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.
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.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
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??
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.
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.
Ironically, while Stephen King might own the copyright to his work, but the majority of creators of copyrighted have no such luxury.
You miss the point though. Amazingly, you can be reimbursed as a writer without stringent enforcement copyright laws. Here's a thought: it'd be trivial to post Stephen King's book on Gnapster or Freenet, and thereby avoid paying for it. Instead, people ARE paying for it for two reasons:
Similar principles apply to most forms of art work. One way to look at it is this: writers, musicians, researchers, sculptors, painters, etc. all existed prior to the existence of copyrights. So somehow it's possible. On the flip side, publishing companies, recording companies, etc. didn't. Copyright makes it possible for those kinds of businesses to exist.
Now, publishing and recording companies actually have, in the past, served a very useful purpose for society, namely they broadened the exposure of various works of writing or music. They were the most efficient way to get the job done. However, with the growth of the Internet, there is now an even MORE efficient means of pushing around intellectual information. Unfortunately, publishing companies and recording companies are slowing this process around. Ironically, where they were once an accelerant they now are an impedement.
I'm not saying that these kinds of companies need to go away, as there's a lot more to either business than just printing and shipping books and cd's. However, owning the material they print one of the ways they make their money, and that aspect of things has to change because it no longer is beneficial to society.
sigs are a waste of space
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
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. The "perfection" of the copy is irrelevant. Digital copying is significant because it has reduced the cost of copying (which has always been determined not by the idea but by the physical medium in which it is expressed) to essentially zero, thereby exposing the grotesque flaws of the IP system.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach