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Information Liberation
Thanks to danny of danny's reviews for pointing that the full text of Against Intellectual Property (which we ran a chapter of back in July is online in full now.
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besonic.com/chrisj ...so pay me!
Or, acknowledge that in some fields the competition is so completely brutal that authors, musicians, artists customarily need to prove their dedication and tenacity by continuing to produce, spending their own money on their art and working and working until they are good enough that they _deserve_ to be paid anything.
Or, indeed, consider that 'listen to me' is in some ways even a more powerful call than 'pay me'. Note that both phrases end with ME! A lot of art is about Me, Me... it's "look at the art _I_ did! Listen to the song about _my_ feelings!" Is it any wonder that, for example, musicians in the brutally competitive music market of LA customarily PAY to play gigs? Does this free-market development fit nicely with your notion that under capitalism artists get paid to make art- if it wasn't for those dastardly intellectual property criminals- and those pesky kids! ;P
Let me put it this way. (the same link) Is that free music? Just because you can download it?
I prefer to see it as over 100M of web hosting for which I pay nothing. Priced out well-connected web hosting of that size lately?
The bottom line is, people who really love what they do will do it for not-money. This does not mean the same people will turn down money if it's offered- hey, I wouldn't! *g* Do please throw money! Or book studio time with me and travel to Vermont and cut a killer album. It's not just about the artistic expression. But that artistic expression is going to be there whether the money is or not...
And that's what I am not seeing in so many of these arguments- people who have no idea from 'pay to play', no clue what the entertainment business is _really_ like, are rabid to defend the 'rights' of a few 'winners' who are milking the hell out of the system. Rather than saying "OK, you're not signed so you don't _deserve_ to have money, but Britney is a great artist because she's signed so she deserves to earn fifty billion times what you could possibly earn, and keep a millionth of that if she has a smart manager!", what is so wrong with asking "What could happen to even the odds a bit? What could technology bring that would make artists compete more on the merits, rather than politics, money and the ability to be chosen by a power elite which controls the mass media completely?"
I would humbly suggest that 'cutting back intellectual property rights' would go quite a ways toward accomplishing the latter. I don't think it would be necessary to obliterate it so much that, for example, I could claim I wrote "Oops I Did It Again" (pop quiz: who _did_ write that? Prove it wasn't me. Were they paid? As much as Britney? As much as the producer? Did they get points? A royalty?). However, it is reasonable to expect I could sing "Oops I Did It Again" while walking down the street and suffer no worse than physical attacks by music lovers. I could tell a friend the words to it, or hum them the tune. In a digital world I could beam the digital audio to their wristband mp3 player so they could hear what I was talking about. I could make a "I Love Britney Spears!" page at ilovebritneyspears.com and put the digital audio and lyrics on the webpage, at as high a quality as possible since I love it so much and want everyone to agree how wonderful it is. And everyone who visits the page would have a chance for me to do everything I possibly could do to _persuade_ them that "Oops I Did It Again" was the most phenomenal audio art the world has ever known...
Intellectual property, as it's currently practiced, is tremendously biased against this behavior, in a frankly classist sense. I cannot be the scout, the evangelist, the fanatic- it isn't my place. That which I am so passionate about is not 'my property': I must keep my place, I must be subservient. "Um, I know this wonderful song- I can't give it to you, I'm not allowed to, in fact I wasn't allowed to make a web domain about it either, but you should go to BigRecordCompany.com and search for 'Britney'..."
That's obscene. It's behavior like the art, the product, is some sort of oxygen indispensable to life. The Merry Pranksters of the 60s had a catchphrase that remains relevant to this day: Art is not eternal!
I don't think Britney's 'right' to snatch a tiny percentage of unthinkable sums of CD gross sales is any more important than any other artist's 'right' to produce some income, no matter how small, just for having tried to produce art. I don't see this as a right at all. If you have something to say, say it- if you have a sound you want to make, make it- the way things are, it's virtually impossible for you to earn any sort of money on that anyhow, and although this is the result of a very sick business, intrinsically that's not wrong.
What is wrong is stepping on the fans, the enthusiasts and evangelists who give that _praise_ and appreciation that is _really_ the coin of the artist's realm. What's wrong is shutting those people off, making them go "Um, I could give you a copy of this art I really love (without me having to go without) but I'm not allowed to...", stifling them, damping their fires. Their place is not 'subservient passive consumers'. They are the freaking _lifeblood_ of any entertainment industry, and the only reason they can be so lightly suppressed and stamped on and trodden into the dirt is that the music industry genuinely does not believe in them anymore- it's all 'push' media now. Except for the Net, and the rest of the world- except for the same 'consumers' who are thought to be nothing more than passive buckets into which you can dump any old slop, given a hot mix and a big marketing budget.
That's where money has led: do the homework, work it out for yourself. That has been the result of intellectual property, in practice.
There have been examples, in history, of un-IP: situations where there was great artistic work being done without it being primarily considered intellectual property. An example would be: blues. What did blues produce? Rock and roll, R+B, the Beatles etc. The 'floating phrases' of blues, too general to belong to anyone, became a universal language open to anyone with a voice and a personality to express. Access to this pool of ideas allowed new forms of music to burgeon and arise.
I more than suspect that if we wish to ever have another artistic reinassance as significant as the birth of rock and roll, we will have to do it in _spite_ of Intellectual Property: or as if IP did not exist.
But the most important prerequisite would be a feeling from the people that they too can create, rap, sample, whatever: that they are not subservient consumer nonentities, that they have a voice. And we may get it.
The revolution is not Napster. The revolution is 1,000,000 people making their _own_ music getting _ideas_ from Napster. Getting total access to all forms of music as freely as breathing. Stifling access to culture and putting up toll booths is akin to stifling art.
You couldn't stop Metallica recording their CDs (especially in the early days!) if you formed a freaking shield wall and hit at them with riot clubs. You'd end up flat on your back with teeth marks all over you and Metallica would be recording their CDs anyway.
That's what you have to do if you want a place in a very ruthless business. Priority One is you get what you want- at all costs- and Metallica wants, or wanted, to make CDs and very loud aggressive heavy metal music: if they'd wanted money there are far better ways and they surely knew that the whole time.
What they've been so upset about is simply an extension of their whole attitude so far- Napster and Napster users appeared to be just more obstacles, this time to getting paid. I wonder if they were just as rabid and fanatic about attacking things like the customary music industry 90% charge for media breakage (basically artists are given X% royalty- but after all other subtractions are done, the artist then is docked another 10% for breakage, a charge dating back to the days of shellac records. I'm not making this up) I think Metallica might well have been just as frenzied in their attack on inequities of that sort- we'd just never hear about it, it is contract business between the band and their label. At any rate, it's not Metallica being exclusively centered on money: it's more Metallica being Metallica. Anyone could have seen that coming.
Anybody seriously worrying about an artist's need to earn a living could do much more good by trying to attack the RIAA and the labels by any means necessary: heck, you could leave the RIAA and labels alone and just attack the independent promoters! (i.e. payola, which never died and now makes up roughly a third to half of your retail CD price) That's if you trust the labels to go "Yay! We don't have to dump billions to these mafialike creeps anymore! Let's lower prices!" which I don't.
The point is, going after peer-to-peer and the _fans_ is the most asinine way to try to help the artists earn a living that could be imagined. Yes, there are major things wrong with the situation, but attacking the natural adaptation to an increasingly monopolized, unfree industry is not the way to fix it- or even to help artists be paid.
Some information wouldn't be created. There would still be a great deal of literature, music and software. It would mainly hurt the creation of information that involves large production costs, such as television shows and movies. Most authors and composers have a day job, a relatively small number make enough money at it to make it their full-time profession.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Biological information can now be claimed as intellectual property. US courts have ruled that genetic sequences can be patented, even when the sequences are found "in nature," so long as some artificial means are involved in isolating them. This has led companies to race to take out patents on numerous genetic codes. In some cases, patents have been granted covering all transgenic forms of an entire species, such as soybeans or cotton, causing enormous controversy and sometimes reversals on appeal. One consequence is that transnational corporations are patenting genetic materials found in Third World plants and animals, so that some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries.
This article is intellectually corrupt. It is full of factual assertions that do not hold up under any sort of scrutiny. For example the statement "some Third World peoples actually have to pay to use seeds and other genetic materials
that have been freely available to them for centuries" is absurd on the face of it. The cases where "third world organisms" have become subject of patents have resulted in the sale of IMPROVED versions of the plant materials, not the native forms.
It would seem to me that slashdot's editors have gone over the deep end on this issue by posting this sort of manifesto repeatedly. At the very least we should see some articles allowed that make the case FOR IP.
Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe)
I'll have to challenge the factual veracity of this - as far as I can tell through performing patent searches there is no such US Patent. Please cite the patent number.
As far as I can see there are only two genetic engineering patents covering Arabica coffee - one a tissue culture method for reproducing clones, and the other a method of introducing new genetic material. Nothing regarding a patent on a gene conferring disease resistance.
Eitherways, people who really love what they do would not do it for money...
This theory is absolute, total nonsense. If you want to encourage creative works, compensation is required.
You cannot obtain the tools necessary for modern research and development without spending considerable sums of money. A good electron microscope may cost a million dollars. Other tools are equally costly. Lab space is not rent free, nor are the test tubes, vacuum ovens or the benches within. The computers required for data analysis, or the electricity requred to run them are likewise not free.
People may well choose a profession based on what they enjoy doing, but the fact is that you need a roof over your head, and food on the table. Savings for retirement, and a college education for your children are nice too. Not to mention being able to pay for medical care.
If I am faced with a choice between a profession that I love that pays nothing, and a profession that I merely like, but will provide well for my children surely I will choose the latter for I love my family very well indeed.
Perhaps you will get some works - those which can be performed by an individual working in his spare time in an unheated cave. But surely you will NOT get the benefits of works that require any significant investment.
This provides a way to regulate images of pornography and violence without raising First Amendment objections. You can make it and sell it, but you can't prevent it from being copied, even in bulk. This makes it far less profitable. It would put a big dent in the commercial porno industry without restricting freedom of expression at all. It also carves out an area where copy protection isn't allowed, a good thing to have in law.
This is a good way to try out "Against Intellectual Property" in an area where, if it doesn't work out, there's no great harm.
Remember, Bush doesn't owe Hollywood, let alone Simi Valley, home of the porno industry, any favors. This is within political reach.
. .
The review at Danny Yee's beings with a famous misquotation.
"Starting with Acton's dictum that power corrupts, Information Liberation explores the corruptions and abuses of information power . . ."
Lord Acton's quote was : "power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely"
This is precisely the same difference (from the mis quotation, in meaning and effect) between those I see who take copyright and trademark laws and use them for tactical gain (please note, all you trendy IP lawyers, I see no bill or statute headed "Intellectual Property", which are words I think created to make this sound the birth right of anyone who merely posesses a brain and uses it), and those who, on the other side say that rights such as copyright should be abandoned because bully boy tactics hurt a number of the innocent.
I ended up arguing this point at length last night in this post (which is very long so I'll excerpt the relevant bit here) :
Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response.
Having just read Chapter 3, "Against intellectual property". I'm fear that Slashdotters who read this book hoping to arm themselves with a credible arsenal against abusers of "IP concepts" (ugh, sorry but that jargonism just slipped in there and covers the relevant sins :), may be disappointed.
Ashleigh Brilliant is a "professional epigrammatist." He creates and copyrights thousands of short sayings, such as "Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything." When he finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright. Television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation. Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue, perhaps because it would have cost more than this to contest it.
A full text of this article, from Wall Street Journal, 27 January 1997, is available here
From it, you will note that "Random House, which published Mr. Brinkley's book, paid him $1,000 for the rights without agreeing to or contesting Mr. Brilliant's claims.
Copyright subsists - exists within, and does not have to be claimed by any author, of an original artistic or literary work. In UK and US code, titles, epithets and bon mots do *not* gain protection as they are not of themselves considered artistic works.
You cannot copyright things as simple as this. But you can, apparently get the occasional (stupid)publisher to pay up to stop you wasting their time.
Personally, I would have contested in court if necessary this man's claims over ownership of title to a book with which he had no connection. (his this sort of claim which might easily be thown out, or at least loose quickly on case law)
Moreover, in the UK there is the concept of a "vexatious claim" in which it can in certain cases become a criminal offence to attempt in bad faith to extract payment not due by means of coercion, including by means of jumped up legal threat. Also in the UK I could apply to the court that any claimant post bond for costs (including mine) in the event he looses and this application usually scares the harassers away :-)
The author of "Information liberation" uses this example as supposedly one of the more egregious happenings in copyright abuse. Awww, come on Mr Brian Martin, it was a simple thing for the publisher to work out that their lawyer's time even in typing a proper response could cost more than the thousand bucks they paid. But I find, from experience, that people who make claims such as Mr Brilliant did do not usually press these in court, as they _know_ how weak they are. I would have acted differently from Random House, especially how you see now how these decisions become grist to the misinformed mill of people working against fair rights in works (Mr Martin)
1. Power tends to corrupt, and information power is no exception
So, should we eliminate power, or should we eliminate corruption. Which is more practical? Which is more beneficial?
2. Mass media are inherently corrupting
So, you published a BOOK and posted this on the INTERNET. Irony anyone?
3. Strategies against intellectual property include civil disobedience
Yeah!!! You gotta fight for your right to party. Give me MP3s or give me death?
4. Surveillance and 5. beurocracy
OK, I'll give you that. Nobody likes beurocracy or invasion of privacy. OTOH, what are you going to do with middle managers after they are let go? Put them on welfare? But wait... welfare is a... well, you know.
6. Defamation law and free speech
Certainly he can't be defending those who *lie* about other people. How can you defend a lie? The issue of defamation where the facts are murky, OTOH, is also likely to be murky. This one is a judgement call. Throwing all defamation laws out doesn't seem like a well balanced solution.
7. The work of professional researchers is strongly influenced by funding, disciplines, hierarchy and competition
No argument here.
8. Simple ideas have a bad reputation. People often think simple ideas are simplistic: wrong, incomplete, inaccurate, misleading. I agree that many simple ideas are no good, but many are quite useful...
So, some simple ideas are good and some aren't. What does this tell us? Not a whole lot. A brick is a simple idea. So is a lump of s%@#. A computer is a complicated idea. So is an H-bomb. So, by defending simple ideas, what is he defending here? It would appear to be nothing.
9. It's better to think for oneself and to assess ideas on their own merits than to worry about whether they came from a famous intellectual or an unknown.
Good in theory, but in practice who has time to sift through all the ideas? Fame exists in part because it's a convenient filter. Or, fame wouldn't exist if it didn't have some value.
10. Information seems like the ideal basis for a cooperative society. It can be made available to everyone at low cost, and a person can give away information and still retain use of it.
If you only made the information for your own consumption, then this is a valid statement. It's a pity to think that future information output might slide down to the level of production motivated only by personal need. After all, how many people have a personal need for a movie, play, or computer program and are able to devote sufficient resources just to satisfy their personal need?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Its been said before but aperantly not enough.
They actually know that their records will be on napster within release time + encode time of the fastest buyers computer. And they still continue to make music? Why? 'Cause they also know that lots of people like to buy records. Like to have a neat cover. Like to spend their free time on other things than downloading stuff from napster. Like their music to play at best possible sound quality.
There will allways be someone there to create great music for us. We will lose our Brittney Spears, Boyzones and Spice Girls etc. But do we really need those? Now adays, anyone and their dog can create good music with a average computer or a plain old guitar. And if releasing it on napster will make them famous. Then they will release their music on napster. They need to earn some extra bucks? They can go on tour. Sell merchandise, or even record a CD.
Everyone is happy, and the strongest (best) will survive and go pro. Everyone else will have to support them selves with a real job. Like helping out elders..
I like the sound of this.
Had patents existed then, the man who invented the wheel would have cashed in big for a few years until the rights passed into the public domain. At worst, transportation technology would have been set back 14 years and dot-com millionaires would have traded in their '89 Gremlins for '98 DeLoreans. (Car nuts, please don't flame any anachronisms.) And we'd have had 14 more blessedly SUV-free years. At best, the wheel would have passed into common usage far ealier and we'd have hovercars today.
See, the point of patents is that they remove the incentive to keep knowledge secret. The inventor receives a short-term monopoly in exchange for making the knowledge public.
...have never needed money to motivate them to create. They pursued their vocation because they couldn't stop themselves if they had wanted to. Ada Augusta merley heard about the idea of a computer that didn't even exist and she couldn't help trying to program it. The best programmers today are no different; they would be hacking away whether someone was paying them to or not. Rock stars are always telling interviewers that they practice their art out of love and consider themselves lucky that they get paid to do do what they love. Now they will get the chance to prove it.
With the decline in corporate control of information and content, musicians, writers and programmers will have direct access to a worldwide audiance, but no more of the exclusive access that the media empires of the past enjoyed. It means that more artists than ever will be able to quit their day jobs and make a moderate living doing what they love, but hardly any will become the kind of intergalactic superstars that can afford to buy private islands and professional football teams. I don't have a problem with that.
At least, that's what Mr Martin says in Chapter 9.
I'm amazed by the extremism here (here being Slashdot, not some third-class rant dressed up as some kind of progressive politics) - a few crude attempts at copy protecting software in the 80s followed by some attempts to abolish fair use in the 90s from the MPAA and others, and suddenly the whole notion of paying people for what they've done and how they've enriched our lives is an outrage, and our dear friends who edit Slashdot believe any old argument for doing so, no matter how idiotic, is worthy of putting up for debate.
But as crude arguments go, here's mine: DeCSS good. Allows fair use. Doesn't harm people's right to be rewarded. Napster very bad. Allows people to exploit other's work without paying a fair price. Brian Martin idiot. Doesn't people paid because he doesn't like them. Wants free lunch. Wont get content if continues to spit bile and fail to offer reward.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The most known example of this is the Arabica coffee bean in the eastern parts of Africa. Ethiopian farmers now have to pay royalties to an american company if they want to sell their coffee on the american market. (It is an american patent, and not valid in Europe) The reason is that this company has isolated the gene that makes this plant resistant to a very widespread coffee disiese that kills cromps in the entire region. The arabica coffee is the only one resistant. This company hasn't made any changes, they have only found the gene, but still they get to collect royalties.
but I seen to recall that in Japan the patent laws are more liberal in some regards than in the USA.
(Of course, if you are expert in Japanese Patent law, please feel free to correct any errors, and make me look like a complete fool) ;-)
Japaness law has changed recently, but this is the way it has been for many years. Here is a link to a specific case that is easy enough to follow, and illustrates the point well enough. It also reveals recent shifts in Japanese law:
It goes something like this. Minor variations qualified the unit as a separate patent.
The upshot probably is not as serious as needing to have patents on green cars vs blue cars (for example), but patents had to be on specific implementations of things. I am not enough of a lawyer to know how much of this is still the case.
But Reverse engineering so that there are some marginal performance differances was common, and there are a lot of copycats that did exactly that. (Sometime old habits die hard.) You build something, say a car engine. They reverse engineer it, find out all of the really important stuff like your design tricks, and them implement them in their own designs.
This situation is really similar to learning code by reading code. The problem is in the setup costs to get production ramped up.
In the USA it is a little more liberal, in that patent can cover more general principles. Things, for example, like the integrated circuit. They did not have to patent all possible circuit implementations of that technology. And their Patent ran out after the usual length of time.
But this is where we get into trouble, because this is where patents get applied to software. A possible incorrect analogy is made between something that involves a manufacturing process (an engine, for example) compared to something that does not.
Quick research reveals that Japans' Patent law was revised in 1998 to correct some of the problems inherent in this. Here is a link to a quick summaryThe important section in this has to do with Design law.
This is all interesting in that it provides a practical example to the problems in different implementations of Patent Law. It has interesting parallels to the the discussions regarding software design, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"