. Ideas don't change hands like money, they divide like bacteria.
If you create a beautiful table and give it to me, you lose a table and I gain a table. You can no longer give the table to anyone else. I can. You can no longer destroy the table. I can.
If you create a beautiful idea and tell it to me, you lose nothing and I gain an idea. Either of us can give the idea to someone else. Neither of us can destroy it.
Now of course you can argue that while you don't lose the idea itself, you lose control of it. You deserve something in return for your hard work. Fine, then sell me the idea. Keep it secret until I pay you to reveal it. But once you have revealed it, do not fool yourself that the idea still belongs to you alone. Now it belongs to both of us. If you want to carry on selling copies of your idea, you'd better make sure you charge less than I do. And as we both go around selling copies of the idea, the supply will grow exponentially and the price will drop. So make sure you charge enough for the first copy of your idea to compensate you for all your work.
I don't object to the idea that you should be able to decide whether to release your intellectual creations. They are yours. Keep them secret if you want to own them. But once you decide to release them, they are not yours any more. You cannot have them back. You should not be able to control what I do with the ideas in my head, however they got there and whoever told them to me.
Free software and other works certainly have their place, but it isn't something that should be foisted upon every author and programmer and artist.
Secrets have their place, but they aren't something that should be foisted upon every thinking being. You should not be able to force me to keep secrets for your benefit.
Here is an essay that gives some background for you. With Google you can easily track down any references that look interesting. For instance here is what Jefferson had to say on the topic. The original rationale is what he said, and by their definition it has definitely been corrupted.
For instance the record industry bullies musicians into signing, and then owns the copyrights for the rest of that musician's life. Read that description and tell me that the system has *not* been corrupted!
In short, please don't mistake your ignorance on the topic for his.
Intellectual property is an artificially granted monopoly for the purpose of encouraging people to create and give away useful ideas. Key to that concept was a limited term. Today the industry is doing everything to make that term "forever minus a day" (in Jack Valenti's words).
That is too much.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Slightly offtopic, but there is a statement here I have to take issue with:
I would counter that cooperation does not make more sense, as proven that collective societies cannot compete with competitive societies by the fall of the collectively based governments in Eastern Europe.
The fatal flaw with this reasoning is that it assumes a competitive society as the "standard," if you will, and thus fails to consider the cooperative society on its own. In other words, this is only saying that "competitive societies left unchecked beat out cooperative ones." Sure, just look at history. But the question is not about interactions between societies--it's about how a single society would work.
Of course, the whole planet suddenly turning cooperative, or even just deciding to leave cooperative societies alone, is about as likely as That Hot Place Downstairs freezing over, but I don't see that it would necessarily be impossible to have a cooperative society with a competitive "interface," so to speak, to the rest of the world.
Take that further with China, which arguably has much more access to resources than the United States, but the United States has used competition to exploit the resources available to it in a more efficient manner and thus produce an economy and standard of living for its citizens that China will not equal for decades.
I could point out that you fail to support this argument, but it is flawed anyway, since it assumes that the values of Americans apply to everyone in the world, which is simply not true. Look at all of the trade arguments going on, for example: the U.S. versus Europe on genetically modified food, or the U.S. versus developing countries on labor conditions, among others. As well, a number of Chinese people I've talked to have complained of the U.S. trying to force values on their society that they don't believe in. (Incidentally, I'm an American myself, but living overseas for the last year has been a real eye-opener on this topic. The U.S. is not the whole world, folks.)
I personally think that both competition and cooperation are needed. Competition gets you improvement on inventions faster (I'd like to use Linux and BSD as an example here if they'd quit flaming and start working), but I don't see how competition gets you a better novel. (And look at the mess competition has made of HTML.)
How about fire??
Fire is a physical phenomenon, excluded from the range of patentable subjects (which exclude "laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas". Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 185, 101 S.Ct. 1048, 1056, 67 L.Ed.2d 155, 209 USPQ 1, 7 (1981))
or any other great leap forward?
It's too bad no one patented "The Great Leap Forward", since perhaps then so many people wouldn't have been killed by China from 1958-1960.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Spoken like someone who is truly ignorant of how the world works. Sorry to be so blunt, but I cannot understand how you could even come to your conclusions if you weren't clueless.
I honestly believe that people would spend billions of dollars to help other people
Okay, name how many people you know who have billions and billions of dollars? Bill Gates, Larry Elison, Steve Jobs ... there are probably quite a few. But you know what, even if they gave up all their money to help other people, they would not be able to come up with a fraction of the drugs that have been produced by 'greedy corporations'.
People don't have billions to spend. Corporations don't have billions to freely spend. The only reason corporations can afford to spend the money on research, to spend years throwing money down the tube hoping for a breakthrough, is because that when they do make a breakthrough, they can recoup their costs through IP.
Chuck out IP, and you can kiss goodbye to any research. Kiss goodbye to reseach, and you can kiss goodbye to drugs.
It would have sucked even worse if it had been shot in James Cameron's back yard.
You mean like the Blair Witch Project? Albeit, considerable sums were spent on marketing and advertising, but good films can be made on a tight budget.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I don't think that those kids are the problem. I mean, they don't have the money anyway to buy all the CD's they want (at least, I didn't when I was a kid) I understand them. I even explained how to burn CD's to my sister, but told her not to make profit (I said she could just ask the value of the raw CD rounded up.)
What really makes me mad are collega's at work that want to borrow your CDs, burn it, copy the cover on the fancy color copier at work and think it is okay. It is *not* okay, those guys *have* the money and should pay for the goods they want.
Even tough I *know* that perhaps only 1% of the price of a CD goes into the pocket of the artist, it is my way to thank them for their work that lightens up my life.
And yes, I know...I'm using two measures for the same thing, but is the way I feel.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Despite some quite valid points the chapter in questions spends too much time perpetuating tired ideas about why no one, and especially those "lucky" enough or "favored by nature" enough to be knowledge works don't really deserve any market compensation but only what "society" (whatever that is) deems equitable to give us. After all, our work (and very existence) is dependent on so many others around us and those in preceeding generations. But this can be said of any person or group. If this line were valid it would invalidate everyone's right to compensation according to the perceived value of their work. It would say that I do not have the right to trade something I produce for something you produce freely and by mutual agreement. Instead both of our products and all our abilities are put into some common view and society (State) decides what compensation we do or do not get. This has been tried over and over again and simply does not work.
Quoted ideas from Hettinger include the notion that one's compensation is a matter of social policy and claim that receiving market value can only be a right once one has established the right of ownership. But if one own's one body and mind and time then one should have the right to trade one's energy and talents with others. The ownership is ownership of one's life and time. It is irrelevant if one is simply "lucky" or not. Life is not about some bogus notion of "fairness". Intelligence is not distributed equally. Nor is ambition. Nor dedication to a goal. Nor insight. Nature is a crap-shoot. But that fact does not mean that the successes that occur should not be rewarded. Evolution, including evolution of ideas and technology, works off of rewarding or selecting that which succeeds.
The market does not have to be "fair" in the sense of equal results or some rarefied and as yet unidentified measure of one's efforts or worthiness. To be fair the market simply needs to be free to all to trade their efforts and products for the effort and products of others.
This of course does not mean that most types of "intellectual property" are actually owned property. We need ways of trading the effort, ability, creativity, dedication and so on without tying up the products of these traits. Tying up the products reduces the useable value of the things we would like to reward and be rewarded for and actually slows down the future manifestation of these valuable qualities.
I can see the final scene now, where Jack (DiCaprio) is hanging on, about to drown...
Jack (hanging on to the edge of a filled kiddie pool): You must do me this honor, Rose. Promise me you'll survive. Promise me now Rose, no matter what happens, or how hopeless.
Rose (sitting on a plastic Fisher Price boat): I promise.
(She shivers when you see James Cameron, in the background, open up a bag of ice and dump it into the pool, making 'whoosh' noises with his mouth to simulate wind)
Jack: Never let go.
Rose: I'll never let go. I'll never let go, Jack.
(DiCaprio rolls over face-down into the kiddie pool filled with ice)
James Cameron (off-camera): Cut!... Cut I said! Just hit the red button on the HandiCam!
(In the next scene we see an older Rose walk up to the kiddie pool, reminisce about the past, and throw a candy Ring Pop into the pool. Zoom into the Ring Pop, fade to black)
I don't know about you, but I would like to see this version of Titanic. Of course, the budget would be tight, so Jack would probably be played by Austin St. John (the Red Power Ranger) and Rose by an overweight Molly Ringwald. The older Rose would probably be Cameron's mother.
It is clear we must defeat the MPAA so we can watch a $2500 Titanic starring a former Power Ranger and Molly Ringwald. Who's with me?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I know, I know, here comes the flame, but I have some comments about this paper that I have to share and many of you may not like.
First off, I'll admit that I have not read the entire treatise, and mostly because of this:
The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting.
This is the third sentence of the second paragraph. I really dislike persuasive papers that delve into opinion so early in their arguments. Granted, most persuasive arguements have their basis in opinion, but good persuasive arguements go to great lengths to give basis to that opinion. Starting out the issue with a flat and unsupported opinion is bad form. There is no logic in nor attempt to explain the premise "The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting."
I've looked down through the arguements...here's one I don't like:
It(intellectual property) fosters competitiveness over information and ideas, whereas cooperation makes much more sense.
Why does cooperation make more sense? There is no support to that premise, and therefore, the statement is not using the correct logic that is necessary to support a valid arguement.
I would counter that cooperation does not make more sense, as proven that collective societies cannot compete with competitive societies by the fall of the collectively based governments in Eastern Europe. Take that further with China, which arguably has much more access to resources than the United States, but the United States has used competition to exploit the resources available to it in a more efficient manner and thus produce an economy and standard of living for its citizens that China will not equal for decades.
The neem tree arguement was taken from a publication about intellectual piracy. I won't argue that the patenting of the products of the tree is piracy, I believe that it is, but I certainly don't believe that it is a good arguement against intellectual property. All kinds of similar piracy goes on all over the world, not the least of which is IP piracy. Take DeBeers for instance. DeBeers controls much of the diamond mining concessions on the African continent, and the peoples of the countries that give/sell those concessions to DeBeers receive very little in return for the billions of dollars worth of diamonds that DeBeers pillages from them. The same thing happens with petrochemical resources in Africa. I always hear about Western oil companies operating in Africa, but I know of no "African" oil companies.
Perhaps some of the arguements presented in this paper are good arguements for reform of IP laws, but not the condemnation of IP itself. Companies like Intel and AMD would have little incentive to innovate if not allowed to patent their chip designs. That goes for just about every other major manufacturing industry in the world. Why should Intel spend billions of dollars on research when they are forced to turn that research over to AMD in the spirit of cooperation.
This paper takes a too altruistic view of the human animal. The arguements presented here assume that humans can be converted into honest and righteous characters. The truth is, people lie, cheat, steal and murder in order to better their own ends. Keeping a grasp on intellectual property is much less of an evil that the arguement presented in this paper would have you belive.
If you want to keep your ideas secret, I support your right to do so. (Make sure you use strong crypto - once your secrets get out of the box you can't put them back in.) If you publish your ideas, then you are giving up control of those ideas. You are no longer the sole owner of those ideas - you share them with the person you told, and the people he told, and the people they told. You don't control the ideas anymore, even though you still own them in the sense that you still know them.
Say, for example, I come up with Invention X, a remarkable discovery that will benefit countless millions. However, I don't have a factory to produce the product, and I fear that without government protection, Big Company Y would steal my idea and immediately begin producing Invention X in their existing factory more efficiently than I could, thus capturing the market for my invention. Why, then, would I put in all the effort to develop and perfect Invention X, when I would never have the opportunity to recoup my costs (let alone make a profit)? I'd be better off just keeping my ideas to myself.
No, you'd be better off selling your invention to Company Y and using the profits to build your own factory to go into competition with them! (Or buy a yacht, I don't care, it's your money.) Remember, the idea is free (libre) so even though you sold a copy to them, you're still free to use your copy. They benefit because they can use their head start to get market share. You benefit because that market share's worth a lot, and they will pay you a lot for your idea. And you still get to compete with them, because there's no intellectual property system creating an artificial monopoly.
Perhaps some of the brilliant chemists and biologists currently working for Glaxo-Wellcome-SmithKline-Beecham-Pfizer-Aventis-B ayer (or whatever the drug industry is calling itself today) will have to take jobs at government-funded institutions finding cures for malaria and multi-drug-resistant TB instead of working on anti-flatulence gelcaps. What a shame that would be.
Just imagine the rate of technological development we would have if technology was available for everyone to develop, and not controled by the few who benefit from IP law.
Its not just the chords. It the whole package. the sound, the lyrics, the ideas, the clothes, the attitude. Mettalica ripped off just about every damned thing from Black Sabbath. Sure nobody ever stringed this exact same sequence of notes and words but that does not mean it's original. Where is the originality for dogs sake that warrants some absurd protection of intellectual property. I say they stole it in the first place.
War is necrophilia.
The original purpose of copyright law was not to allow authors to profit from their works, but to protect their right to be identified as the author of their works. Ironically, without IP laws other people would have no incentive to "steal" your work since they would not be able to distribute it under restrictive terms and make money from it. The only reason they need to claim that they created your work is so that they can claim the right to distribute it. Without copyright, everyone would have the right to distribute information and their incentive to claim ownership would be removed.
After all, how many people make Metallica's songs available on Napster but claim that they are their own work?
You sell poetry? You da man! Nobody buys poetry anymore except from dead people.
War is necrophilia.
"More generally, intellectual property is one more way for rich countries to extract...Surely there is no better indication that intellectual
property is primarily of value to those who are already powerful and wealthy"
The graph paraphrased above is opinion and conjecture and not fact. When I wrote papers in college, I was required to make statements based upon fact, otherwise, I would be guilty of writing a rambling thesis of my opinions and not a true research paper.
But then I read the Mr. Martin was an "academic and activist" and realized he has no real job, no real use to society and probably lives off somebody else, most likely a guilt-based handout.
This is not news or even of interest. It is one person's opinion whom somebody with Slashdot agrees with and therefore it has become an approved article.
That makes Slashdot pointless.
Fine, I'm just going to copy everything on slashdot.org, put it up on slashdott.org and I'm sure andover won't care because after all according to this yahoo you haven't contributed anything at all to the idea of Slashdot and are just exploiting me if you try to stop me. It is interesting that idiots like this always think IP is exploitative because ideas are supposedly a dime a dozen and patenting them exploits the third world -- if this were true, then why don't we see a ton of patents from third world nations. Couldn't it be that IP protection spurs the development of new ideas?
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
The original purpose of copyright law was not to allow authors to profit from their works, but to protect their right to be identified as the author of their works.
The original purpose was to prevent large publishing houses from publishing the works of authors without renumeration. If there were no copyright laws, do you think Metallica would get paid by Sony Records?
Yeah, like that will ever happen... welcome to capitalism baby!
I'd rather be pepper-sprayed by a mountie,
Sure, it was a well-written paper and it raises many interesting points. But I wonder just what this guy's grounding in the real world is?
:)
Now first, a disclaimer. I like to think I've done my part for the world of Free software. I want this to go to show that I have no qualms giving away intellectual property that I have created, but I want it to be my choice when I decide to do that. That, friends, is the real meaning of intellectual freedom.
At more than one point in my life, I survived as a writer, and to tell you the truth, it scares me to think of a world where my copyright means nothing. Stephen King just recently said it quite well, as I attempt to paraphrase him: "Please respect my copyright; as a writer, it's all I've got." Not bad, coming from a no-talent hack
Free software and other works certainly have their place, but it isn't something that should be foisted upon every author and programmer and artist.
yours,
john
I'd rather be pepper-sprayed by a mountie,
Does ANYONE honestly believe that a pharmaceutical company, which spends millions or billions of dollars in research and development to produce drugs that YOU ALL USE AND NEED would continue to do this if they were not allowed to make a return on their investment, time, and effort?
I don't think anyone is suggesting we make pharmaceuticals companies give away drugs for free, merely that other companies be allowed to sell those drugs too. Then free market effects would (presumably) take over, and drug prices would (presumably) drop.
This ignores the initial R&D investment of course. Would pharm. companies continue to invest so much if they knew they would not have exclusive rights? Perhaps not; perhaps traditional academic scientific discovery would take the lead. Would this be a bad thing? I don't really know. But I don't think it's fair to assume that scientific progress would stop.
People may argue that this would create a state of absolutely no privacy, but the idea of privacy is a fanciful dream, at best. Better that we are allowed to know exactly everything the government does and is as well -- the Fed already knows everything about us. As for marketing companies, you always have a choice as to whether or not to buy their crap.
[pink beam of light]
At least not that kind of absurd egalitarian/Marxist view of fairness, where everybody's effort is considered to be of equal worth, whether it takes them an hour to tie their shoes or they revolutionize another field every week. It's not about guaranteeing people a "fair" reward, it's about giving them an incentive.
For that, the mere possibility of a reward will suffice. How many Edison-wannabes were inspired to follow his example by seeing how rich he got from it? Do you really think that Edison getting it before Grey discouraged people from inventing?
Sure, only a few novelists get rich, or even make a living. But looking at those few who do tempts everyone, and draws out those who are talented enough to succeed.
Scientific and mathematical research works just fine without IP, so there's no IP available. While there are a fair number of poems, essays, and short stories written with no hope of reward, it's a very unusual person who spends months or years working full-time on a book without expecting to get paid for it. Factories started to hide how they were doing things, so patents were brought in to give them a reason to share their techniques with the world. It's all about society's benefit, and freeing information.
Arguments about how it's "unfair" are utterly irrelevant. I would, OTOH, love to hear arguments about how other things could work better. Suggestions of something perfectly "fair" but ridiculously unworkable only serve to illustrate my point: the two don't go together.
I can't prove it anymore than the pro-IP can prove their system works.
No, you see, the pro-IP people know their system works, from experience. What they can't prove is whether it works better than an IPless system. What the anti-IP people can't prove is that their "system" works at all. Pre-IP society was so radically different from modern society that it doesn't provide any real evidence about the effects of dropping IP. For all we know, society could collapse into chaos.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
While there is no doubt that a paper is worthless if it misstates key facts, there is no "academic procedure" which provides that any incorrect statement in a paper "invalidate[s]" the paper. That having been said, your point about AT&T/radio is well taken.
Nels
See what I've been reading.
It bothers me that people are confusing the world-changing nature of digital copying. It is not that digital copies are somehow new and fundamentally different from older methods of copying. Good point, but I think I can counter. Digital copying IS fundamentally different. 1) The quality of the copy, which you rightly attribute to being a matter of degree, is not irrelevant. When I have a somewhat-less-than-perfect copy of the music there is still an incentive for me to buy my own copy of the music. But if I have a perfect digital copy, there is no reason for me to recompensate the people who spent time and money to produce the music, ever. And I don't. 2) Digital music don't really degenerate with repeated copying--a 5th generation copy sounds as good as the 1st one. 3) Digital music is piratable on a MASS scale. We aren't talking about you making a scratchy tape recording of the new Duran Duran album for your buddy. We're talking about you making several thousands of perfect copies of the new Duran Duran album for any jerk with an Internet connection to copy.
And yet, this guy would make it economically imposible for Charles Gentile to make a cent from his poster of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Without Copyright, anyone could take one copy of the poster, which say costs $30, slap it on a large-format copier and make cheap, crappy copies that they can sell for $10. This not only destroys the original owner's income, but puts sub-standard product on the market with his name on it.
Quit trying to solve the obvious abuses of IP by destroying it all together.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2000 Andover.Net -Every Slashdot page.
I was wondering when someone around here was going to comment on the blatant communist dogma in here. The article actually had me going along with it pretty well until I hit this one.
More generally, intellectual property is one more way for rich countries to extract wealth from
poor countries. Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade
system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to
poor countries. Yet in the GATT negotiations, representatives of rich countries, especially the
US, have insisted on strengthening intellectual property rights. [3] Surely there is no better
indication that intellectual property is primarily of value to those who are already powerful and
wealthy.
Did he get that last sentence from a Lenin speech or something?
What's almost spooky here is in how some of his arguments are actually well formed and articulate. His "manifesto" side only comes out in little tid bits. cooldev, I'm sincerely glad to see that you picked up real quick on his redistribution of wealth scheme.
But there would be economic resources released: there would be more money available for other creators
That bold faced lie has sold far too many of those 3rd world countries he's apparently so concerned about into far dire straights than anything IP has ever inflicted.
Since intellectual property can be sold, it is usually the rich and powerful who benefit. The rich and powerful, it should be noted, seldom contribute much intellectual labour to the creation of new ideas.
I love this bit. "Rich and Powerful" used back to back. Ahhh, I get it now. These are the folks that are making my life rotten. Feel free to replace that phrase with "Jews", "Whites", or even "Japanese" and I think we all get a much clearer picture of the ideology here. He's gotten himself an enemy on which to focus, but only in the abstract. No, examples out of context don't count as getting specific either.
This guy is a Marxist zealot. There are a number of very good run downs on the weaknesses of our current IP structure. This is not one of them.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
This is exactly where my dilemna comes from. But RSAs patents really push the limit because they are not pure math. They are an entire construct which uses math in a previously-unthought-of way to encrypt communications. No one else thought it up (barring the claims of that group in the UK gvmt.), even though it was long needed, and public-key cryptography was quite an advance. Of course, I think their patent is overbroad -- for example, I'm not so sure patents based on elliptical curves rather than primes should have been considered under their patent, since their method did not use them. But it WAS novel, even if it based on always-present mathematical principles. I'm not even disagreeing, really, just saying why I'm ambivalent about this.
Thus, an economy based on property and ownership needs IP.
However, I believe that there are alternative economic models possible. Check out some of the local currency projects, which base their value on time of labor - these alternative economics could definately support a lack of IP.
Ithica, New York's HOUR System
Participatory Economics Project
[pink beam of light]
You are mixing several concepts:
1) Using legal means to keep information from spreading
2) Using non-legal (but not necessarily illegal) means to keep information from spreading
3) Giving away physical matter.
4) Charging money for anything at all.
5) "Must" vs "should"
Let's stick with the pharm example. Let's say DrugCo works 20 years and perfects an anti-aging cream (a real one).
No one is saying they MUST immediately hire a dozen planes so they can shower the populace with free bottles of the miracle drug, although clearly this would be nice. They can sell the physical cream and bottles it comes in.
No one is saying they MUST print the formula on the side of the bottle. Then can sell or not sell the formula all they want.
What we ARE saying is that I own the knowledge that is in my head. So if a copy of the formula makes it's way into my head (through whatever means) then I should have no legal restraints on what I can do with it (beyond the legal restraints I have on the rest of my knowledge). This might include telling other drug companies, starting my own drug company or just saying "Hm, so that's how they do it" and forgetting the whole thing.
In other words, if YOU want to turn knowledge into money by keeping the knowledge a secret, then YOU are responsible for the keeping the secret.
This same argument could have been posted to the "Napster isn't releasing their source code" story. Napster is in the business of trading secrets that have already been revealed (we call those secrets "music"). This should be perfectly legal. But Napster's secret (the source code) hasn't yet been revealed. No big deal, it will be eventually (or we will stop caring). Napster apparently sees value in keeping their secret where Metallica didn't. Fine.
--
Give us our karma back! Punish Karma Whores through meta-mod!
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
(actually Katz's Hunkapiller article wasn't too bad)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The concept of "property" has not *always* existed, much less the idea of intellectual property.
Simple counter-example, Native American Indians of North America prior to contact with the Europeans did not "own" land and did not sharply delineate what we would think of as theirs from what other people "owned" in their communities. If one wanted to get into the realm of conjecture, one could probably make some good arguments that the idea of property, with its individualistic formulation that we currently have, probably started with the agricultural revolution.
Surely, property has *not* always been around. Moreover, this kind of reasoning stinks a bit of the whole is/ought fallacy, where you argue that something is "right" on a moral dimension simply because it has historically or is currently the case.
Apologists for slavery said many of the same things. Slavery has *always* been around. It is a fact of nature that some men dominate others or what have you. Even if slavery had always been around, which I think is hard to argue convincingly, it still does not mean that it should not be abolished or allowed to continue. Its fact does not give it moral legitimacy.
Similarly, I think your arguments for intellectual property have the same problems. Intellectual property is an artifact of living in a world where everything is commodified. What do you produce? How much do you make? For people whose work are ideas, there is an obvious need to view ideas as property that can be bought and sold. If your ideas are popular or useful (read useful as adding to someone's bottom line), then you have increased status, money, or what have you.
It seems to me that a social order could and does exist where people are not valued only by how much they can make from selling their "intellectual property". Free software is one example, although it still has many of the problems associated with commodifying ideas.
In essence, intellectual property is not a public good. It is a private good that often benefits individuals other than the creator. Still, it appeals to our sense of what is right in a world where value is measured in dollars. Maybe one day we can move beyond that...
While I can see this applying to patents, I don't see how this applies to copyright. The most widely published computer programs are the freely distributable ones. Almost everyone has a copy of gzip, which can be downloaded from GNU, but also from thousands of other places too.
Human creativity dates back at least, oh, 10,000 years. Intellectual "property"(*) and its protection date back about, oh, two hundred years or so.
So does the incredible rate of technological development.
A few overrated old artists don't compare well to the incredible diversity and quality of modern IP-protected literature.
Comparisons of pre-IP productivity to modern productivity certainly don't make a case against IP.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
they would become instantly useless if he made his writing free..
Well, at the least he does his writing for free, as is made clear in this final section. I think he answers the question quite well. Book publishing can't be done without finances. He himself points out that alternative systems of gratification would be necessary after the abolishment of IPs. Since we aren't there yet, and no such systems really exist, the practicalities can't be completely ignored. People have to live, and expensive creative works would scarcely exist if they all had to be financed privately. Whether we really need Star Wars for example could be endlessly discussed. OTOH, plenty of people enjoyed watching it.
You are too busy to answer fully, but you have time to waste on slashdot. And this is an extremely important issue, but you don't have time to refute it.
Exactly right. The article was quite long and it would take considerable effort to refute the whole thing. I read pretty quick, usually reading Slashdot while waiting for stuff to build.
But I gave my little rant, and I'm pretty confident that people with the author's opinion are in the minority, so I have no reason to spend a lot of time defending the status quo.
Or, maybe you just like to sound important and sound off
Occasionally. It's fun to debate, though I prefer smaller forums.
I betcha it's not even 1%. Unless you define writer, actor, etc as only those who make a living at it. A self-fulfilling definition.
Pray tell, what does the other 99% of the population do that doesn't involve intellectual property? It's probably true that the number of people directly receiving royalties from their work are small, but we are now in a service and information based economy. The only way that works is we have laws and also general respect for intellectual property.
Farmers, hard laborors, prison guards, and bottom-chain retail workers are probably the groups least (positively) impacted by intellectual property rights. Most professionals are highly impacted. Hmmm. Some doctors might be a notable exception.
Nowhere does he say a subsidy paid from taxes. You say that scientists work for corporations, and that there is no general subsidy for scientists. Why then do you bring in a strawman of a fictional tax subsidy for creative people?
Under the Royalties section he writes: "The alternative in this case is some reorganisation of the economic system. Those few currently dependent on royalties could instead receive a salary, grant or bursary, just as most scientists do." So... scientists hired by corporations are't exactly on the side of the author. Example - Say DuPont hires chemists to build new plastics. Well, they're not exactly giving away how they do it. And, surprise, the scientists hired by our government, whether it be to build the hydrogen bomb or measure bovine methane pollution, are paid for using our tax money.
Look, I agree that a lot of recent patents are nonsense, but for the most part the laws governing IP are right and just.
Luckily, I think that most people here generally respect copy(right|left) and intellectual property. Napster users excluded, of course (unless you're only trading noncommercial songs).
Relax, man. It's not your article. :)
I must have missed that.
But I can tell that this is a highly respected publisher that is Very Concerned About Freedom. In fact, based on their home page it looks like they're mostly concerned about anarchy, anarchy, and, well... anarchy. An appropriate publisher, I guess.
Where do you get that I assume that competitive societies are the standard? I use a comparison of two societies based upon economic prowess. China has vast land and human capital resources at their disposal. Their society leans toward cooperation (this is changing though, as witnessed by the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy) as opposed to competition. The society based in the United States is the other way around. The Gross Domestic Product of China is but a fraction of that of the United States. Economically, the competitive model that the United States is based upon is more advantageous than the model that China is base upon.
As well, a number of Chinese people I've talked to have complained of the U.S. trying to force values on their society that they don't believe in.
You're trying to turn a factual arguement into a moral one. I'm not trying to say that one society's morals are better than the other, I'm using each as a point of reference based upon economics.
My arguement has nothing to do with whether or not American values are beneficial or warranted around the globe. My arguement is grounded in the circumstances that our little world has to deal with on a daily basis. Many of those circumstances are based around human nature. For instance, it is human nature to want to improve one's station in life. Take a look at Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs. Physiological and Safety needs top the list. Accumulating wealth allows humans to fulfill these needs. Accumulating vast amounts of wealth puts humans in positions where they hardly need ever worry about whether or not they are going to eat the next day.
You say I do not support my arguement that China's economy and standard of living are unequal to that of the United States. It has nothing to do with American values. You seem to be confusing economic advantage with a morality play again. Speaking in strictly economic terms, the economy of the United States allows the U.S. to be able to produce more tools and derive more productivity per capita than China. I'm not trying to say that the U.S. is better off because more people in the U.S. have a car or a television than in China. I'm trying to say that the U.S. is better off than China because we have the capability to produce laser lithography machines to improve the speed of microprocessors. Our manufacturing sector is the most advanced in the world. Machines, such as earthmovers and other infrastructure building equipment are shipped from the U.S. to everywhere in the world because the U.S. has the ability to make these tools better than anyone else.
China simply does not have the economic muscle to build a freeway system similar to that of the United States. They will eventually do it, but it will take years. China's collective style of society (not government) puts them at a competitive disadvantage when compared economically to the United States.
This premise ignores two inconvienient facts:
- The establishment of IP laws rose with the advances in technology that made it progressively easier to duplicate the original works. The primary way to protect invention before patents was to keep one's methods secret, but in these days of reverse-engineering the trade secret is far less viable than it was, say, prior to the Industrial Revolution.
- The primary way that creative workers such as composers and artists lived before IP law was to attract the attention of a rich patron. Having largely disposed of hereditary nobility (this year's U.S. Presidential election notwithstanding), the modern-day equivalent would be the wealthy businessmen and the heads of powerful NGOs. While I'm sure it would tickle Bill Gates no end to be in such a position, I doubt that this is a good thing.
It's one thing to realize that IP law has become flagrantly abused. It's another thing entirely to claim that this means that there is no use for it.Information wants to be free -- but informants want to be paid.
Persons making above a certain amount of money in the US are no longer considered citizens.
Companies or organinzations which are "For Profit" are speculators and profiteers and enemies of the people.
Those with money (kulaks) must be hunted down as they are enemies of the revolution (New Democrat Revolution of 1992). Enemies of the revolution will be dealt with accordingly through the use of regulations, government mandates, unauthorized usage of military and law enforcement personnel and news media collaboration.
The people are the State, the State is the people and the State is infalliable.
I wish you had not posted as Anonymous. Please stand behind your beliefs here.
"Does ANYONE honestly believe that a pharmaceutical company, which spends millions or billions of dollars in research and development to produce drugs that YOU ALL USE AND NEED would continue to do this if they were not allowed to make a return on their investment, time, and effort? NOT! Those anti-cancer drugs do not produce themselves. There is a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money involved in saving your lives or keeping you living and healthy. If you want drugs to treat your INEVITABLE diseases, then intellectual property protection and patents are absolutely necessary. No protection, no drugs." We don't all NEED drugs. I almost NEVER use any product of the pharmaceutical industry becuase I don't trust it, and don't like it's methods. Health is something I create for myself, not something bought with money. Anyway, there's one thing that's for sure. The internet is too good a media not to destroy most aspects of the publishing industry. Consider what it costs to print books (both in money and in environmental resources), then consider what it takes to copy that book from my machine to yours. We're seeing the distribution of music change. Next will be TV and movies, books, magazines and newspapers (which we're already seeing, I read my news online). Computers will become more common to the point where this change is even more marked. This is inevitable, and I wonder what will go next. -Joshua
For one thing, most of the larger entities involved in a film--the stars, the director, etc. DO share in the profit/failure of the film. For another thing, shares in films are often publically sold on the stock exchange, so anyone can buy into a piece of the pie. For another thing, if the guy holding the boom mike didn't pony up $10 million of his own money to risk on the making of this film, why should he get as much of the take as the producer who is risking financial ruin? The system works fine and fair the way it is, why fix it?
So you're saying society would need those medicines? But pharma companies wouldn't be able to invest a few million and recoupe it because any one can then copy it?
Society needs roads. I think you'll find that most roads are built with the taxpayer's money, and not by private companies which charge toll.
Why would medicines-development be different from road-development?
It's not my fault the US still haven't got healthcare and social benefits right....
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
In the example you gave, Intel could require its employees to sign a contract stating that if they reveal Intel's trade secrets, it can sue their arses off. This voluntary agreement to keep a secret is completely different from what IP laws impose, which is the non-voluntary requirement that you treat all published information as secret (ie, don't share it) without ever having agreed to do so.
when he published "Steal This Book".
/my/ karma)
"It's embarrassing you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List."
-- Abbie Hoffman
(quote stolen from above link to boost
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I wrote a novel, I published it myself. I put the first 13 chapters on the web ("Acts of the Apostels" at www.wetmachine.com). It took me about 4 years to write it, $12k to print a bunch of copies, and several $$k to format the book and put up my website. Right now the rest of the book isn't online anywhere. It's on a tape in my desk drawer. Call me paranoid. Most people who want the book find it easier to shell out the $$15 for a copy than to rip up another's copy and photocopy it. And "Print-on-demand" books are still a little in the future. I figure I've got a couple of years before a napster-equivalent scan-and-print for books becomes prevalent. When that happens, I'm fucked. In the meantime, would you like to buy a copy?
Ultimate Geek NanoNovel: Acts of the Apostles at www.wetmachine.com Fear the Future! Defrock the Infodruids!
There are lots of problems with IP law, which is well known, so the interesting part is the list of alternatives. Most alternatives are public funded (scientists on universities etc.). I hope we all want free competition, and since a company does not exist without some kind of ownership and something to own, a company based on IP wouldn't exist in the world described by the article.
Since the economic growth is right now in companies focusing on IP value, we would lose a lot of wealth in short term. In longer term, this real IP value requires organizations to make it work - the question is, whether these organisations would exist without some private companies showing the path...
Maybe it would work in software, because investments are pretty low, but how about more expensive technologies like IBM's harddisk technology? How would that be with no IP rights?
OK - with Linux you don't need that big harddisks, but I am happy that I have a bigger harddisk than my original 30MB Seagate ST238R...
I believe that it would be a giant failure to make a such extreme experiment as to remove IP. The communists had nice thoughts about a land called utopia, and their experients has cost so many million people their lives - I guess removing IP could do the same.
No, he couldn't sue you for quoting him. His statements are not copyrighted, and can't be because they were uttered (or typed) in a public forum.
I don't want any reform to the current IP system, because the next system will probably even be worse...
However, I like the way the GPL proves the point that copyright owners systematically privatize (under private, proprietary control) vast chunks from the public domain, and in effect, surreptitiously steal from the general public.
If we prevent such theft by GPLing any addition to the public domain, after some period of time, these copyright owners will have hardly anything to steal freely and we will simply have beaten them at their own game...
Just a proposal: Take away the ability for corporate entities to have IP and give it exclusively to people (groups are okay, but as long as those groups are explicit to specific people). Corporations have way too many rights and benefits at the cost of people. I think that's the real battle here.
[pink beam of light]
As a matter of fact, I've done film lighting for several years, and sure, it's an inherently collaborative medium, but that doesn't mean that one individual isn't ultimately in control of the final product. In the same way that other IP authors absorb the influence of previous work and rely on a social infrastructure stretching back for millennia, a director (sometimes producer, depends) absorbs and filters input from various crew departments and cast members.
In any case, the MPAA != "studio system." Without the MPAA, there wouldn't be Oscars or a rating system or CSS, but there would still be corporations (studios) established for the purpose of investing in film production.
In a world without IP nobody will be allowed to earn a living out of the product of his mind.
I stress the word "allowed". This is not about freedom. This is the very opposite of freedom. The basic idea holds in a few words: "I don't care who you are / what you do, as soon as you publish something, whatever the genre, whatever the way, you lose any kind of rights over it. It does not belong to you any more. Just forget the idea that you might even be rewarded for it - let alone make a living from it."
I especially like the way he makes his point: "IP is inane in this and that situation, therefore the very concept of IP is bullshit". Obviously Mr Martin would have done very poorly as a science teacher (for info, he seems to be a profes sor at Wollongong's faculty of arts).
But I think it is better explained by an excerpt from Mr Martin's paper:
Suppose you have written an essay or made an invention. Your intellectual work does not exist in a social vacuum. It would not have been possible without lots of earlier work - both intellectual and nonintellectual - by many other people"
This man is telling us that since Beethoven used the western musical style, and would probably not have existed would there have been no Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi, Bach and Haydn before him, Beethoven has no significance in himself - and that the very idea that he should be rewarded for his work is ridiculous.
"Pitoyable".
Thomas Miconi
The hidden assumption is that he had a clever (non obvious) idea, or invested the years of work it takes to develop, produce, and validate a treatment. Once that treatment has been validated (eg FDA approved) anyone can skip the expensive development and validation steps, if the product is not protected. There is a lot of failure along the road to a successful drug-it's not like software development where you can always make something work (not necessarily perfect, but work). In drug development, sometimes you test it in cells and it looks great; test it in mice and it looks great; test it in dogs and it looks great; test it in people and it gives them a rash. Bang! Ten years, $50,000,000 into the trashcan.
This is why he says IP benefits one at the expense of many.
IP, in some industries is a way of encouraging people to do the mostly unproductive work that leads to progress. Not many companies, or even governments, resarch foundations, etc, are willing to throw that kind of money at projects that may hit 1-in-100, if that one doesn't stand to make a 100-fold profit.
There are places where IP makes less sense. There are great arguments for free software-the utility and profit in software is what you do with it. (what good is a database without data?) But in other industries (like pharm) the end product is the valuable part. Even the pharmaceutical business does a lot of "free" work-nothing gets to market without a pile of support, published in peer-reviewed journals, and all available to anyone for use in their own work.
Why then do you bring in a strawman of a fictional tax subsidy for creative people?
This is not fictional - it already exists. In Germany at least, tax is levied on empty cassettes and fed back to the royalty organisations. In Great Britain the BBC is supported by licences and not advertising. At least it was when I lived there years ago.
How do you suggest artists earn a living? Should they all work for corporations too? BTW, as the article mentions, many scientists are (obviously) supported by taxes at universities.
The physical phenonemon exclusion would also apply to genetic code I presume.
You could always patent a process of creating a spark or hot ashes in order to cause combustion in flammable materials.
Umm, while I generally disagree with patents, I find your argument kinda silly. You are being hindered from adding a mathematical function created by someone else, because they don't want it used without their perission. Was this mathematical equasion obvious, the idea of doing what it did maby, but they patented an implementation, not the very idea of "public key". (if they had I've be very much opposed to it) seems to me that they created something very unique and put a good amount of thought into it, and deserve compensation simply for giving the world such a handly piece of software. Anyways there are other public key encryptions out there, use something else if you don't want to pay, or simply wait till September 20th. I think thats just the price we have to pay for getting this kinda inovation personally.
I am certainly not saying that. A capitalistic society should always seek to bolster other socities into either a)becoming capitalistic or b)improving their economy. Since trade is also a signficant part of our society it is important that third world countries become more than third world countries. America isn't the ideal model for capitalism, I am just saying it is by necessity of our survival that we use it. However your correct IPR's can be misused to not only damage competition (i.e. Microsoft) but also to garner incredibly high profits vs. sharing information. I support Linux, I support charity and various other things that are non-capitalistic in their origin because of the results we as a society garner from these types of programs. I am simply saying however that IPR's are a necessity in America where your product is as only as good as your development team (and to survive you must protect your investment). The important thing here is not to go to extremes. Extreme Nationalism/Capitalism (i.e. Anarcho Capitalism) or extreme altruism is idiotic in a manner. However a solid blend of both is what lends to a truely strong society and economy. Either way I am equally appalled at what some companies do and they are anti-competitive in their nature by doing so.
Arg. Regex hangover. "It seems we're no longer raising children, but breeding consumer pods. Fuck it, let Mattel and
Folks,
It appears you folks are not going to make much headway in terms of "intellectual property" in terms of copyrights and registered trademarks.
You do forget that people work long hours to create these "intellectual properties," and they do want to be rewarded for their hard work. I mean, think about it: musicians often work six to seven days a week working more than 12 hours a day for several months to complete an album, and movies can often take 2-3 years to complete from start of production to making the final print for theaters.
Besides, the world is governed by the Berne Convention on Copyrights, and most of the "First World" countries (e.g., USA, Canada, the European countries, and Japan) have strict copyright laws internally.
Unless you can overturn these national laws and the Berne Convention protocols, you can essentially forget about doing anything that can circumvent copyright laws. That's why Napster is being shut down, and it's likely that the folks who wrote DeCSS may end up in legal hot water in the courts (even if they win their current case because you know the MPAA will appeal to the higher courts).
Anyway, here in the USA the dominant political parties are strongly in favor of copyright laws, so the chances are not good that either George W. Bush or Albert Gore, Jr. will favor any laws that overturns our current copyright protections.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Fuck live performance. I'm sick of it.
At the lowest rung of the ladder, you're playing some tiny shithole, surrounded by drunks. The more popular you get, the more drunks and druggies come to see you.
At the highest level, you're trapped in the Enormodome with the sound crew, the video crew, the riggers, the steel crew, the vendors, etc. The place sounds like shit because it was designed for sports, not your fucking tender songs about loss and sorrow. After playing 60 of these concrete toilets in 70 days, you're considered lucky if you break even or there are no lawsuits pending over injured or dead concertgoers.
In between, it's just the same shit, different scale.
In the studio, however, I can come and go as I please. The assistant engineer makes a nice cup of coffee. When I sing I'm not dodging the pills and panties that the front-row sluts throw on stage. It doesn't have to sound like I'm playing inside a concrete toilet unless I want it to.
So, tell me why I have to play in front of a herd to make money?
K.
--
Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
Is this the same Brian Martin who runs Attrition.org and does a lot of security crap?
Responding to some of this out of order here.
Anti business? Sure. But RMS's slant doesn't hurt big business. It hurts the little ones.
This one is especially interesting, and is appearing to be more true than not if the stock market is any indication. For example, you've got this little ol' RedHat company that's been announcing all kinds of really exciting things going on with them. Market share, sales, profits, partnerships, all the things that should indicate positive value to a stock. Do I need to quote where they are trading at now?
On the other hand, IBM the Huge gets to announcing they're gonna put "some" of their R&D into Linux, while getting around to actually putting it on their hardware line. Folks owning IBM stock are most likely grinning too hard to read this.
Do we have any financial success stories that involve GPL thus far? It seems that there's a whole lot of Corel kinda stories that make up the bulk of the news out there concerning this.
So what's the ultimate end? A fringe group of idealistic creators who labor for the masses (who, incidentally, could care less).? More likely, a fringe group of idealistic creators who labor for each other. Hm. Sounds familiar.
I tend to think of RMS in much the same way I do libertarians. (don't try these kinds of logical leaps at home kids, we're talking deep hurting if you miss) I like a lot of the direction that the libertarians push towards. Smaller, more focused government and much of what that means. Thing is, I don't want to live in the land that they would create where things are just on the bitter edge of anarchy.
With RMS, I like the direction he's managed to get folks moving with opening up the source of the applications out there. Essentially moving towards a community of programmers working together to build an infrastructure we can all share into. I don't want to see a world where we have nothing but open source software because there is still (and I believe will remain) tremendous value in closed sourced projects as well.
Down the road I think we're going to see RMS's influence pushing the computer industry towards a direction without ever reaching his wished for destination. The same could also be said of them libertarian folks as well.
In political discussions an analogy to a pendulum often comes up. When the pendulum is pushed hard into one direction, it always ends up coming back the other way eventually. If GPL does manage to push this analogy hard enough one way, you can darn well expect it to swing back.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
This may be true, but physical property rights say more than: Don't snatch toys from other children they say Don't take toys belonging to other children even when they are not playing with them. If we follow this line of argument to its conclusion, i.e. no rights over things we are not using, we will find ourselves imagining no possessions, (to misquote John Lennon).
Technological developments have made it cheaper and easier to make copies of information....Yet there is a strong push to expand the scope of ownership of information.
It is precisely because it is getting cheaper and easier to make copies of information that there _should_ be a push to expand the scope of ownership of information While it may be virtually cost-less to copy information, there are still costs involved in creating it or discovering it. If you want to provide the information you have created or discovered for no charge, you are free to do so. But if the process of invention or discovery requires investment, the process will only take place if there is a mechanism for recouping the investment.
[S]ome Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials that have been freely available to them for centuries.
This is nonsense. The only way that the transnational corporations could force people to keep buying their seeds is to make the seeds produce sterile plants. People are free to keep using the seeds that have been freely available to them for centuries, but may choose to use the genetically modified sterile seeds if they worth the price.
Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to poor countries.
Assuming, for a minute, that it is the world trade system that is the cause of the vast inequalities between rich and poor countries, to me a much better solution appears to be for rich countries to cancel more the debt of the poorest countries.
He notes that the whole argument is built on a contradiction, namely that in order to promote the development of ideas, it is necessary to reduce people's freedom to use them. Copyrights and patents may encourage new ideas and innovations, but they also restrict others from using them freely.
Another nonsense argument. Two statements contradict each other if they cannot both be true. [T]o promote the development of ideas does not imply that you cannot reduce people's freedom to use them so there is no contradiction! It is true that copyrights and patents of new ideas restrict others from using them freely, but this is the price of having many of those new ideas. In the same way, property rights restrict people from using physical objects, but they are needed to give people the incentive to produce them. E.g. in the city in which I live there are many homeless people and empty houses yet I still support property rights over houses because otherwise there would be no incentive to build new houses and maintain existing ones.
This is one chapter of a book Information Liberation. The rest of this is also well worth reading (see my review), but unfortunately it is not online (ordering information). Danny.
Hmm.. why not? (I know it has been said already, but think it is particularly revealing) God forbid they (I know he doesn't) plan to recover some of their costs!
I do web pages.
Web pages advertising perscription drugs.
Perscription Drugs which cost billions to design.
Billions which were payed by a drug company hoping to make its money back.
Drug Companies spend billions and will make the money back by having a monopoly on the drug for its useful lifetime.
Web Pages which are copyrighted.
Goddamn! This puts me out of a job, dumbies!
Think about it: in the middle ages was there any copy protection other than that few could read or write and writing was so expensive that even Archemedis' drawings were written over to get paper? No. There were no copyrights then, and not much innovation, either.
Oh, and that GPL? It's a contract based on copyright. If you got rid of copyright, you would instantaneously be able to use ALL intelectual goods created UP TO THIS POINT. And yes, artists would still create. But they wouldn't have as much money to create with, as their creations wouldn't get them any money. So you may be killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs.
-Ben
Intellectual property has served its purpose
Clinging to it any longer can only be harmful
Ah, yes. Historical inevitability.
People have been making claims like that since the First International back in the late 19th Century.
Overbearing and largely unfounded declarations of inevitability have served their purpose (the mass murder of millions). Clinging to it any longer can only be harmful.
For more information, consult a library filled with history texts (no! do not cling dependent on any one particular text!)
Almost -- code which is merely disclosed is not necessarily open source. For a long time, Qt was one of the more prominent examples of this.
Disclosed source certainly can be useful, but it is not the same as open source. (Or free software, the term I actually prefer.)
You're a suburbanite.
Correct. They either created under contract to some rich aristocrat (who became owner of the work), were dilettantes or otherwise rich themselves, or lived in a time less dominated with money.
Does not work in a non-feudalistic economy as the current. If I could spend two months writing a novel or two months flipping burgers, which would enable me to pay rent and food if the monetary comensation for the novel would be $0?
Should Einstein have patented relativity? Or copyrighted it?
Ridiculous: you cannot copyright an idea, but Einstein had the copyright to his papers on relativity. Nor can you patent ideas as such, just physical expressions of them.
As another poster noted, as long as we have an economy based on profit and income, you need IP in order to have "intangibles" (IP) produced in some quantity, otherwise only those who gain money "automatically" (interest on large fortunes, automated stock trading) will have the time necessary.
The alternative is for the "State" to provide everyone with what they need to live, aka. communism. (However, as history shows, communism mutates in few months into a feudalistic system where the politicans and administrators become the upper class. Everyone else lose.)
Lets back up and think for a minute...
What makes corporations work ?
They provide services
They provide goods
They have IP
No corporation has ever created IP out of thin air. IP is created as a result of the employees (serfs) working for it.
By law corporations are treated as 'entities' which have many of the same rights and privledges as humanistic persons. Except for:
(a) they don't die (in the traditional sense)
(b) they can merge
Those two items have contributed to the existing situation (or problem). Witness the Time-Warner/TBS/AOL merger. No humanistic person could ever have garnered that much IP from their own creative works. Not the Beatles, nor John Wayne.
Too much IP is being concentrated in too few corporate entities. Those who control it, make decisions based on 'stock holder ROI', rather than the customers interests.
As the world grows in population, we need to move more towards an individual centric IP ownership paradigm. If 1000 people work on the creation of a movie, than 1000 people should share in the IP, maybe not equally, but they should all share.
quoting from J. Buffet:
It ain't about the talent, it ain't about the skill
It's all about the silly stupid horeshit deal
- just another cosmic ray -
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
I'm just happy that research scientists still have some moral against patenting, or at least against abusing the patents. What if Cooley and Tukey had patented their fast Fourier transform and sold the rights to a single company? (FFT stands at the center of signal processing, encompassing everything from satellite communications to medical imaging, from acoustics to spectroscopy...) Patenting is fundamentally an artificial impediment of free competition and natural selection of products. It may allow inferior products to dominate and is a waste of resources (especially in small companies). Without patents, technology products would be forced to compete more with qualities like usability, aesthetics or environmental issues (which applies to traditional goods like clothes and food). Of course there are also other views and patent laws can't simply be nuked in practise, but in my opinion at least 1. "The idea behind patents is that the fundamentals of an invention are made public while the inventor for a limited time has the exclusive right to make, use or sell the invention" Publicity of the information is the principle that somewhat justifies patenting, but it can be questioned, because the patents are often made as ambiguous and illegible as possible. This has become an art in itself and the patent engineers are getting better and better in it. The patent application should definately not be accepted until it is made as plain and simple as possible and complies to a certain set of style rules. It should be considered as a scientific publication among others. Going through obfuscated patents consumes a lot of resources but is necessary when planning product development. 2. The life span of patents should be shortened, as well as the time during which the information must be applied in a commercial product. 3. Too all-encompassing patents should not be possible. I don't know how, perhaps the patent holder should have the exclusive right to use the invention only in the kind of applied products explicitly specified in the patent application? Furthermore, the maximum number of the specified products could be restricted. This would allow the patent holder to release his/her killer product but would encourage others to think of new uses for the invention.
Martin explains why its not at the end of the chapter that is online
No he doesn't. He mentions that it's a dilemna, then he plugs Freedom Press, but he doesn't provide any explanation. He gives guidelines for determining if copying is undermining Freedom Press, and he reccomends negotiations. He even says that negotiations will be important in a post intellectual property society, completely sidestepping the issue that whereas they are legally necessary as long as he holds a copyright, they would become instantly useless if he made his writing free.
Someone asked what would happen if, in painting, perspective had been copyrighted. I agree, it's ridiculas to allow a copyright on perspective. However, a painting using perspective can be copyrighted.
Music can be thought about in the same way. A I-IV-V chord progression -- commonly used -- should not be copyrightable, however a song that uses that chord progression yet creates a distinct melody should be.
As an occasional wanna-be fiction/non-fiction writer, and a person who writes software, I highly disagree with the idea that a piece of fiction I produce or the source to software I write should not be something I own. I shouldn't reap the rewards of my labor just because I lose nothing by selling a copy of my program? If I spend five or six hundred hours writing a piece of software, why shouldn't I be compensated? And why shouldn't that compensation by contingent upon how many people choose to use my software? Just as importantly, the time it takes to write a particular piece of software doesn't include the thousands of hours of training I had (in writing other software, in reading, in business, in college, etc.) that allowed me to write that software in whatever time it took. Without that training, the development time may well have been much longer.
No, I believe in compensation for one's work.
Sean.
Chances are you will be working for some company when you work on this. Chances are you signed an agreement with them that if you come up with anything, anything at all and they own it. Chances are they will be compensated unfairly and you will see a raise that is just enough to buy an extra cup of coffee in the morning. It won't be your product, it will be theirs.
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
An argument could be made that a legal system that makes it possible to produce and profit from a movie with a $200 million budget is not socially beneficial. Does society need $200 million movies?
What about drugs, something with more obvious social benefits? It costs a huge amount of money to develop, test and get approval for modern drugs.
What will the drug industry do when someone invents a cheap molecular synthesizer? Do you want 100 grams of the latest antibiotic (or cocaine)? Just type in the chemical formula and come back in an hour.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I don't think that there is any reason that we have to view online distribution of MP3s as a complete business model for musicians. First of all, at the moment they are operating in a world where there are established distribution channels that nearly everyone is aware of. If you want a CD, go to the store or order it online. What percentage of the music-buying public knows that MP3.com is out there? My parents probably don't.
Second, why should musicians ever give up actually playing in front of audiences? I love live music. One of the most interesting performances I have ever heard was a little-known band jamming with a friend of mine after a show one night. Three very talented guitarists doing things with the music that required all three of them. It wouldn't have happened in a studio. Okay, few musicians make a living performing live, but it is another part of the equation.
What I'm getting at here is that the fact that nobody is making a living via MP3.com doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place. Are there musicians who can point out how their audience has grown through their exposure there? Are they making money at it? Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when somebody like MP3.com sponsors webcasts for obscure groups.
I look at music online from a very biased perspective. I have non-mainstream tastes (unusual celtic bands, filk, and some even less mainstream stuff). I look at the net as a way to build audiences big enough for the musicians I like to continue performing and recording. I can't get to their performances, and the record stores don't carry their CDs. This is about, among other things, the survival of diversity.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I don't think it's fair to assume that scientific progress would stop.
Not stop, just slow down. If any pharmaceutical company could legally produce any drug, ignoring current intellectual property, all incentive to create new drugs is gone. Why spend millions developing new drugs when you can just manufacture existing drugs instead? Whoever goes first always loses, because they spend big bucks to get something that everybody else then gets for free. Like you said, a free market effect would kick in, and pretty soon you would have a couple of very big pharmaceutical companies, conspiring and price-fixing to keep a healthy profit margin and not even considering doing any R&D in any field other than marketing.
One of the ideas is that you say "I will release this book when fans have donated X dollars", with the book having already been written and given to a trusted party. That way once the monetary goal is reached the book is released, and the author doesn't need to worry about people copying it because he has already gotten the money he wanted. He will in fact want to have people copy it, so that his work would become more popular and that there would be more demand for his next work.
This issue is at the center of what is wrong with our world. Think for a second about how far ahead we would be if we had no intellectual property. Despite the fact that the inventors would have nobonus other than being able to tell people what they have done, it will distract by doing this people who only want money, and are instead on the marketing side of things from even trying to invent something, as other people will come up with better products. It will also make inventors of items not be able to retire off the earnings of their invention but will keep them as constructive members of society. Imagine how far we would be behind if George Selden's patent on car engines meant that we had to pay royalties to him every time we bought a car, and imagine how far ahead we would be if the oil companies hadnt bought out the idea for tyres that dont wear and not developed it. The simple aim of society as it is today is to make money, not advance society further, and that is where our whole system of govevernment lets us down.
Here's how you do it:
http://www.infoshop.org/aip.html
http://www.freenation.org/fnf/b/intprop.htm
-- Your Komrade, Quincy
Why do you position Linus so high? If he was so holly as you want others to be, he would have to give all his intellectual works for free. It is absolutely no truth. Some geeks say: musicians have no right to get a penny for their music files. They are completely wrong and speak as thieves. Only thieves decide about rights of other people and manipulate them for their own profit. No matter if this is money profit or entertaining profit or any other kind of profits. No matter if a thief grabs a buck from your pocket or commands you to work for him for free. You have profit from listening to music. Musicians, writers etc. do not want to become your slaves. It is you who want to establish new kind of slavery by new technological means. If you want to grab musicians's right to decide themselves about price of their works, you grab one of very basic rights from all. It is very bad starting point leading to grabbing any other right from anybody. Seems like you do not think of you at all. If you take part in this grabbing, one day somebody comes and take any of your rights from you. Another mistaken point - no geek can live from programming free software only for whole his life. But you say that IP is bad, that intellectual work must not be paid. How does it come geeks take money for their programming? Are geeks so hypocritic? Do not try to use sofistics kinda "they do it for rich people and every rich person must pay". It would be terrible lie - because if a poor man would like a geek to make a code for him, 99,9% of geeks would not move their finger for free. Geeks know value of their time very well. How a time can have a value? Is it a property? Is it the geeks's property? Do they sell it? Yes, they do. All of us do it. If you know to fulfill time with quality that you and others make happy, it is perfect. But it is only you who can decide about price of what you offer. No other man can take this right from you. If he/she does, he/she is thief and/or slaver. New technologies are about destruction of old systems of production, presentation and distribution of anything, now mainly of works that can be distributed as electronic data. Internet distribution of music is about destruction of RIAA and greedy bosses of old recording industry. It is OK to destroy world of parasites, where writers and musicians have nearly no rights. Bosses took their rights from them. And what now? Music listeners are the next, new, much bigger mass that is going to take all rights from musicians? Will they be even more dangerous and evil than recording bosses? New systems of distribution must share not only files but also must think about sources. Without them not only musicians or writers could live and develop its arts, but there also could not start all necessary new infrastructures - it will have absolutely no sources. Musicians themselves are very frustrated from mass stealing of their works. They see no future thanks to that. Do they really have new cruel bosses - Internet thieves? Thieves that shout about freedom for all - except of people that are robbed by them (total hypocracy). Freedom needs SOURCES for its living - NOT ROBBING! I see no reason for not paying 5 cents for a song I like. And I will never agree with stealing a song. If 1 million people pay 5 cents for a song it gives $50,000. If there exist billions of songs on the Net worldwide how many of them can wonder about 1 million downloads? But their writers and interpreters will hope to get at least something to see if they can continue. Yes, there would travel billions of dollars being paid in micropayments. But big part of it could be invested into infrastructers and development of further new ways of presentation and distribution. Also electronic industry would get new impulses to come with new devices. You can not make people free without necessary conditions for their development (by making them as poorest as possible). It is no freedom. It is ultrabossism, way right to death. If you are going to continue stealing you are going to destroy conditions for development. I have read some suggestions that musicians could get money for their living in some other ways, eg. selling T-shirts, dishes, sell hamburgers etc. New stalinists also allow performances in clubs to be paid. What a good advice to others if advisors themselves would never do anything like that for whole their lives. I say NO! to that all. Let the artist decide themselves about how they want to make and offer their music. Let people decide themselves how they want to share what they know and like to do. Geeks making free software in their free time are not the only ones in the world that do something for free - not at all! If you manipulate and steal in names of whatever ideological constructions, you kill freedom and development.
Trying to make chaos pieces meaningful. The more meaningfullness I get, the more new chaos appears.
But guess what, whatever you create belongs to the company that you work for, so you will not be well compensated. You will probably get the recognition you desire, but not the huge monetary gain you want. Why do I say this? Because thats how the world works. You will settle for making 200K, 300K from 125K a year. Alot of people do take this small compensation while the company makes millions, sometimes even billions for their discoveries. You might argue that you can break away from the company and then sale it on the market. But mostly this doesn't work, because the work that lead you up to your discovery will most undoubtedly show up in things you have done for the company. For example, I left a pretty nice company that designs software for fortune 500 companies. To make a long story short, I left that company to work at another company that was working on a project almost similar to what Microsoft is doing right now with .NET. At any rate, I got an phone call from my old boss saying stuff about intellectual property, and if I am working on anything similar to what I did for NASA that I could be walking the line desaster. I think my old boss was more concerned for me than anything else, but you never know what management has under their sleeves.
Intellectual property is a very complicated issue. I hope it is cleared up sometime soon...
I don't know what life is, but no one gets out alive...N
Horse manure. I'm sorry, but this paper is just so loaded with BS I can barely dissect it properly. Aside from the usual knee-jerk nonsense ("Third World Exploitation" is such a wonderfully convenient buzzword, even if you don't really give a damn about the Third World except in as far as it serves your arguments), it's littered with an amazing number of impossible generalities. Arguing against intellectual property is like arguing against gravity or sunlight. People have always had ideas; it's just that we've recently begun to acknowledge how they can be recognized and traced back to their creator. What's next? I don't have the right to sign my posts?
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
While you admit that there is only room for a few competitors in the chip manufacturing business, you say that a reformation of IP law would splinter the market into many different competitors. This is nonsense. A reformation of IP law would not change the cost of a fab plant.
I think you are also confusing trade secrets with publicly available information which is nevertheless considered to be some entity's intellectual property. I am not saying that Intel should be required to reveal its latest R&D secrets to its competitors. I am saying that Intel's competitors have a right to use whatever information they can gain by reverse engineering Intel's publically available products. The lead time from coming up with a viable chip design (whether by R&D or by reverse engineering) to selling cheap, reliable chips based on that design is substantial - this lead time would give Intel its competitive edge in a market undistorted by IP restrictions. As long as that edge exists there will be innovation in the semiconductor industry.
1) You are assuming that because it is true in the current situation that if Intel were to go to sleep for 6 months, they would get clobbered by the likes of AMD, that it must also be true that any technology older than 6 months is worthless. This simply isn't the case. Hence I see serious flaws in that it never occurs to you that perhaps Intel makes technological investments that extend beyond your 6 month window. There are numerous situations where this is the case!
2) Intel is a large company. But, without decent IP protection, who is to say the larger and better capitalized company couldn't come along and rape them? I could see someone like Microsoft finding it perhaps advantageous to prevent Intel from developing non-PC chips that might turn the market against. They may even be willing to do it at a loss!
This seems largely a baseless assertion to me. If you don't know what it costs you really can't say this. If you don't know the technology, you really can't say this. Furthermore, merely having an "edge" is not enough. It goes back to risk and reward. If you cut into an already thin market, by "liberating" technology, you may be cutting the market off at the head. That ~2% may just be enough to make the industry totally unprofitable for ANY innovator, thereby draining any and all serious R&D dollars.
As to the technological side of things, there are many innovations which are visible in the product and relatively easy to mimick (certainly cheaper than doing the R&D yourself). There are many issues in product design, where you'll look at the product and say "duh, that's obvious". But 3 months before you couldn't do it no matter how hard you tried. Even if you spent most of that time and effort spinning your wheels, that doesn't mean the competition didn't either. They took risk. You will curb the reward by allowing all out copying.
As for your arguments against IP, I think you overstate your case, whether or not you know it. There is more than one way to skin a rabbit. In many industries, simply proving that a thing can be done, or the creation of a market is sufficient to bring about further innovation. So while that patent may grant exclusive use to the holder, it does not, in reality offer the protection it claims, nor does it hold back meaningfull progress. Which is another very important reason why it can be terribly important to maximize profits while possible.
Intel is just ONE company in ONE section of ONE industry. There are hundreds of vastly different, but equally tricky, industries. But I've yet to hear you give an accurate depiction of even one.....
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Both Shakespeare and Mozart created their art primarily because they knew they were going to get paid. Are you suggesting that we go back to the patron system?
(*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's gold is to gold
Try explaining this to Otis, your new cell-mate for the next 5 years. Regardless of whether you think IP should exist or not, the consequences for violating its mandates are very, very real. IP is no more illusory than the notion of "human rights."
Good point. But the fact that Intel benefits in some way from its IP does not prove that the semiconductor industry could not survive deregulation of IP, which is the leap of reasoning that you seem to be making. (By deregulation I mean that information sharing should be a matter of private contract.)
My aim in pursuing the previous poster's point about Intel and AMD was not to prove that nothing would change if IP were deregulated, but to deflate the argument that IP provides the only incentive to innovate. This argument is based on the false assumption that any product can be copied at a cost which is negligible compared to the cost of innovation, and in a time frame which is negligible compared to the lifetime of the product. I was simply pointing out that in the real world reverse-engineering is neither free nor instant, which leaves innovators with the possibility of making a profit. Maybe not the same profit that they can make today, and as you say it is possible that margins would be reduced to the point where innovation is not economical. However we can only speculate about the amount of change which would be caused.
2) Intel is a large company. But, without decent IP protection, who is to say the larger and better capitalized company couldn't come along and rape them? I could see someone like Microsoft finding it perhaps advantageous to prevent Intel from developing non-PC chips that might turn the market against. They may even be willing to do it at a loss!
This makes no sense. How could Microsoft force Intel to stop development of a particular product? Only through a hostile takeover. That scenario is equally (un)likely today, but with the current IP laws Intel's new owner would also own Intel's IP, and would be able to stop anyone from developing the product by refusing patent licenses. If reverse engineering were legal, this would not be possible - another company could continue development based on Intel's most recently released product. So you have provided another argument in favour of allowing reverse-engineering.
In many industries, simply proving that a thing can be done, or the creation of a market is sufficient to bring about further innovation. So while that patent may grant exclusive use to the holder, it does not, in reality offer the protection it claims, nor does it hold back meaningfull progress.
I'm glad that we agree that neither innovation nor profitability is necessarily dependent on intellectual property. I'm sure we will continue to disagree on whether the semiconductor industry is a case in point.
This guy starts by saying that the original reason for patents/copyright was okay, but that governments having the power to grant this is totally corrupting so - let's throw it all out, there is no real justification for it.
That is so much nonsense.
If you were to argue that period of a patent or copyright should be limited in this day of the internet..okay. If you argue that the DMCA takes copyright into areas it should never have been extended...okay. But throwing the whole system out is even more rediculous than the problem this paper is arguing about!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
"Does ANYONE honestly believe that a pharmaceutical company, which spends millions or billions of dollars in research and development to produce drugs that YOU ALL USE AND NEED would continue to do this if they were not allowed to make a return on their investment, time, and effort?"
Just thought I'd mention that the big drug companies spend significantly more on marketing than they do on research.
Ever seen the crap that doctors get? Bloody drug companies aren't at all shy about spending tens of dollars *per doctor per promotional sample* to buy their way onto the prescription pad.
It ain't nothing to do with the efficacy of the drugs, nor even their appropriate use: it's about buying the doctor.
It's pretty scary. Next time the doctor prescribes something outside the tried-and-true, one's gotta wonder: is it because this drug really is the best solution... or is it because PharmaGlakCo bought him a hooker at the last convention?
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Yes, I agree that IP isn't the only means by which the innovator can be rewarded in every case. However, in most situations, it is terribly necessary. Regardless, IP is the status quo, and there are few, to no, empirical counter-examples of success without it. Every nation which has appropriated IP has fallen behind.
While I'm well aware that Linux, Apache, Perl, and a couple other IP-less products have enjoyed relative success, I don't view them as even approaching proof of IP-free environment. They
are orders of magnitude less involved than the likes of Intel's microprocessors. They truely aren't breaking any new ground. In short, the bulk of the development is handled by people working in their part time--the product of which has never terribly impressed me.
The bottom line is that the onus lies on you to prove an IP-less environment is viable, let alone desirable. You have yet to even do this theoretically. I, on the other hand, have first have knowledge of some important industries (i.e., biotech, medical devices, etc.) where the obliteration of IP as you specified would cause great harm. If the most you can give is an abstract argument with flaws for one industry, it really is not terribly realistic of you to expect me to agree.
This comes down to numbers, not just ideas. Pull out a calculator and do the math.
While Big Media has worked on extending the length of copyrights and various access-control methods, Microsoft has apparently been a prime mover behind UTICA, so they're not blameless either.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I find it ironic that the book from which the chapter is taken is only available from book sellers (albeit freedom oriented ones) for a fee, and not "freely" distributable over the web.
Otherwise there will be no incentive for people to begin trying to play music, write books and stuff like that. If there was no IP protection, how many of you think that small industries like the comic book industry would survive?
I have no problem with strong IP laws if they successfully remove the publisher/record label from the picture and the creator is the one reaping the rewards.
I never met an idea that wanted to be free.....
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Eric Hoffer's observation that "Given freedom of choice most people choose to be like everyone else." is a valid observation. Robert Showalter observed that creators and inventors of any type are people who are different, if they were like everyone else they would do things the way that everyone else does them; they wouldn't feel any need to do things differently.
In my opinion the "Social Vacuum" argument is a bad argument. It sounds good on the surface, but if you examine it closely you will realize that it is just another case of a majority trying to exploit a minority; in this case the non creative, conformist, majority trying to exploit the work of the creative minority while simultaneously trying to make the minority feel guilty for being creative. If ever an intellectual argument could be characterized as a "Pile of Crap" this one qualifies.
There are many points to criticize in this article/chapter. This is not one of them. Does this sound better to you?: "To each according to his ability to take, from each according to his weakness." Western states appropriating knowledge that has been developed over time by poor cultures, then turning around and charging the countries they appropriated that knowledge from is theft, pure and simple, especially when the rules are set by the nations doing the taking.
The "few hundred" figure is pretty questionable even if you don't count all the indirect beneficiaries of IP laws.
This argument is refuted early on, but I guess you skipped that part. Let me refresh your memory:
And your wrap-up is acknowledged by the author himself as the most convincing argument for intellectual property.
I'm not convinced by the argument to abolish all IP laws, but in a society where these sorts of questions are routinely determined more by a comprompise between extreme factions rather than a true meeting of the minds, I'd read this piece as more a rhetorical argument in opposition to, for instance, those who'd extend patent protection to business models or basketball moves than an earnest manifesto. In that light, it gives one something to think about rather than just something to reflexively rebut.
In mathematics priori is always argured over and rightly so. Due credit is and should always be rightly given. People need access to the 'real Mccoy' Ideas and expressions are easily mis-interpreted. As to ownership, it is riduculous to say anyone owns it. I know that a fired cannon will follow a parabolic course. I will use this formula, that was taught to me, in high school. And if someone should say to me 'I own that idea and you can not use it', then I know where to point the cannon at to verify the the acuracy of my, ahh the formula.
Open Source, better than C++ for code reuse.
This guy is a Marxist zealot. There are a number of very good run downs on the weaknesses of our current IP structure. This is not one of them.
The whole analysis is written in typical socialist fashion. Pick on abuses of the current system, of which there are many; then conflate the abuses, which favor an easy hate-group, with the legitimate uses, to invalidate the legitimate uses of the system. There are plenty of changes that should be made to the IP system in the US and other countries, and there are many abuses to correct. There are even sound arguments that IP in general is detrimental. But "Intellectual Property allows people to get rich and I don't like that." is not a legitimate argument against IP, and never has been.
So when is slashdot going to post a link to a capitalist analysis of what's wrong with our current system of IP?
Can you imaging how bad off the world if people created for love rather than money. Great artists would be forced to strive to achieve a higher standard in every work created or be pushed to the sidelines when a greater artist comes along.
Bah...
I ask every advocate of intellictual property this -- "What if painting had been patented, or perspective, or any other great leap forward? How about fire??"
We live in a world evolving at an ever increasing pace. Why should we try to stop progress in the name of profit for the few?
Sorry to rant. It's late. Good night.
Mmmmmm.... Well this is my sig.
This is why I have nothing but respect and admiration for Linus Torvald and people like him.
Your attitude it contemptible and fills me with disgust.
I honestly believe that people would spend billions of dollars to help other people. Companies would not. I believe that companies would kill billions of people, if they could make a return on their investment. Don't you think creating diseases would be more profitable? You could inoculate the select few.
Your IP is worth nothing to me. Maybe you could copywrong it and pull in a few pennies. I would rather reward the generous.
This is called "communism." You are not just arguing for IP reform, you are arguing for a fundamental reform of our entire economic system at a basic level.
Every molecule in my mind belongs to me. If I happen to hear you sing a song, the song enters my mind, the version therein belongs to me. I own every magnetic bit in my computer. I own every scrap of paper in my house. If you don't want other people to own information that you yourself own, don't give it to them. No alternative to this will be enforceable by government or any other armed mob in perpetuity.
1. It is true that IP is profitable mostly to large business. This means that one might write thousand articles, but nothing will change. The police will just come and arrest you. You have no rights. You have absolutely no rights. Remember, you even is unable to elect the leader that you want. The only way to reach progress this way is to slowly dissolve the issue. Napster, Open source, Gnutella, ... The primary goal is to publish anything that has not been protected by the copyright yet.
2. Those corporations have the self-contradicting demand - the ability to copy things easily and to make a profit out of this copying. Everyone legally allowed to make copies of Leonardo da Vinci works. Nobody succeeded yet. Even Universal Pictures. This is in human nature - willing to get money for nothing. Large companies can achieve this for a limited time.
3. And the most important to my mind: the state is not the same thing as the community. Actually, the state is against the community. So, if there are things that naturally belongs to the community - like free software - do not let the state to own them. This is the word against Marxism.
Although publishing books in PDF/PS format rarely seems to affect sales of dead tree format significantly. I wouldn't be surprised if Katz would agree to release free online versions.
What I think many people don't realize is that when you ask for abolishment of IP laws, you are asking for too much of a change. IP laws are so imbedded in our society that they can not just be got rid of. Go for a little change, like getting people to just realize some of the problems with IP laws, but do not say that they are completely bad or the average Joe will space out.
The article brings up some great points; I personally think the best one mentioned is the piracy. With the super-techno-information-superhighway Internet web thing that many people are just starting to have access to, piracy is becoming a bigger factor, just look at Napster. People are realizing that if they are not going to have any other way to get it, because of budget, the company isn't really hurt... if the person really would not have bought the CD/game/movie.
Like it or not, IP laws are going to be here for a while, just because they are so deep in society. Until lots of normal people start to think that they are bad (and it is starting, many people feel that the patenting of the genome is horrid) we'll just have to wait it out.
Moderators! View at -1, Newest first w/o threads, ignore scores!
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
Scottish newspaper, The Shetland Times, went to court to stop an online news service from making a hypertext link to its web site. If hypertext links made without permission were made illegal, this would undermine the World Wide Web
I remember this example from when it was going around when it happened. The crucial point IIRC(which was ommitted from the chapter) is that it was not the fact that it had been linked that was the problem, it was the fact that it had been linked such that it appeared within the frames of another site and was made to appear as if it was their content. In essense the other site was claiming ownership of work which had been produced by the Shetland Times.
This comes to the crux of my feelings on copyright. As well as my computer work I am also a short story writer. I have no objections to people having copies of my work and distributing them, I distribute most of my stuff for free as it's just an interest for me and not a source of income. What I do object to and would invoke the law to prevent is someone else claiming ownership of something I have written or charging for it's distribution.
I suppose you could describe it as 'Freework', you can copy and distribute it so long as you don't charge for it or claim that it's anything but my work.
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
You know... I can't think of a corporation when I read this... none are coming to mind... *coughmicrosoftcough*.
Although it's rumoured that the major oil companies are cartelling again...
I'd rather be pepper-sprayed by a mountie,
The possibility of owning ideas is, uncontroversially I think, created by the action of government. For that reason, thoughtful capitalists seem much divided on the subject. Some are more attached to what's become traditional in the marketplace, and are inclined to label strident libertarians like ESR "communists". Others see IP as government again tampering with the natural order of things, obscuring that great Platonic Form of the One True Market.
I'm being a bit facetious, of course... but I hear bunches of people taking your position. Of course, that's in geek spots like Slashdot. In society at large, capitalists are indeed a small portion of the anti-IP folks, who are themselves a tiny fraction of the statisically insignificant group of people that cares about IP.
But cheer up. I agree with you. :-)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
This article is written by a communist. If you read carefully you will see that he is against all property and wants to make everyone equal and have creative people work for a measly salary so that non-creative people can benefit and claim ownership without reimbursing the creator.
A system wherein only the people who own the factories and the land have any money or power. Yeah. Stop and think about how great it was, before unions (I say this because destroying copyright would drop the value of "intellectual labor" to an astonishing degree), before all of those copyright systems were in place.
Does copyright suffer abuse? Hell yes. Can I make a perfect analogy between tangible property and intellectual property? Well, no. So what? Who said that the Noosphere had to be exactly like meatspace?
The paper seems to say, "Intellectual property is hard and confusing, must abolish." This is the Neaderthal approach. No, what happens is we need to think harder. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" (I'm misquoting, nine points? Nine points out of ten? Do I get a gold star?) worked great for a while. It doesn't extend perfectly into the realm of ideas. So what? Who says it has to? It just means we'll have to come up with new concepts, rather than extending old concepts to the point of idiocy.
If you abolish intellectual property, you will go back to the factories. The factories may look like MIDI studios for musicians, who will now be no more than jingle-writers for commercials. The factories may look like data entry for creative writers, who will be reduced to the status of ad copy and Hallmark cards, or possibly romance novels. The programmer will now be a data entry guy, just entering code, and his factory will look like a Unix workstation bought by the guy he writes drivers for. The artists will be doing work in studios in giant rows to catch the morning sun, and will be called "graphic designers." Back to minimum wage, guys.
Our economy is moving more and more towards the production of intellectual goods, not tangible ones. The service sector is huge.
Many artists work for more than just recognition, and, let us not forget that recognition and compensation frequently go hand-in-hand. Bill Gates is famous (or infamous) partly due to the amount of money he possesses. Demanding that someone give up their time for free (which is what you are doing if you tell people to do intellectual work sans monetary reward) is like saying, "Hey, come mow my lawn!"
No longer will your artists and programmers have any independence. We will all require patrons and corporations to back us from largesse. We will paint flattering pictures of moneyed families. We will compose pop tunes about how great it is to use Microsoft (or RedHat, you never know). We will ghostwrite biographies of Linus Torvalds, Courtney Love, and George Bush. We will program what we are told to program, for whom, when we are told to do it. We will do it cheaply, because our work has no intrinsic value, and we will enjoy our minimum wage. We will not sing, paint, write, or program what is on our minds, because the people who pay for the studios, the canvases, the printing, and the servers may not agree with us.
"Destroy a work of corporate art," said Tyler Derden. If we take away intellectual property, that will be the future: corporate art. Corporate programming. No more little guys in basements making the bills on a dream.
Now, stop slacking and Slashdotting, back to your factories!
associating IP with the exploitation of the 3rd World? Pretty big logical leap.
Not a big leap at all. As he points out in the text, companies have patented the genetic make-up of several types of base food used in by farmers world-wide, thereby forcing the farmers to pay the company if they want to keep using the grains they have used for generations.
If you came up with a treatment regimen that would reverse or halt aging you would be worshipped and showered with gifts for the rest of your life regardless of IP law.
Test 1 2 3 4
Why are copyrights valid for a period after the death of the author? Answer: to remove the economic incentive for murder! If copyrights expired with the death of the author there could be a monetary reason to kill an author; to harm a competitor in the publishing business by destroying the copyright on a work.
Does that mean he favors anti-intellectual property?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
See this "Roundtable" on copright, from the archives of The Atlantic Monthly. John Perry Barlow and Lawrence Lessig are among the participants.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
I certainly think that IP law needs a lot of rewriting (for example, why should copyrights last longer than patents? why aren't patent terms tweaked from year to year?), but I don't think it should be completely abolished.
Remember, the main purpose of patent law is to get people to disclose their designs, similar to opening your source code. Without any patent law, manufacturers will keep a lot more things secret.
I think we can move toward a system where IP is not necessary, such as Mass Market Busking, but we should let people demonstrate that the system works without it before we dump it.
If we demonstrate that we can support the efforts of producers without them using IP to force us to pay them, we shouldn't have any trouble getting rid of IP. If we can't demonstrate it, then maybe it's not such a good idea to drop IP.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
They'll get their crumbs after we get our Nike's.
You make it sound as if, every week, God sent a giant pie down to the surface of the Earth with the intention that everyone share equally in the pie, and the first world greedily consumed 95% of it and then left some crumbs over for the 3rd World. This is not the case.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Da Vinci: 1452-1519
Kepler: 1571-1630
Galileo: 1564-1642
Leeuwenhoek: 1632-1723
Newton: 1642-1727
Look at how long it took to capitalize on those developments. Especially Da Vinci, who was an incredible designer, but could only afford to work in models and drawings. They were all hamstrung by lack of funding when it came to actually making things, unlike Edison and Tesla.
I won't argue that people don't have good ideas and share them without IP, but getting people to invest in developing these ideas into useful products is another matter.
There has to be a profit motive to invest the cooperative efforts of hundreds or thousands of people in building prototypes and working up to an assembly line without letting all of their competitors just grab those expensive advances and have the advantage of not having the debt from them. You could argue that without IP, the visionaries couldn't command labor to assist in their development, and had to do almost all of the grunt work themselves, slowing practical developments to a snail's pace.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
That's Open Source... it takes from the rich, gives to the poor, and doesn't touch the middle. Kinda reminds me of communism...
I'd rather be pepper-sprayed by a mountie,
Moron.
Money that "sits in the bank" or that's invested in stocks does not just rest in someone's desk drawer. It's the financial fuel that provides your new factory equipment, new coding team, and the expanded new office.
If you've ever worked a day in your life, you have been the beneficiary of such money. The computer you used to vomit this nonsense onto /. is a direct result of investments of the sort that you ignorantly dismiss.
I repeat: Moron.
Liberty in our Lifetime
Of course, the article presents the issue in a very one-sided manner and in a very vague sort of way. It is quite possible, from the wording of the article, that the investing corporations did in fact innovate procedures or materials that did not previously exist. Regardless, I doubt that anyone who has been making neem-based toothpaste for generations has been suddenly excluded from making neem-based toothpaste, I suspect the Indians are angry because other people are making money off of neem-based toothpaste and they want a piece. I wouldn't know, because the essay makes no pretense towards being objective.
First off, I am a molecular biologist. I love science and the field. I am willing to do work for the good of all but I expect to also make a living. If I came up with a treatment regimen that would reverse or halt aging, I expect to be well compensated, given that such a thing would be in HIGH demand by everyone. If I stood to gain nothing for this, then guess what, I'll keep it secret and offer it on the sly to only those I select (family, close friends). I would quietly offer it for a fee to the rich but I would not release the information to the public if I could look forward to...nothing.
I do not and will not work for nothing. If I produce something that people find valuable, then I WILL be compensated fairly and I WILL make a living, better or worse based on the "value" of the product, be it a technique, a chemical, or whatever. If not, you all lose (except for the select few).
So, you have a choice, revamp copywrite and intellectual property law, NOT eliminate it, or lose out on a lot of good. Stephen King wont write stories for nothing. He expects compensation for entertaining you...quite rightly. It is simple, really. You don't toss out the baby with the bathwater.
Does ANYONE honestly believe that a pharmaceutical company, which spends millions or billions of dollars in research and development to produce drugs that YOU ALL USE AND NEED would continue to do this if they were not allowed to make a return on their investment, time, and effort? NOT! Those anti-cancer drugs do not produce themselves. There is a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money involved in saving your lives or keeping you living and healthy. If you want drugs to treat your INEVITABLE diseases, then intellectual property protection and patents are absolutely necessary. No protection, no drugs.
Property protection, be it intellectual or otherwise, is good so long as it is tempered with common sense.
I ranting because a big fat ugly patent stands in the way of a piece of software I developed. I had to disable a very important feature only to be "allowed" to turn it back on on September 20 (RSA's patent expires).
Mmmmmm.... Well this is my sig.
Check out the Linux Today dialogues between RMS and Tony Stanco here. Also featured here at Slashdot but I'm too lazy to find it right now. I think Stanco's arguments can be applied here as well.
The are two ways to become rich. One way is to control tangible property like real estate, rail ways, etc -- the means of production in the classical sense. The other means is to control the expression of your ideas. Eliminating IP law leaves you with the former only.
Economically, with the means of production so completely controlled by the rich, there is little left for the poor. The poor is then left with their intellectual prowess. They must either work for the rich (use their skills) thereby ensuring the rich get richer or they may attempt to sell their ideas thereby obtaining a larger share of the economic pie or even becoming rich themselves. Why limit their options because it inconveniences a few?
But I think there's more to it than just property and control. At the most basic level, humans have a tendency to think in the terms "mine" and "yours." "My" ideas are what makes me "me" and sets me apart from "your" ideas which make you "you". To say that "my" ideas are not "mine" is to say that I am not an individual. This idea of ownership is why copyright and patents are acceptable to people today. And were acceptable to people in the past.
So, people may give away the expression of their ideas. But it is theirs to give. If they attach terms that you must abide by to gain access to the work, and if you find those terms acceptable, then what harm is done?
The author of the essay left out one of the justifications for patents, the one which (I believe) was used in founding the U.S. patent office:
An inventor might come up with some invention, and then keep the process for it secret, and they thus keep a monopoly on their invention. To increase the spread of information, the government gives the inventor an enforced monopoly on the invention, for a limited period of time, in exchange for the inventor sharing the secret of the invention. With the patent system in place, an inventor can take the gamble that no one else will come up with the invention and keep it secret, or he can (for 17 years) protect himself from others duplicating his invention by sharing his knowledge.
Now, whether or not you agree with the scheme, there are certain things that the U.S. patent office is doing that are definatly beyond that scheme's bounds. A prime example is the Amazon signle-click shopping patent. With something like this (a web interface), once they start using it, other people can duplicate it without knowing how they did it, but the patent system is there preciesly to encourage the sharing of the how. The patent system was not (originally) designed to protect the how, the idea, which anyone can understand and (attempt) to copy once they see the invention. Amazon's justication, that they are trying to protect their investment in coming up with and implementing an original idea, has nothing to do with the purpose of the patent system.
Another example is the patenting of genes of which the patenters don't even know what they do. If someone tried to patent an application of a gene, that might fall within the original parameters for a patent. For example, a pig farmer patented a system for better pig farming by feeding the pigs asprin, something he might have done secretly and never shared with other pig farmers. If someone came up with an application for a gene were they could use it without having to first share the information, that might fall under the scope of a patent. But to just say "here's a sequence of DNA codons, we own it" falls way, way outside the parameters of a patent.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Good. So does every patent office on the face of the earth. Please quit perpetuating this straw man.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
From first principles: I own myself. I own anything I produce. If I produce a work of fine sculpture, it is mine to dispose of as I please: I can sell it, keep it, destroy it -- completely my choice.
The same applies, without even a shade of difference to a non-tangible product of my creation. Whether it's a poem, a song, or an operating system, I own what I create. The only difference that does apply is in the ease of disposing of that property; I can generally reproduce it more efficiently than I could a sculpture, but that does not change the nature of my ownership.
Gov't's only legitimate role in society is to protect the persons and property of its citizens. (Accurately describing the limits of this role was the pure genius of the American Revolutionaries.) It is, therefore, completely correct for the gov't to prevent the theft of my property -- tangible or intellectual. Indeed, that is the sole obligation of a legitimate gov't.
Sweeping aside intellectual property rights would represent nothing less than the wholesale nationalization of our brains... and the universal enslavement of our creative abilities. (Slavery to each other is morally equivalent to slavery to a single master -- and as a practical matter, someone's sitting on the Politburo, calling the shots.)
I choose not to be a slave -- or a slaveholder.
Liberty in our Lifetime
The reason I admire the free software movement is precisely because they put their money where their mouths are: they release their software (an incredible amount of work!) under free licenses. You can blather on all you want about intellectual property, but until you actually start to contribute I'm not going to take you seriously. This guy says that if you want to copy his chapter or his book, you have to get permission. How is this any better than any other book publisher?
This guy is no better than the arm-chair environmentalists who write essays about why we shouldn't use so much oil then drive to work every day in their SUVs. I say put up or shut up.
Hey, you're an impostor!
The real un!tron has Slashdot ID 215773, but doesn't rate an impostor.
There is a time and place for IPR's. Capitalism- We (United States) are a highly socialized (and becoming moreso) society. However our lifeblood and social structure is based heavily around the concept of Capitalism. The arguement here is simple and short: We cannot take the means of profit protection away otherwise our economy will be wraught to ruin. Logically speaking IPR stands as a measure to advance our society technologically as well as economically (through profit). If a person in our capitalistic society takes the initiative to develop products, then he is also entitled to the profit from them. Anything else in this society is illogical. The profit allows further and greater expenditure in areas which development would heed beneficial results and advances to the IPR. The protection of an IPR therby guarentees that profit which allows further worthwile products to come forth. At any point however a competitor can and will invariably design a product that outperforms the other. Thus to ensure fair competition IPR's must be enforced in capitalistic society otherwise the competition is no longer capitalistic in nature but altruistic. Altruism in a society that is based around the concept of capitalism is a devastating idea. Essentiall you take the model which allows the society to thrive economically and replace it with fluff. Open Source Of course all the above applies to Linux. The nature of Linux and all other open source products also fall under this system. Linux and various other open source and for the most part freely developed products cannot be sustainable without market capitalization on the innovations of those products. If we were to immediatley remove IPR's then not only would the economy immediately suffer but as a corllary so would the "free" projects supported by a thriving economy. A thriving economy can support a loss in the strive for innovation. However a weak economy cannot support such a loss. Either way removing IPR's from (at least the US) would significantly damage and inflict great harm on all aspects of the economy as well as the lifestyles within. Utopian worlds are great to conceptualize philisophical tests in but to carry them out they must use real world scenarios. Jarrett.
Arg. Regex hangover. "It seems we're no longer raising children, but breeding consumer pods. Fuck it, let Mattel and
This article started well... but it got worse and worse as I kept reading. I strongly oppose IP law as it currently exists and is enforced. I think it is the result of years of corporate influence in government for selfish ends and has resulted in a system which comes no where near its original intent. I think the founders of our constitution had it right. The intent of intellectual property law should be to encourage the creation of those intellectual idea. At the time, they felt limited control over intellectual property would be effective. And I agree. This is where the article starts. But it quickly goes astray.
The authors first mistake is when he discounts the importance of economic investment in the creation of ideas:
>Since intellectual property can be sold, it is usually the rich and powerful who benefit. The rich and powerful, it should be noted, seldom contribute much intellectual labour to the creation of new ideas.
Yeah, but if I have capital and I pay somebody else to do that work- then I've contributed to that process. Communism make the same mistake when they assume that only the worker has added value to a product- not the person who invested capital to allow the process in the first place.
Then he goes through a series of examples where IP law has been lame. Well, duh. But he's just setting up a straw man argument for IP law in general. The important part is his critique of common justifications for IP law. And, mostly, they attempt to refute the idea that individuals have a right to the fruit of their intellectual labor.
This is actually a very non-trivial issue. And the author would do well to comment on which philosophical tradition he's following. The Libertarian school will claim, that due to full self-ownership, we have the absolute right to the fruit of our labor. More radical versions of this philosophy support the claim that taxation is illegitimate unless consented to. With that foundation, its hard to argue that intellectual property is not justified.
I, however, am not Libertarian, along with the majority of modern philosophers and society. A more generally accepted philosophy, like Rawls, would grant individuals freedom and liberty to believe/think/do what they want, but not promise them complete control over the fruit of their labor. In any reasonable society this is essentially necessary. Even if you believe there is some dessert associated with your labor, society still determines to what extent you can profit from it. This is necessary in order to tax people. There is no, 'what you would have made if government weren't there', b/c w/o government, it wouldn't have been very much.
With such an understanding of economic dessert, it is much more reasonable to take the approach of the founding fathers of our constitution. We grant IP so far as it benefits society, not b/c the people who possess these copyrights/patents/etc. have some inherent right to benefit from these things.
And this is where the author makes his next mistake. He assumes that society will be most benefited w/o IP at all! He talks about how scientist don't profit very much from the work they do. They're payed independently, by universities and the government. And its true that the government attempts to encourage intellectual advancement in society by funding scientists. But this model isn't going to work in every field. Engineering solutions to problems are much better left to the market. But in order for that to happen, people need to be sure that they will see a return on their investment for finding solutions.
If I think that people could benefit from a word processor and invest my own time, or hire other people to program a word processor, I'm going to expect some compensation for it. Some people (noticeably in the open source community) may not. But that is not a reliable source of innovation. Our society intellectual advancements should not be dependent on volunteerism. In restricted arena's, it may prove beneficial, but generally compensation will prove necessary.
>Getting rid of intellectual property would reduce the incomes of a few highly successful creative individuals, such as author Agatha Christie, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
This claim implies that this would be the only damage done by getting rid of IP. But this assumption is naive. Many of the advancement made in society today are no longer just the results of independent, self-motivated individuals. I am temporarily working for a company as an RF engineer/intern. They pay me and others to design and test various circuits. They spend lots of money on equipment and personnel. But they can do that b/c they know when they come up with a design, they can sell it as their own. Do you really think that would be possible w/o IP? The designs are frequently simple. I can sketch a schematic for you on a piece of paper. A bill of materials and the board layout and you'd have the culmination of all the company's investment. But it wouldn't exist unless they were confident it was protected by IP.
Honestly, the system as it exists today is pretty bad. But that is not b/c IP is inherently wrong. Its mostly b/c corporate interests have decided the way IP is going to go over the years. The first step is to reform the process by which patents and copyrights are granted, then dramatically reduce the length of time they hold for. Don't throw it out altogether.
Obviously, this story is a troll, a page-view-whoring attempt by Hemos who wants even more millions in his massive, multi-million dollar estate in Michigan, but we need a test of how sincere Hemos and the rest of the slashdot people are about being anti-IP. Obviously, Commander Taco and Hemos have become multi-million dollar media moguls and their income is derived almost entirely from IP. Somebody needs to copy all of the content in real time on slashdot, put on a faster server, but get rid of all of the ads, and put their own ads in, and collect revenue from that. Then see how quickly Commander Taco and Hemos sue. I give them two hours.
Gee, if I spew out a bunch of crap opinions, interspersed with "references" (also to crap opinions!) does that mean Slashdot will call me smart? I think so! This article pretty much confirms for me that Slashdot is now completely worthless. I'll stick to nytimes.com and sciencedaily.com, thank you very much.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
The number of people going to great, even illegal lengths to move into places like the US and Canada vastly outweighs the number of people trying to move out. Do you think this is a coincidence?
I personally think that both competition and cooperation are needed.
I personally feel that this is more or less what we have now. Why are so many people so eager to radically change it?
Sorry, I can't let this pass. IMHO, trade secrets are the most offensive form of IP because they discourage the sharing of information.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
The problem is that while no one wants things like fire and painting copyrighted, people deserve to make money off of their good use of the basic ideas. A person shouldn't be able to copyright the process of painting, but they deserve to make money if others want to use a painting they created. The same goes for software that may be based on similar concepts but is built up in different ways. While all desktop or server operating systems fall into their respective catergories because of the basic purpose of the OS, they are seperated by how they accomplish it. We need to focus on those kind of aspects because those are what determine what deserves copyright protection.
"I don't like this deep shit about crazy crap"
The article makes some interesting points. I do agree that in many instances patents, etc are given incorrectly. However, I do not believe that this justifies removing the system.
The old saying 'Necessity is the mother of invention' is very true. Necessity comes, however, in many shapes and sizes. For example, the need to see at night was only PART of the need which helped invent the light bulb. The other part was the need, on the parts of the inventors/buisnesses trying to make the invention, to make money. If there were no patent system businesses simply wouln't invest the money. It wouldn't be worth it.
The same can be said for intelectual property rights. In the article, it is said that if one writes a poem, and a thousand copies are made, the writer can still have a copy to read. This is true. However, the most talented of writers would not be able to spend their time writing poems if the poems themselves did not generate revenue. They would be busy at other jobs, and only writing in their spare time. I see nothing wrong with making AS MUCH MONEY AS YOU CAN by selling your ideas/poems/songs etc. And I also see nothing wrong with selling it under the best possible terms you can sell it under, and still have it maketable.
Articles like the one linked to above anger me greatly. Wouldn't the world be a better place if everyone just developed new ideas/products for the good of humanity? Wouldn't it be great if the artists we loved made new songs, painted new pictures, etc and then released them free? While we're at it, why don't we each do our part, work at whatever we are good at, and donate everything to each other. Sure, the world would be better. But it's never going to happen.
The above dreamworld has been tried. It's called communism, and it has one basic flaw. People are driven to make their own life better. If no incentive is given to innovation, no innovation occurs.
It is true that in many cases, innovations are sucked up by companies which had no part in creating them, and the rewards go to that company. True enough. The possibility still exists, however, for ANYONE to make money off of an invention, song, idea, etc. And this possibility is what keeps people trying to create something new, despite the odds.
If the reward system is removed, innovation will be hurt. Is the current system perfect? Of course not. But it is definately better that the alternative.
All other IP issues aside, trade secret law should never have come into existence.
Patent law was made to encourage disclosure of the principle of mechanisms. Copyright was created to make it possible for authors to profitably distribute their work widely, instead of, say, memorizing their stories and knowledge and being hired to tell or teach them. Copyright was applied to software so we wouldn't all get stuck hiring computer time for running their secret programs from IBM. Trademark (the oddball of the group) was created so you can't stamp shoddy products with the name of a respectable manufacturor.
All laudable goals, whatever the practical flaws.
But trade secrets? What are those for? To protect the profits of people who invent something and hide it away so they can monopolize it?
IP laws are supposed to benefit society in general, by spreading information, not to help people hoard it for their own use. Trade secrets must go!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Copyright isn't the only thing the concept of "Intellectual property" supports.
If IP doesn't exist, what would prevent someone from claiming authorship of someone else's work?
Suppose I took a posting you wrote, added a couple sentences of my own, and posted it on my web page as my own words. Isn't that stealing? But if it wasn't your property, what have I stolen?
The person/organization who spent the time/money to collect data and/or produce a product has the right to distribute it under whatever "license" they choose, be it art, technology, or none of the above. If I spent a billion dollars inventing a better mousetrap out of common household items, I don't want my next door neighbor taking the thing apart, building his own, then undercutting my own price, leaving me a few hundred mil behind for having invented it in the first place.
The only problem I see with this is that for most artists and companies, the legal folks make sure you don't get that choice for themselves, or even know about it if they can help it at all. Maybe RAMBU$ really wants everyone to use their memory technology and just needs to recoup their investment -- well, THEY probably don't, but WE have the choice whether to buy it...
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
If you are a creative person, you probably think you should have some ownership over your output. Fair enough. But think about a society where every idea, every expression that you could put into your work is potentially owned by someone else and denyed to you through patent protection. How would you produce anything creative?
I know it's easy to bash Intellectual Property, in fact, the people responsible for perpetuating it are mostly to blame for this. However, the basis behind intellectual property is still sound. The whole point is that people should be able to receive compensation for their ideas, should their ideas be deemed worthy of compensation. In theory this is true, artists and thinkers deserve to be rewarded with their work and these rewards help ensure that their work continues.
Now, this also leads to the problems we're facing now - IP being taken to a far extreme of what it rightly should be. I think that patenting the human genome is explicitly wrong, I believe that software should be build at least to open standards and preferably to Open Source, and I think that people should have free access to governmental information. On the other hand, if we just ditch the whole idea of IP, then it is going to hurt artists and thinkers. Yes, the current system of IP is horrendously broken, but throwing it out is a bad way of fixing it. The simple fact is that artists need some kind of support for their work. Granted, a true artist or thinker produces their work becuase they love to do it, but the whole purpose of the IP system is that they can have the level of support they need to concentrate solely on their craft.
Already, IP is changing. Napster was just the first step, the old channels of IP distribution are falling down, and rightly so. However, we have to remember that we need to somehow support the arts. I think that a nice micropayment system would be a great first step. Already Steven King's begun his own experiment in decentralized IP. The fact is that the old gatekeepers of IP, the RIAA, the MPAA, the big publishers Microsoft, all of them are rapidly becoming less and less relevant. What worries me as a producer of art (I'm a musician, and I have released several 3D models into the public domain) is will this shortchange the artist? I think Napster can work for new talent, I've personally supported artists via MP3.com, but I still don't see anyone able to make a living off these services yet.
So, what's the compromise going to be? I forsee a new patronage system coming out of all this. Back in the early days of the first artistic revolution, just after the Renaissance, artists would be supported by wealthy patrons. These patrons would support the artist and many of them allowed them a great latitude in what they could produce. Look at VA Linux and Slashdot... VA Linux is a patron to Slashdot, they foot the bill in the interest of the community, and they give them editorial freedom.
But there lies the catch... even when Napster wins and music is cheap and/or free, are we really better off? Look at the people who see a conspiracy between VA Linux and Slashdot, imagine what they would say if all art is sponsored that way. Also, would that guarantee sufficient funding for the arts and sciences? Public TV works this way, and look at how they're doing financially. We certainly won't see any less pandering to popular interests, even if the RIAA and the MPAA and their ilk disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't mean that we'd lose crap like the Backstreet Boys. It would just come from a different source.
So, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one. The current IP system is screwing the consumer over through poor legislation and litigation, along with the content producers who are being held back in much the same way. Get rid of IP altogether and we're just as screwed, if nobody can make a living off their work, a lot of people aren't going to go through the trouble and effort to distribute it. Some will do it for the love of art or science, but they won't be able to popularize it effectively and will have to juggle a lot more issues, all of which will distract them from that creative process.
In the end, we'll have a compromise between the two. Art is always going to be around, but there needs to be a level of support. I think that artists like Chuck D and Steven King have the right idea, get rid of the middle man, go direct and leverage technology. That way you get the best of both worlds, consumers get freedom to choose, and the artist gets support. Of course, all this counts on that support emerging from the consumer. We'll probably see the status quo remain, albeit changed, for quite some time.
In other words, support your artists. If you hear a song you like, buy it. Go to concerts, attend plays, get off your ass and support people who actually care about their art. Nine tenths of the problems with IP could be cured if people just stopped giving into those who are corrupting the system. Support *good* Intellectual Property. IP itself isn't really the problem, it's the way in which it's been mishandled and corrupted. Through these steps, we can preserve both the freedom and choice we want as consumers without losing the ability of the artist to support their work.
I admit it. I'm rather suprised it wasn't moderated into oblivian.
Mmmmmm.... Well this is my sig.
The above post directly addresses a point made by its proper parent, and said point is directly connected to the discussion topic.
If you didn't agree with phliar's point, then post a response, instead of wasting moderation points.
Children. Yeesh...
Another example: Penicillin and its many progeny. How many millions of people are alive today because a simple course of antibiotic cured them of an infection. This infection may or may not have been preventable in any particular incident, but that is beside the point.
Again, if you are a troll, IHBT
--
True, but consider this: the vast majority of the useful inventions and interesting artistic creations we benefit from today were created in the last 200 years. The last 200 years is (roughly) the age of modern copyrights and patents.
This may be a coincidence, but it is likely not. Surely the development of the modern rule of law has been a crucial enabling condition for the progress and prosperity of the last 200 years; just recently, in the Asian financial crisis, we saw countries suffer because they lacked the proper rule-of-law infrastructure to promote a stable environment for investment. Given the large majority of the past 200 years' useful inventions that have been patented, it's hard to believe that they all would have been created just as quickly if their inventors had been working only for the intellectual pleasure of invention.
The question of whether inventors "deserve" all of the rewards from a patent is beside the point here. Clearly a reward system in which Alexander Graham Bell (to take an example from a previous post) gets all the profits from inventing the telephone, when others get nothing because they invented it slightly later, is imperfect. However, even a very imperfect reward system is better than none at all, from a social-efficiency perspective. The question should be not: is the IP system fair? but: is there empirical reason to believe it works better than the alternative(s)? I think there is.
Linux has been oft-cited as an example of a terrific advance developed without IP protection. Since I'm writing this from a Linux machine, I can hardly dispute that it's terrific. However, remember that Linux would not exist in its present form without cheap Intel-compatible hardware to run on, and that hardware would not exist without (a) competition in chip design driven by the prospect of rewards from IP (chips are very expensive to develop, IP rewards allow the devel. costs to be recouped) and (b) Microsoft, which created a standard OS so ubiquitous that HW developers had to make their HW compatible enough to run that OS. So Linux is indirectly dependent for its existence not only on IP, but on a company often held up as one of the worst abusers of IP.
Nevertheless, the author of the "Against IP" article gives a useful and thought-provoking catalogue of the costly abuses of IP in today's world. I agree with most of his specific criticisms of abuses. Many posters have responded by saying "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."
In fact, it is possible that the IP system today is inherently subject to such abuses that reform is not worthwhile and abolition is the way to go. Establishing this would require establishing that (a) the costs of IP abuses exceed the known benefits of IP's existence and (b) the nature of the IP system, and particularly of the governments that enforce it, is such that reforms will not cause the cost of abuses to fall below the benefits. These are both debatable questions, and it would be really interesting to see them studied from the point of view of Public Choice economics. Does anyone know if such a study has been made?
I wish the whole book was posted so I could read his final conclusion. I think that throwing out copyright laws would be a bad move for a lot of people. On the other hand, people copyrighting phrases is insane. "Hey, umm... I'm sorry but you're gonna have to fork over some cash to me. I own the patent to the English Language." Who the hell is running the patent office anyway??? A reform of the Office of Patents (Or whatever it's title is ;-)) would be a good start.
// Brought to you by letters Q and E and by the number 7.
OK, first the pluses;
1. Performing artists will replace recording artist. Recordings will be used to promote concerts, rather than concerts used to promote recording sales. This will mean a lot more live performances, though ticket prices will go up to pay for the elaborate productions (few of the elaborate production concerts actually pay for themselves). There would also be a shift from studio recordings to live recordings to save on expenses.
2. No more advertising. A goal in itself! Without branding, the concept of advertising, except on the local level, becomes absurd.
3. No more commercial television. See number 2
4. Global economic parity. Which of course is the end goal of the article's writer. Eventually, the elimination of branding and research, coupled with increased out sourcing, would drop developed nations to the same economic level as third world nations.
5. Lots of free software. Of course, since there is no branding, it'll take a while to get song or program you were looking for.
Now for the negatives (just the big ones, or I'd be here all day);
1. No more big budget films. I have no doubt that people would continue to make films for arts sake, but the budgets would be limited to voluntary contributions, I figure a cap of about $100,000, think "Blair Witch Project", or "Clerks". Laudable projects, but I'd miss "Star Wars" and "Toy Story".
2. No more Stephen Kings. I'm not saying Stephen King would go away, in fact I'm sure lots of Stephen Kings would appear, but with a couple hundred thousand books a day, both good and bad, (mostly bad) there would be little chance for the few gems to rise to the top of the morass, especially without any coherent marketing.
3. No quality control. Without branding, the only way to tell between one product and another is price.
4. No competition. Only those companies with the most resources will be able to produce and distribute products for the least amount of money.
5. Creative people will have to get real jobs. With only a limited number of government research jobs available, the majority of scientist, design engineers, artists, musicians, actors, directors, writers, programmers, inventers, and pretty much anybody else who does creative work, will have to get regular jobs in production.
6. Barter economy. That's right, without IP, printed money becomes worthless, and without branding, banking becomes foolhardy.
7. Stagnation. We need only look at the old Soviet Union to see the fruits of suppressed IP. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Anyone can just throw a wild fantasy out there.
How about: "Just imagine what the productivity of our farms would be if anyone could plant crops on any land or take the crops anyone else planted, and the land and crops weren't controlled by the few who benefit from farm law."
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
For a few years one person or company would get rich off of selling fire, they deserve it fire is a big deal. Then after a few years, when the patent expired everyone, would sell fire.
It is not about stopping progress it is about trying to encourage it. What if the people who invent went on strike or decided not to invent any more? Who would invent? You? Lets try to keep the inventors happy.
Will
Banning IP property rights would not result in your above scenario. What it would result in is Obscurotech paying off a couple of Intel engineers to take the designs of Intel's processors to Obscurotech and your six month turnaround shortly turns into six days. Intel, because they have no legal recourse against their employees who "procure" such information for Obscurotech, could do nothing more than sack any employee that was caught sleeping with the enemy. Of course, whomever took the technology from Intel could hardly care, because they prolly just pocketed a cool $50 million USD from Obscurotech. Everyone here but Intel wins. Obscurotech gets away with Intel's designs and manufacturing process for a sum of money that is little more than a couple of percentage points of what Intel paid to discover the technology in the first place.
You say that IP stifles competition by stopping people from using ideas they know will work. I counter that AMD has benefited from the fact that Intel would not allow them to use their chip designs, therefore, AMD came up with a new chip design, which (in my mind at least) is better than what Intel has to offer.
The issue with intellectual property is a very important one for everybody. If something you create is not really yours, then what is your value? What should you be compensated for your work? Why should you work harder than anyone else to create bigger, better things/ideas? This has implications for more than scientists, artists and writers. What is the value of the individual in a manufacturing facility? Or a teacher? Or any other profession? Everyone has a work product (well almost everyone) and to some degree is based upon intellectual activity. The lack of intellectual property is called communism. Think about it... you are not valued as an individual with unique abilities. You are not compensated for those unique abilities. The society sinks to the lowest common denominator. I don't disagree that changes may be in order for the length of intellectual property protections, but to remove them totally is to go down a path that's already been tried. BTW, if this guy really believes in no intellectual property why did he publish his comments in a book? Why not on Slashdot or somewhere else on the web with explicit notice that the material was not copyrighted?
I didn't write it, but I'll agree with it.
--
Most of the article, and many of the supporting responses seem to be opposed to the concept of individuals profiting from their talents if those talents are engaged in creating IP. As a creator of IP I find myself wondering if the same objections are raised against the huge amounts of money paid to sports and theatrical (including movie) celebrities -who in the final analysis derive their compensation from - you guessed it - IP.
Total busking income to date (in US Dollars): $4.60 By product: -unspecified: $4.60
That's a great article, and I find myself agreeing and disagreeing. (I could patent ambiguity and ambivalence ;))
First, there is clear abuse which needs addressing. Professional epigrammist? Please. I'm no lawyer, but I find it amazing that such a person could EVER win in court, if only because of fair use.
Both the epigrams and weak patents come back to the root of the problem: you obviously shouldn't permit IP protection for "the obvious". Obvious phrases, and obvious patents are the bane of IP. Whether it is a patent on web links that (gasp) change color, or a catchy phrase which anyone could have come up with (and 10 people probably have), that's a major problem. But the issue is that we don't have a good way to handle it. If we go to court, anyone can buy expert witnesses. "It was obvious", "It was innovention" -- and the judge is supposed to impartially decide? One possible solution would be the court independantly selecting the 3 most qualified experts themselves, deciding on their testimony, and the loser of the case is liable for expert testimony payment.
Trademark law is also grossly abused. I'm all for letting McDonald's fend off "MacDonald's Big Mic", but I've known too many people who've been on the wrong end of this dirty stuff. For example, people who've registered legitimate domains, only to LATER have someone register a trademark against it, then file a trademark claim. How absurd is that? I own animal.com, say, and have free info for zoologists. Someone who wants to sell pets, say, registers an "animal.com" trademark and then sues. I had it first, sure, but if I didn't do any commerce, I can lose. That's a fictitious example, but one ecommerce project I've worked on, I've watched exactly that happen to someone (who's domain we ALSO wanted to acquire, and they were forced to sell to someone because they couldn't afford to defend themselves legally).
It's time to get back to our roots: things should require public recognition for trademark status. No more "Mug O' Coffee" for Denny's. Things should have to be truly non-obvious for patenting. (Hi, Amazon!) Copyrights should be for distinctly original work -- no patenting a phrase anyone could turn in a witty moment.
Finally, we need a way to level the legal field so that the legal system can't just be used for intimidation. At the risk suddenly sounding like Katz gone wild: corporate america has really run wild, and their need to protect themselves helps stimulate the kill-or-be-killed mentality.
The point where I really get ambivalent is "discovery" of things which really can't be invented, but really are novel. Obviously, RSAs legendary patents are primarily a mathematical construct, they are clearly novel, and I would be hard pressed to label such an advance "discovered" instead of "invented". (And I'm skeptical about the benefits of denying a patent on such cases, in terms of motivation)
All in all, a very good read, although some parts were weak. I don't see spielberg making jurassic park without the chance to cash in (movies cost bank). But a strong case that IP law has gone too far, and is too easily subverted, and most of all, too hard for the layman (who it should arguably protect most effectively) to take advantage of.
Of course, you could always write a more detailed explanation (the way shareware authors used to back in the days when the term "shareware" was still new and many people hadn't heard of it yet), or you could point people back to http://www.boswa.com/buskware/buskware. html.
I would suggest adding a second essay to your page: a "What is buskware?" essay written for users rather than developers -- the "more detailed" explanation I mention in the paragraph above.
Urgh, I feel like I'm not being very clear here. Hopefully you'll understand what I'm trying to say.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
I'm sorry. I just don't buy it. I don't have time to refute this entire article point by point, but I'll do a bit. (But first of all, I want to note that I have absolutely no problem with people that want to give their work away.)
Governments generate large quantities of information. They produce statistics on population, figures on economic production and health, texts of laws and regulations, and vast numbers of reports. The generation of this information is paid for through taxation and, therefore, it might seem that it should be available to any member of the public.Agreed. This part makes sense, nothing to do with the subject really since governments are supposed to be servants of the people anyway.
The idea behind patents is that the fundamentals of an invention are made public while the inventor for a limited time has the exclusive right to make, use or sell the invention. But there are quite a few cases in which patents have been used to suppress innovation
This is pretty much a summary of the article. Intellectual property is sometimes abused by the rich, so it must be altogether bad.
More generally, intellectual property is one more way for rich countries to extract wealth from poor countries.
Sigh. "From each according to his ability... to each according to his need." "Why can't we all just be even?"
The potential financial returns from intellectual property are said to provide an incentive for individuals to create. In practice, though, most creators do not actually gain much benefit from intellectual property. Independent inventors are frequently ignored or exploited (...and later on...) What about all the writers, inventors and others who depend for their livelihood on royalties? First, it should be mentioned that only a very few individuals make enough money from royalties to live on. For example, there are probably only a few hundred self-employed writers in the US
Pure bullshit. Every writer, actor, producer, director, programmer, designer, architect, publisher, and many millions of other people all make their living from intellectual property whether they know it or not. Oh, but wait:
Those few currently dependent on royalties could instead receive a salary, grant or bursary, just as most scientists do.... Getting rid of intellectual property would reduce the incomes of a few highly successful creative individuals.... But there would be economic resources released: there would be more money available for other creators
Oh! Now I see!! Let's just collect more taxes and subsidize everybody that wants to be creative! I mean, why should the truely creative people get paid more than people who's stuff sucks and no one would actually pay for it. Yeah, this way both Mr. Speilberg and I will make movies, and we'll get paid the same! Cool!! BTW: I'm pretty sure most scientists work for corporations, colleges, or for the government doing specific work for the military or public health and environment issues. I've never heard of a general subsidy for scientists.
I could go on and on, but to wrap it up: Doing away with intellectual property would bring us back to the dark ages. Intelligent and creative people would all of the sudden have no real opportunity. Anything they create would fundamentally have no value. Land owners and those strong enough to snag up other material resources would become all powerful. Yuck.
There are few things I would fight to the death for, and intellectual property rights is one of them, right along with freedom of speech.
Last but not least, the author is a total hypocrite:
Available for 7.95 pounds from Freedom Press
Who will be first to OCR the book and put it online? Not that I want to read the garbage, but it's just the natural thing to do...
IP in general is a natural extention of the freedom to contract.
Let's say I live in a world with no IP laws. I invent a revolutionary new manufacturing process. If I just make it public, I get fame but little else. I'll be lucky to even recover my costs. So instead, I approach a few manufacturing companies. After making them sign an agreement not to use or reveal the process without my permission, with large penalties if they do, I let them look at my process. They like it, and pay me a fee to use it. I'm happy, and they're happy. So are their customers, since they can get more goods for cheaper.
But things could be better. Only a few large companies have access to the process. I would like to sell the process to many small manufacturers, and they would like to buy it, but the costs of making and enforcing the contracts are too high. Since the process is a secret, many new inventions which could have been based on it are never made.
The government notices this, and offers me a deal. It will sign an NDA on behalf of the public if I agree to stop charging fees after twenty years. Everyone can look at the process and learn from it. Everyone can decide whether it is worth the licence fee. I get more customers, and the public can get it for free when the term expires. If I think it is worth it, I agree and everyone comes out ahead. Otherwise, I keep doing what I was doing anyway, and nobody gets hurt.
This is the principle behind the patent. Nothing is magic about the details. The government can and should adjust the term for new patents in order to provide the best deal for the public. If inventors don't like it, they can alway fall back on trade secrets and NDAs. As with any other contract, I have no right to expect the other party to be a philantropist.
A similar argument can be applied to copyrights. It is just a different deal applied to a different subset of potential secrets.
There is no such deal for scientific discoveries because there is no fixed term which would give the public a better deal than what they already get. Instead, the government subsidizes basic research both directly and indirectly through subsidies of universities. We all pool together to pay the salaries and expences of scientists, and in exchange they release their discoveries into the public domain. As incentives for exceptional work, scientists have the opportunity to gain professional recognision, fame, and future employment. And if that's not enough, they can choose to pursue other lines of work, or look for private purchasers of research (such as Celera) who may provide better terms.
If the current system is unfair, it is because the government is offering the wrong set of terms on patents and copyrights. IMHO, patents should be reserved for cases where it appears unlikely that anyone else would have invented the same thing, at least until late in the term of the patent. In other cases, it may be better to offer a shorter termed, narrower version of a patent, or even leave inventors to fall back on trade secrets.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
Do you seriously think actors, directors, and artists can make a living without relying on royalties and residuals?Are you saying there were no actors, directors, or artists before copyright laws?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these professions (well maybe not "director") have been around for millenia. They didn't need copyright then, so why do they need it now?I might start doing that, I certainly wouldn't object if other buskware writers used that slogan. However, it doesn't include the other half of the equation: disclosure of revenues. This is essential, because you're not really just trying to support the guy you're paying, you're also trying to bait the rest of the industry. Still, it's one hell of a lot better than my current "In a Nutshell".
Sometimes, I get so hung up on precision that I destroy clarity.
I've got lots of plans for more explanations, but, of course, that takes time. I'm just about finished with a "Rules of Buskware" cheat-sheet that gives donors and producers guidelines to make the system work. There's about ten for each side, and the sense of them should come through a lot more clearly than a dozen pages of solid text.
I posted an abridged version of the essay to kur5hin, and was starting to get some good debate going, but then, of course, kuro5hin died. I got several good ideas for changes to make the essay, though, as it became clear what wasn't coming through.
Thanks, it's good to know that some people are interested out there.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I would disagree with the writer on this point, this argument displays immense cluelessness, could you imagine going to an employee and saying, "yes we know you did 5 times as much work as Joe Bloggs over there, but you are ten times as smart, so we are going to have to pay him twice as much as you."
Certainly some valid points are raised, and IP has gone way to far, but to totally abolish IP would be ludicrous and would not encourage innovation. IP, like trade unions is a necessary evil.
You are not me, therefore you are not important
Just keep trying to define new technology, modes of thought in terms of old laws designed to cover material goods and this is what you come up with. We've been struggling with our mammalian instincts for a while. I pissed here, so it is mine. No, I pissed here first! Whatever. As human pursuits become more immaterial, idea-driven, and less bound to definable boundries like land, we will have to evolve our conceptions of what "belongs" to us. There's nothing there to piss on any more.
I've called some of my little toys buskware, but didn't explain how it was supposed to work. Most people probably thought it was just a new word for shareware.
Also, I haven't released any really good products. I've got some (hopefully) interesting stuff coming up, but all I've got on the site so far are things I hack together in a day or two. I only called it buskware because there's no reason not to (and also, because some of the things are precursors to stuff that should be worth paying for - lrnkana to lrnkanji, perpol to morph; maybe it'll make sense later on). Maybe they'll bring in a few bucks, maybe not, at least it should spread the buskware idea around.
Hell, even the essay needs a rewrite. A few things didn't come through quite right. I'm not expecting to make a fortune off of anything that's up yet. I do, however, hope to make a living off of the bigger and better projects I'm currently working on.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
You can argue that patents should run out sooner, or last for varying lengths of time based on the product or the industry in question. You can argue that certain types of patents (like software patents) ought to be disallowed, or that too many silly patents for obvious things are granted (like the Amazon one-click thing). You can argue that the system is set up to favor companies over individuals, due to legal fees associated with registering or defending patents, or that some companies exploit their employees by claiming ownership of everything the employee creates, whether or not it was done on company time. You can even make a general argument that the patent system as it stands now doesn't serve its stated purpose (blah blah common good, yadda encourage progress yadda yadda blah...), or argue against the very premises of the whole patent concept.
If you want to take an intellectual dump on the patent system, there's plenty of things you could choose to complain about. But at least try to come up with some semi-legitimate argument. I mean, c'mon, where do you think you are, Slashdot? Er, wait a minute...never mind.
To answer your first question, in such a world great artists would be forced to work at Taco Bell. No one would be able to profit from reproductions of their work, period. I mean, fuck, man, you could at least spell the word "intellectual" correctly. Geez...
> Contract law is restricted to those contracts which generally serve the public good. For example, you generally can't enforce a contract that says an employee can't go work for a competitor
Yes, but you can contract your rights away. What do you think a NDA is ?!
Of course, certain clauses MAY BE uninforcable, since society/state assumes that in those specific cases, "no sane person would agree to something as crazy as limiting his rights."
But it does bring up an interesting point. That the large corporations are using IP rights to crush smaller ones, or countries from exploiting natural resources.
Fight Spammers!
No law I've ever heard of exists for prosecuting a person for "holding" an idea in their head, nor speaking about it to others, nor using that idea as inspiration to come up with a "new" idea. Digital-quality duplicates of engineered studio masters is not an "idea" existing in someone's head. It is a tangible substance which must exist on a piece of physical media.
Everyone should control the fruits of their labor. This applies to intellectual property as much to physical goods. Naturally, labor is not the only factor that makes a product profitable. If it were, then there would be no need for steel companies or record companies. The internet may reduce or eliminate the need for record companies, but the same principle applies. Patents were instituted to encourage inventors to reveal their inventions, thus surrendering control over their own ideas sooner than they might otherwise. However, we all still have the choice. We can post our ideas for free, try to sell them directly, or asign our control to someone else to sell the ideas. This is capitalism. It is the fairest system ever invented. Ownership of the fruits of labor (as opposed to stealing from someone else or from the public domain) is simple justice.
"Those few currently dependent on royalties could instead receive a salary, grant or bursary, just as most scientists do..." Who'd pay that salary? Someone mentioned taxpayers, but how would that work? In the U.S., artists can't even convince the American people that the NEA budget of $100 million per year is worth it, now this writer suggests that someone (presumable the government) fund ALL creators formerly protected by IP laws? It'll be a cold day... I'm a composer of classical music, which means that there is no company that I can work for. Yes, classical music existed before the advent of contemporary IP laws. But composers like Mozart and Beethoven were ripped off by unscrupulous publishers throughout their entire careers. The fact is that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the church and wealthy patrons fostered creativity and supported the arts with a passion. Today, no such class of people exists, at least not in America. The authors claim that few people rely on royalties is simply false. ALL professional concert music composers earn large percentages of their incomes from performance and publication royalties. This generally amounts to very little money because there is very little market for what we do. But don't deny us the fruits of our labor, because that's simply all we have.
IP law should not be for the people but for the person.
The person (inventor) should be rewarded for his or there hard work.
An inventor does not have to be an employee but it is most likely in his best intrest do be an employee or he would not be one. Take the example of Steven King. He has decieded that he no longer needs to be an employee he can do it him self, most people can not.
If you were to elimate IP the companies would not longer find it profitable to hire inventors.
Will -sorry for my spelling it is late
I consulted with my pineal gland and it thanks you for the recommendation
Will
First off, we will get competition, but R&D would be done jointly by a given industry, to spread the cost around, and giving them money for quality control :P. It's just a different paradigm, one of cooperation, even if it is for gain in the end. Also, copyright stays, hence, brand. Money is backed up by the government, so unless that somehow vanishes I don't understand your assertion. As for the Soviet Union, it has commited much less war crimes than the post-WWII US gov't (read up on Chomsky and the like).
:(
I've got more to say.. I think.. but it's not verbalizing itself
ICQ#2584116
-- d'arcy poirot
It's fine and good to say "competition works." Everyone likes "competition", just like no politician is against kids. Unfortunately, life is not nearly so simple.
Sometimes you need to actually think things through, and ask yourself tough questions that no amount of impassioned slogans can banish. Even after such deliberations, each individual result isn't always going to be pleasing. Instead you must take the long view, and look at the results on the aggregate. You must ask yourself: What is the greater good?
Sure we can all find examples of failure in any system, be it capitalism or socialism. This is not to say, however, that they're both equals. Anyone with half a brain who scrutinizes them will arrive at the conclusion that socialism fails miserably.
I can't possibly hope to prove to you in this time and space that the current situation (IP) is light years better than your proposal, no intellectual property. What you need is hard won experience to shake your darling notion of "competition." To that end, I shall cast some serious doubt on your specific example.
First, and foremost, your example of the semi-conductor industry is a very poor one. as it's terribly productive. Why is it that chip speed doubles time you bat your eye? In how many other industries do you see this same amount of R&D spending? How is it that you can on one hand claim Intel is massively holding the industry back, while on the other assert that 6 months in such a long time? I grant you, Intel isn't perfect. They're definetly somewhat anti-competetive. Their chip designs are even somewhat mediocre in some areas. On the other hand, and most importantly, they serve the consumer very very well. They've been continually producing fast chips at affordable prices, a combination of which most consumers obviously find preferable to any of the generics.
Secondly, your notion of the industry itself is way way offbase. You don't just build CPUs that can compete against Intel on whim, it's a very very expensive propostion--billions of dollars. It simply doens't scale well to the generics you allude to. Even the smallest competitor to Intel today requires hundreds of millions in cash and other liquid assets for just one such attempt. Completely ignoring the research angle, developing a manufacturable chip is an entirely different game. The point here being, that your generics are completely mythical. If anything, if an intel could survive an IP-less environment, their massive wealth would give them a huge advantage over even the smartest of small competitors. Intel could snatch their IP and get the ball rolling before the competition even acquired the necessary capital. Where is the incentive for the little guy, when they can just freeride on good ole' Intel.
Third, while it is true that 6 months is a long time in the computer industry, it's not everything. They don't reinvent the entire wheel every 6 months. Many of their patents 5+ years old are still terribly valuable today, from the manufacturing process to development to the chip itself. In other words, 6 months is not necessarily (in fact, it is not) a sufficient window of profitability to encourage Intel to take spend the money here.
Fourth, have you ever heard the word economies of scale? Even if your idea came to fruition somewhat they way you wish, where 6 months is sufficient. A splintering into many different competitors would absolutely kill the market. Because of the high fixed costs involved here, every competitor needs a large share of the market to hope to offer even remotely competetive pricing. In other words, since developing the technology and building the plants and machinery costs hundreds of millions (and even billions), if they only sell a hundred thousand, they could not survive. The chips could never be sold for that the necessary amount, and they'd need to sell more of them. The only reason modern Intel chips are as cheap as they are is because of huge economies of scale, as in millions. Only a small fraction of most of Intel's sale represent profits--not exactly fitting for the monopoly you seem to be implying.
Fifth, the concerns over southeast asia's approach to IP have nothing to do with domestic (their bread and butter) fear for their IP. Where piracy is rappant all companies that rely on IP lose a market (that country). You are mistaken if you think these companies can really export IP violating products en masse to more developed nations. Even if they could, your statement that they could "outcompete" the US is totally foolish, because they're simply not, and they've been brazenly violating IP for some time now.
Last, but not least, you are basically completely failing to calculate risk versus reward here. You don't understand the scale of development. You don't understand how much money they spend on R&D. You don't understand their current profit margins on the aggregate. You need to look at how much is actually coming back to the investor. Proportionally speaking it's not the least bit unreasonable when weighed against the risk. You don't understand manufacturing. In short, you don't know the high tech industry, never mind semiconductors.
By destroying IP, you'd destroy the already thin margins in the industry, not just in the semiconductor industry, but most every high, pharma, and biotech business.
This is nothing more then that. Granted the patent and copyright is abused wholesale by corporations, but corporations are by definition evil and abusive, what can you expect? What really bothers me, is the implication that I can't own my own work. I'm a musician, I write music, and its my soul on the manuscript paper...social relevance and standards don't apply, its my soul, I own it, end of story. If they WANT to fix the copyright / patent system, make patents / copyrights non transferable, and make patents / copyrights easy to contest, so abuses like patenting genes, can't happen.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
...in the sense that it would get you a decent grade in a freshman-level Intro to Philosophy course. Virtually every sentence contains either an over-generalization, an over-simplification, a straw-man-pummel-o-rama, or a plain-old fiction. The writer suggests alternative solutions in the same work that he attempts to argue for the existence of a problem in the first place. It just offends my sensibilities to the point where I don't care if the author even has a valid point or not--he's obviously made up his mind before he thought or researched the issue.
I must admit I only skimmed this article, but it seems to consist of exampels of absue of Ip either through the unreasonable streatching of the concept of IP or through governments not acting as the servents of the people they are or should be.
He states in his first few lines that IP was invented to encourage the creation of artistic works. (Actually that's copyright. Patent was created to safegaurd knowledge that was being lost to scoiety through inventor-secrecy.) He then fails to address the 300 years of artistic creation following the Statute of Anne (the first copyright law) but instead jumps straight into modern adn extreme examples of abuse-- some genuine and some only posited.
Frankly, if I were grading this for a poltiical philosophy class, I'd call it a C paper.
Show that others have tried to solve the problem, but failed. Then show that you succeeded. That's a demonstration that it's not obvious.
I like private property, free markets, global free trade etc. I get the impression that I am the only such person who doesn't like intellectual property, since most of the anti-IP arguments I read, like the one cited, are anti-capiatlist arguments as well.
...". (And thats about all in the chapter I agree with.) Rather than promoting a free market, it seems to me that IP is anti-competitive. The government decreeing that an idea, wherever and by whomever it is used, is owned by some particular person makes no more sense to me than the government decreeing that all wood, wherever and by whomever it is used, is owned by some particular person.
My problem with IP is that "Shoes and poems are fundamentally different
That being said, I am somewhat swayed by the argument that we need to encourage the development of ideas by rewarding those who create them or finance their creation. Perhaps that does require some special laws. I'm not sure. However, I am sure that if we need them, those laws should not be made by analogy to physical property.
The major point this article fails to acknowledge is that "intellectual property", whether or not it was called that, has always existed. Even before patents, copyrights, trademarks -- which are notable only in that they are government-enforced -- individuals devised ways to guard their ideas from being used by others.
Take, for example, the closely guarded secrets of medieval stone masons -- which I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet, since it was the key closed-source metaphor behind Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Or take secret recipies, or any other trade secrets that existed just as well without government.
My point is that intellectual property is not something to be argued for or against -- for better or worse, it just exists. And, as the founders of the United States noted in the Constitution, it takes its most undesirable form when good ideas lay dormant for fear that they might be stolen. IP law is a trade-off: the government will protect your monopoly on your idea, under the condition that you allow the government to publish the idea after a certain period of time.
Why would this be desirable? Say, for example, I come up with Invention X, a remarkable discovery that will benefit countless millions. However, I don't have a factory to produce the product, and I fear that without government protection, Big Company Y would steal my idea and immediately begin producing Invention X in their existing factory more efficiently than I could, thus capturing the market for my invention. Why, then, would I put in all the effort to develop and perfect Invention X, when I would never have the opportunity to recoup my costs (let alone make a profit)? I'd be better off just keeping my ideas to myself.
By "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," intellectual property laws prevent against this, the worst-case scenario: that a brilliant idea or invention might die with its creator, never having been passed on to contribute to the public good.
-IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Seeing as how this is not, by and large, what is happening in the real world, I am going to call scarecrow on this argument.
I'd rather BigCompany, Inc. keep it's designs private than me having to research their patents to know what I am allowed to invent on my own.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Brian Martin's first objection of principle against intellectual property is that it is intrinsically a "social product." So, if I make, say, a microwave from scratch and wish to sell it, I can only charge you for parts, since I should be paying fiscal homage to everyone from Maxwell (E&M) to Joseph Bardeen (transistor)? Or how about my great-to-some-power-grandmother, since I am a derivative of some grueling interval of 9 months for her? His fallacy is to malign the nature of the work, rather than accepting that the nature of the product is different, and gunning for the ethical basis of property in general.
Another criticism he makes is against the economy of "deserving." I agree with this -- let there be a free-market of intellectual property, where the social value is irrelevant to the extrinsic. I must say I am non-plussed by reading a critique against socialist ethics housed inside an anti-IP strawman.
Really, the only objection that I have read that holds water is the Though Control thesis (promulgated by RMS, among others); its downfall, though, is the intrincism of "information wants to be free."
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
While you're right to say,
"It is not about stopping progreess, it is about trying to encourage it."
your next sentence simple doesn't follow. The referenced article -- and most of the discussion recently -- about IP attacks the premise that IP still serves to encourage progress. Ignoring that for two sentences, effectively every inventor is somebody else's employee. The IP is not going to an individual/group -- it's going to the company (government institution, etc). If we want to encourage innovation by rewarding it, IP law ought to be changed so the individual/group gets more money. (And, incidentally, yes, I would invent. I'm a programmer (among other things) -- I do it all the time.)
The essence of patents is an attempt by the government to bribe those with secrets into exposing them by helping to exploit them commercially. This is distinct from the essence of copyright, by which it was decided that the creation of more works was beneficial to the people, and that the best way to promote more works was economic -- to allow the free market to handle it. With that in mind, the copyright system was set up to create such a market. The essence of the argument against copright is that the market (as consituted by, say, the MPAA) created by copyright law no longer -- or less than optimally -- benefits the people, and the same for patents, though the specifics, obviously, vary.
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
I'm sorry. I just don't buy it. I don't have time to refute this entire article point by point
You are too busy to answer fully, but you have time to waste on slashdot. And this is an extremely important issue, but you don't have time to refute it. Apparently all the other issues you deal with are more important, including reading slashdot, but not leaving imperfect rebuttals behind.
Or, maybe you just like to sound important and sound off, but it's really not quite as important as you make it to be. That makes me wonder how important your post actually is to you, and to me.
Here are some more examples of hyperbole:
Sigh. "From each according to his ability... to each according to his need." "Why can't we all just be even?"
I don't quite see what smearing with the Marxist slogan has to do with ran actual discussion.
Every writer, actor, producer, director, programmer, designer, architect, publisher, and many millions of other people all make their living from intellectual property whether they know it or not.
I betcha it's not even 1%. Unless you define writer, actor, etc as only those who make a living at it. A self-fulfilling definition.
Let's just collect more taxes and subsidize everybody that wants to be creative!...I'm pretty sure most scientists work for corporations, colleges, or for the government doing specific work for the military or public health and environment issues. I've never heard of a general subsidy for scientists.
Nowhere does he say a subsidy paid from taxes. You say that scientists work for corporations, and that there is no general subsidy for scientists. Why then do you bring in a strawman of a fictional tax subsidy for creative people?
--
Infuriate left and right
Also blockquoth the poster:
Nah, that'd be as silly as granting a patent on single-click purchasing, or on affiliate Web site programs, or... oh, wait. The USPTO has allowed patents on broad topics despite manifold examples of prior art. I guess that argument doesn't hold.And finally, blockquoth the poster:
Yes, it's well known that Mozart flipped burgers for a living. And no one ever heard his music, more's the pity. Likewise that Homer guy, and Bill Shakespeare swept streets and never got around to writing those plays he was always talking about.It's time to face facts: Human creativity dates back at least, oh, 10,000 years. Intellectual "property"(*) and its protection date back about, oh, two hundred years or so. It is absurd to argue that the latter is necessary for the former. And if IP works so well, why is it necessary to make those laws increasingly oppressive? If simple copyright and physical patents produces the Industrial and Information Ages, why the sudden and increasing pressure to "tighten" those laws?
===== (*) Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's gold is to gold.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Contract law is restricted to those contracts which generally serve the public good. For example, you generally can't enforce a contract that says an employee can't go work for a competitor. It's also why you can't sell your indenture (much the same thing, really).
(IANAL, TINLA)
In general, businesses keeping secrets about how they do things is bad for society. This is the premise of patent law.
Why, then, do we have these laws making this kind of contract stronger? I think it would be more appropriate to restrict this kind of contract as detrimental to commercial development and the general welfare.
IMHO, without trade secret protection, they wouldn't "have to twist themselves into pretzels to hide their secrets", they wouldn't be able to hide their secrets at all. Good ideas would only secure a temporary advantage before they spread around, and that's the way it should be.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
- Titanic
sucked? It would have sucked even worse if it had been shot in James Cameron's back yard. Which is pretty much what you guys are rooting for by being against the big studio model....Some of the most outraged comments in this discussion are the equivalent of no one will invent without IP. They forget that for a long time there WAS no IP, and people still invented, and wrote, and painted.
.24 cents to that one, and so on.
The ones that gall me the most are the ones who complain about how bad things would be without IP, and never acknowledge how bad things are *with* IP. I myself haven't a clue which would be better or worse. I simply do not believe the current IP situation is fixable, so I would be quite willing to try having no IP. But I don't claim to have any argument that it would be clearly better, only that those arguing against anti-IP are not arguing for IP, they are merely ranting with blinders on.
His thesis is in part that no invention stands alone. The most obvious is scientific discovery. How many scientific discoveries were truly years ahead of their field? How many were invented completely out of the blue and had no genesis in the ideas that came before?
About zero. In other words, all would have been invented by some other worker soon enough anyway.
As I wrote in a response elsewhere, the current IP rewards only a few, all out of proportion to their actual contribution. There is no allowance for those who contribute the pure math, or the drudge work trying to replicate other work, or who tested a million reagents or ran a million particle experiments. Why should the one who did the last little bit of work get the jackpot, and the hundreds, or thousands, or millions of others, get nothing?
Why should Alexander Graham Bell have gotten the patent on the phone, and the incredible monopoly riches which followed, simply because he beat that other forgotten man to the patent office by an hour or two?
Should Einstein have patented relativity? Or copyrighted it? Good gosh, there's an idea! Suppose Bohr had to pay royalties to Planck, who had to pay royalties to Maxwell, and so on?
The current IP is broken because it rewards so unevenly and unjustly. The only fix is to patent everything, and I mean everything. That biologist in the lab -- he will need a lab book next to him, and every single idea he uses, every equation, every drawing of a benzene ring, he will log that, and every month, he will cut checks for 13.5 cents to this patent holder,
But wait! Did he get permission to use that benzene ring? Oh, ho, no he didn't! Quick -- some one will sue him. Remember, copyrights are now good for 95 years after death. I bet that benzene ring is still under copyright protection.
Yes, that is unworkable. But that's the trade off you have to make to make IP fair and just.
I bet you could get exactly the same results and put a lot of lawyers and accountants out of work if you simply threw out IP. But I can't prove it anymore than the pro-IP can prove their system works.
--
Infuriate left and right
Obviously, RSAs legendary patents are primarily a mathematical construct, they are clearly novel, and I would be hard pressed to label such an advance "discovered" instead of "invented".
The number-theoretical properties on which the RSA patents are based have always existed. R, S and A "just" went to the trouble of discovering, documenting and automating them; in principle, though, it might as well have been Euler or Gauss. Either way, they're purely intellectual constructs. It's absurd to say that they "own" that portion of mathematics; in this case, the discussion shouldn't be about intellectual property per se, it should be about how much it cost R, S and A to do all these things and how long they should be allowed to profit from the fruit of their work exclusively to compensate for those costs.
If that doesn't convince you, think about where we'd be if Joseph Fourier had decided to patent his transform. What about integration by parts? Heck, what about Euclid's algorithm for GCD determination?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I'll make this short and sweet, because it's late, and I need z's:
I don't think people are against copyright laws and intellectual property as a whole. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that the creators of works - artists, programmers, writers, performers - should have control over how their stuff is distributed and transmitted.
I think what we're getting angry over is the abuse of IP/copyright law and the legislative process by entities that have less interest in the creators' works, and more interest in the amount of money those works can bring in through various forms of control. For one example, take the frightening pay-per-use concept that's slowly seeping into comments made by spokespeople and executives for groups such as Seagram's, Microsoft, the RIAA, and anyone else with a vested interest in draconian control over all media they're involved in (not necessarily media they own, just involved with) and profit in those fields. They not only want consumers to accept it, they want laws in place that will allow them to force it upon the market, whether the consumers know about it up front or not, while providing an unfair legal advantage over people that dare produce art, music or software outside of their sphere of influence.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
You say if you invent something really valuable, you would keep it a secret if there were no IP protection.
Your hidden assumption is that this invention would be such a breakthrough that no one else could possibly duplicate it.
One of his points is that IP differs from physical goods in that no invention stands alone. Your breakthrough would stand on the shoulders of everyone who came before you. He is objecting to the fact that others may have done the pure science background while you scarfed up the next natural step, got to the patent office a few hours (days, months, makes no difference) before all the others who could also come up with the idea, and now you alone stand to reap the reward.
You are outraged that you will not make a fortune. He is outraged that you alone make a fortune.
This is why he says IP benefits one at the expense of many.
If there is no IP at all, then some, like you, would lose out on a fortune which you did not earn purely by the sweat of just your own brow, but by the sweat of all the brows that came before you. The only fix for this, if IP is to be kept, is to protect literally everything. Then you will have to pay royalties everytime you use literally every other idea. Your every working minute will be spent with a logbook by your side, documenting every single idea you use. How would you like it if those big pharmaceuticals you are so fond of turn around and sue the bejazus out of you for all those incredibly trivial ideas you forgot to document?
--
Infuriate left and right
I admit I didn't read the whole chapter from this guy's (expensive) book, because what little I did read was shitty. However, he seems to have missed something that, to me, is important.
Copyright laws prevent Knopf or Grove or pick-your-own-huge-ass-risk-averse-allegedly-cutt
It is good that they can't do that without asking poor little me and my respectable little money-losing publisher first.
If not for this IP protection, I'd be writing copy for Encarta, because I might as well get a weekly check for being hosed by some monstrous corporation.
[ASCII Robin Hood smiling in agreement goes here.]
[Napster comment redacted.]
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
In a society with less hierarchy and greater equality, intrinsic motivation and satisfaction would be the main returns from contributing to intellectual developments. This is quite compatible with everything that is known about human nature. [31] The system of ownership encourages groups to put special interests above general interests. Sharing information is undoubtedly the most efficient way to allocate productive resources. The less there is to gain from credit for ideas, the more likely people are to share ideas rather than worry about who deserves credit for them.
Didn't someone already try this? I mean, this is no more free than the system it critiques. Instead of system that can (forcefully) prevent people from obtaining information or idea that you have, this says that we should establish a system in which people can (forcefully) take ideas that you don't want to share, "for the sake of humanity."
If current ip law is theft from humanity, how is what this guy is proposing anything but theft from the individual?
While it is couched in a very academic tone and wording, this paper (propaganda?) is the most ridiculous(as in, deserving of ridicule) argument against current ip law I have ever seen.
Follow this argument to its logical conclusion:
First we abolish Ip law, and find that such a jolt destroys much of the economic structure of the Western world.
Suffering from such a jolt, the gov't decides to place workers where they can be of the most benefit, regardless of desire (Hey! It is for the greater good).
Finding that private ownership of tangible goods still has too much of an effect on the equality of outcomes all property becomes owned by the state.
No need for money, because the gov't chooses what you do and what you get based on the good of society.
What are you left with?
No money, no property, no freedom, NO FREE WILL.
I would say that was a much bigger damper on "artistic creativity" than the current system.
This guy sounds a lot like the people who chase off the prime movers in Atlas Shrugged.
I hope (and so should you) that I never have to live in a world as such as the one described by this "social scientist".
zor_prime
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." -Mark Twain
Elsewhere I wrote that what I don't like about IP is how it rewards handsomely the very few who did the last bit of work, leaving all the others with nothing, and that the only way to fix IP is to protect absolutely everything, so that everyone will have to constantly log every time they used anybody else's thoughts, no matter how trivial, and cut checks once a month for a hundredth of a cent in royalties.
Here I explore some of the more extreme possibilities if the current IP expansion continues to (even more) ridiculous conclsuions.
Lawyers. I have read of serious proposals to allow lawyers to patent their styles. After all, that's their sole stock in trade, isn't it?
Anyone who invents a new phrase that catches the public imagination. Remember, Eddie Murphy isn't dead yet, so that "trademark" laugh of his is not something you can repeat in public without permission and without paying royalties. Oh yes, I am dead serious about this. That is his stock in trade, right? Or George Carlin's seven dirty words. Not only will you owe him for mentioning that phrase of his, but he probably owes royalties to the FCC for banning them and making his phrase generate income.
As mentioned in the article, the Fosbury Flop and other athletic tricks. Really -- Fosbury had a new way of setting records. Surely that is patentable. Does that mean that every high school kid who got an athletic scholarship for his high jump prowess now owes royatlies to Fosbury?
Who invented "Hungarian notation"? Come on folks, pay up! I understand Microsoft will owe a fortune, but -- ha ha -- you would have to get a look at their own IP (their source code) to know how much. Quite a quandry, eh?
Wanna pay royalties to K&R for C and every language which aped it?
IP as it currently stands is broken because it is such a half hearted attempt. The only way to fix it is to protect literally everything, or protect nothing.
--
Infuriate left and right
I read your bio
you confuse Communism with the governments of Russia, China, and Cuba
The bourgeoisie were not the middle class
There was no middle class
Intellectual property has served its purpose
Clinging to it any longer can only be harmful
Don't be scared to believe that other systems could work, that they may even better than the current one
Do not confuse law with morality.
Just because current laws say record companies have the right to own the music of some dead guy does not mean it is immoral to not allow this or any number of other things.
For more information, consult your Pineal Gland
I'm not going to claim that there are no problems with current IP laws--there are, lots of them-- but these are problems with the laws, not with the basic idea of intellectual property. Do the idiots who write this stuff ever think of where the biotech industry would be without IP? Nowhere, because no investors would be foolish enough to put money into a company that can't even get an advantage from what it discovers. How many writers, even those that don't make a living at it, wouldn't be writing if they didn't at least have the possibility of profiting from their work? And as for the contention that university researchers can serve as a model for producing ideas without properties, sheesh! Those guys are at least a decade behind the times. I wouldn't trust the average university CS prof to be smart enough to push my system's reset button after a crash. The vast majority of real, useful research these days is done by people who would not be employed without IP laws in place. Argue for better IP laws. Don't be a neo-Marxist buffoon and totally discredit your case. Linux: Yesterday's interface tomorrow. Ciao