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(Well Written) Essay Against Copyright
rts writes "A well written article about how copyrights and patents are
anti-free market
is running in the Canadian paper "The National Post"." The backdrop to the story is, perhaps inevitably, the Napster case - but it's much better written then most of the other bazillion Napster editorials. Update: 01/28 04:48 PM by S :The article refered to this paper by Stephan Kinsella.
I recently came up with a design and did some basic prototyping. This took me all of 2 months. Upon checking for a pre-existing patent, which I spent 2 *weeks* researching, I happened across someone else with the exact same design. This patent holder beat me to it by 3 years (he was awarded the patent sometime last year).
Does this annoy me that I have to contact the patent holder to find -if- I can license the rights from him? Yes. Does it bother me that I could have "had" the patent if I hadn't been dong something else in my life? Yes.
But worse would be if there were no patents at all. I would feel pretty helpless with what to do with a "good idea."
He, like I, appear to be individuals who just came across a "better way" to do something. Now, he now has 17 or whatever years to refine, market, and produce the idea. Let's forget the time that he "owns" the design (more on that later). In a world without patents, as soon as his product hit the market, HP, IBM, and just about any software/hardware related tech company could look at his product and in less than 6 months, crush his chances at market survival. Why? They have the designers, they have the supply chains, the economy of scale, and the marketing departments. This guy would receive nothing for his efforts.
I agree with you that the patent period is too long. 17 years (and I believe it is longer now) feels like a generation. At the same time, 1 or 2 years (as yo propose) is way too short too, mainly because the "little guy" won't have the chance to push out into the marketplace. Should he? Well, I believe that the time and effort in development does have a corresponding cost that needs to be rewarded. People should be awarded for their ideas. Patents are probably the one area that individuals have a *chance* of being equal with the huge corporations (then again, they'd be crushed in litigation).
Personally, I think 5-6 years is a nice figure--an incentive to move on the idea but enough time to gain some mindshare for the design or product. If the product is "not so hot", most will just wait for the patent period to ride out. If the patent idea is "hot", 5 years is just long enough to pressure people to get in on the action the marketplace the idea has created. Similarly, the dramaticly shortened patent holding period may help lessen litigation, since there is less at stake of not "being the first". And 5 years tends to lend itself to a balancing act--it's just enough time for the patent holder to come out with their product, but not enough time for a market stranglehold, so when other players come in, they still have a chance...this sounds to me more like what a free market should be--reward the designer, but let market forces pick the best product.
Put another way, patents equalize the rights of corporations and individuals in some ways. They give them the same playing ground. That's good. Without them, every idea an individual came up with was intangible because the established companies could just gobble it up. Corporations know this--this is why they have lobbied for the patent period to increase (and won). The longer patent holding period gives larger companies the excuse to overzealously protect their ideas or, with litigation, go after competing ideas. Since they are large, the chances the corporations would win sides with them.
Hmmm...
I'm not sure, because all that philosophical doublespeak got me confused, but I have a feeling that that article might have sucked.
I'll take the final sentence as an illustration: "Since ideas should not be treated as property, laws that target those who have not violated person or property are wrong". I'm guessing this is the grand finale of the writer's argument. Now this comes after focussing on commercial music recordings.
But Brittany Spears songs are NOT an idea. They're an implementation. A product. It took a huge amount of money just to produce the music, let alone to market it. This is what I think the author has completely missed.
Surely when somebody invests time and money to create something, they should be given the right to determine who gets free copies and who should pay for it!?
The public's current attitude towards music pricing is the result of supply exceeding demand (hence reducing perceived value), as well as dissatisfaction with niche music being ignored in favour of factory-production hits. Music fans still don't object to paying reasonable prices for the music they genuinely like, as research on Napster users has shown.
Heh, I do wonder how that writer would feel if suddenly all her freelance writing became open fodder for free distribution because people suddenly decided that it was just an idea that deserved to float in the ether, rather than a product that took time and effort to produce. This philosophical stuff is all good and well, but last time I looked, freelance writers needed an income too.
So anyway, I know I've probably just missed some important points in the philosophical-jargon-laden-section, so please enlighten me, fellow Slashdotters!
That's all.
P.S. Oh, didn't Stephen King cut his online novel prematurely and go back to writing more lucrative commercial novels?
Nope.
:-)
The BT (British Telecom) patent on hyperlinks is a USA patent
A free market has no restrictions on the behaviour of corporations whatsoever.
False. You're not talking about a free market but about anarchy. Being in a free market doesn't mean that you have no rights.
They are free to engage in price fixing, formation of monopolies, egregious treatment of employees, sale of dangerous products,
Right, right, right, and right.
false advertising,
Wrong. A lie amounts to use of force and you can be held liable for it.
copying of their competitor's trademarks,
Wrong again. This is a violation of their competitors' right to property, and is a criminal offense.
mislabelling their products contents,
Wrong for the same reason as above.
and whatever forms of environmental rape that result in their greatest profit.
As long as the damage remains restricted to their own property. This includes air pollution and even noise.
A free market does not mean lawlessness. One has to wonder what you're hoping to achieve by claiming that it does.
2. No, Tim Berners-Lee developed the entire idea of the Web at CERN in Switzerland in '89. (IIRC, the original program, running on a NeXT was called WorldWideWeb - it browsed, it served, the only major differences from today were the lack of tables and inline graphics)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If copyright were abolished tomorrow there would, it's expected, be no NEED for the GPL.
Firstly, because no one would have much of a reason to keep their source code secret - you could copy the binaries freely, so there's little to be gained by concealing source. And by releasing the source, third parties could modify it, or produce good add-ons, or port it, etc. increasing mindshare for what that would be worth.
Secondly you do not need to agree to the GPL in order to download use or modify software distributed under it. It's already protected by copyright. You need to agree to the GPL (or work out private arrangements with the copyright holder) in order to REDISTRIBUTE the software or your modified version therof.
This is why the GPL is so much better than 99.44% of software licenses. It only grants you rights by agreeing to it. Nothing is taken away. Wheras something like MS's EULA tries to (illegally IMHO) strip people of rights they're guaranteed by copyright law in order to let them use something they already paid for anyway. The BSD license is also quite good, but I personally don't care for it as much as I like the GPL as it doesn't take measures to ensure the continued viability of the community it serves.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
First a note on gender. The name Ilana strikes me as feminine, so I will refer to the author as she rather than he.
I have pretty much taken that at face value. Since the type was so tiny that I couldn't read it, I downloaded and restyled the article. The entire article, (minus the National Post cruft) is (temporarily) online at My site. Warning, I am at the end of a low-bandwidth pipe. I can only handle some 30 .. 60 hits/minute.
I doubt that a haevy load would take the site down, but you might
have trouble getting through.
MODERATORS: please do not raise this above "2" to keep my load down.
I have not contacted the authour since there was no clue in the original as to how to do so. If anyone knows how to do so, please write me! You have the hostname, the username should be "websmith".
== Buz :)
Did Mr. Black not sell the Post, as well as most of the rest of his Canadian newspaper holdings, a few months ago? Unfortunately, the rather extreme right-wing, anti-Chretien slant of the paper seems unchanged. It's a sad day, indeed, when the Globe and Mail is the most liberal-leaning daily in Canada.
But what about Metallica. Clearly they have invested countless hours and dollars in the creation of the prerecorded music that I value. Should I be forced at gunpoint (forced by law) to compensate them with my money? Should the business that helped me save time in the downloading process be forced by law to compensate them?
I think the answer is clearly NO. But then how can Metallica possibly make any money by creating prerecorded music?
Several ways. First they can use the pre-recorded music as a loss-leader (open up your marketing 101 books) to bring more and more people into their for-pay concerts. A live performance is still valued by most music fans and is a unique once in a lifetime service (either you were there or you were not, and no watching it on pay-perview is not just as good (unless the band stinks)). Besides performance the band can hold other special events and charge for admission. If they truly want to be compensated for their pre-recorded music then they can release their songs serially and demand a ransom to release the next one (or next set, whatever they want to). Basically this is the street performer protocol and would work well.
This is long-winded, but my point is that times are changing and the internet allows for the sharing of information between people for virtually no marginal cost. Business models based on government enforcement of IP monopolies will not last as people will find a way to get what they want.
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
You could say the same about anything else -- building bridges, writing software, etc. The fact remains that he's ignored the question regarding economic incentives. Why should artists go unpaid for their work, especially if the public are willing to pay to hear it ?
Music is never free -- someone has to put time and effort into it. Basically, whgat you're saying is that the musicians were screwed. This certainly explains why the bebopers had such short life spans Charlie parker was on his way out before he was thirty, Billy Holiday died fairly young, as did most of them (Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, ... ) ... it's easier to count the ones that *didn't* die young
A lot of these guys died because they were basically worn out -- they'd prematurely aged partly through drug abuse, but you can't sort of seperate the drug abuse from the fact that these guys were working ridiculous hours playing live.
You can do away with copyrights and still get great music, and that's just fine if you're happy to screw the artists (which most of the napseter mob are)
Well, see if I give you any money for that comment! ;)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Are you serious here? They might not have incentive to create, or they might not have the time/money to create even with the incentive, but surely, if they create the work, they aren't going to lock it up in the cellar just cause they won't get paid for it!
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
However, I think if someone takes something that's 'yours', and uses it without damaging it in anyway and without inhibitng your use of it (Say they sleep on your steps while you're on vacation, or copy your music, or set a book down on your car while it's in a parking lot, or pop an outgoing letter in your mailbox (That's tricky because they might mess with your mail, but let's pretend outgoing and incoming are different boxes), or look at your clock...), I think they should be able too.
Think about that. Some of them these are legal (sleeping on your steps probably is, setting a book on your car is, and looking at your clock is), and some of them are not (it's simply illegal to mess with someone else's mailbox, and copying music is a violation of copyright laws). Why is this? Well, mail has odd legal protections in this country...and copyright law...um...protects the 'owner' of the music.
I just wanted to bring this up. Do we, as a society, really want to let 'owners' of things charge people to do stuff with those things that doesn't affect those things or said owner in anyway? Why don't we have them spread the wealth? We can consider it a tax on owning things. If you own something that people can use without affecting your use of it or affecting it in general...you have to let them. (Of course, if it really didn't affect you, you wouldn't even know in the first place...which raises the question of why you want to forbid it.)
P.S. You will note that I said 'raises the question', instead of 'begging the question'. Please remember you do not say 'begs the question' when a question is raised, you say it when a theory is proven by first assuming the theory is true. In other words, if the proof only proves the arguement is logically consistent, and doesn't prove it true. This has been your offtopic grammar lesson for the day, and has nothing to do with the comment I'm replying too. ;)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Just because you aren't able to earn money is no business of mine. The ethical consideration is not whether I have not compensated you or not, but whether I have harmed (or at least inconvienced you) you and then not compensated you. You don't have some magical right to be compensated by me. You can get that before the harm, or after the harm, or, as a last resort, after the lawsuit. ;)
The point was, whether I copy your music or not, you and your music have not been harmed by said act. In fact, like I said, assuming I copy it from something then your copy, you'll never even know I copied it. Perhaps you would rather I paid you for the music, but I'd rather people paid me for reading these comments instead of reading them for free. In fact, I'd much rather people paid me for loafing around on the net all day.That doesn't mean it's going to happen, or there's some moral obligation there for people to do so..
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
We're talking past each other. I just said my copying music you created does not, in fact, harm you at all, and you will not even know about it if I do so. That is my entire point. The action does not harm you anymore them me looking at a clock you have on the wall harms you. We don't need to 'assign rights' to looking at clocks at all, because looking at a clock doesn't inconvenience the owner, and neither does copying a song they have produced.
You're begging the question, assuming that you have a 'right' to sell your song, and when I copy it, I am depriving you of money. Well, by reading this comment without paying me any money, you have deprived me of money. In fact, by merely existing without giving me money, you continuelly deprive me of said money. This doesn't mean I have some sort of right to your money, anymore then you have the right to get money from me when I do something that doesn't affect you. Affecting people is what property rights are based on.
Within the last couple of hundred years, though, we invented the idea that people can, in certain circumstances, limit the use of idea they had first (patents and copyrights) (Trademark laws is based on harm. Fakes can ruin your reputation.) We do this purely to give incentive to creators. However, the cost of production has continutally gone down (think how much cheaper it is, in real money, to produce a CD, as opposed to a record. It used to require teams of people, and nowdays you can produce a passible CD in your bedroom with a one time fee of 2000 dollars and per CD cost of 30 cents.), while price has also gone up (in real money), and copyright times have continued to go UP. Way up. Something is wrong here, and what it is is people forgetting 'intellectual property' is just a legal fiction intended to get incentives for production, not to have them make insanely large profits. Oh, and the people making the profit in some industries, like music, aren't even the people making the music! Many many of these artists are taking huge risks making these songs, spending all their time and a lot of their money, along with some of a music producer's, and ending up with a CD they get 25 cents off of everytime someone buys it, and they have to pay back the forty thousand dollars they borrowed from the producers in the first place...maybe, just maybe, we don't need so much inventive out there. If people are willing to do this for just the barest chance of making any money out of it. (I feel like the Grinch now, at the end of the book ;), then maybe a lot of musicians aren't in it for the money at all!
With the road tolls, I was listing things that inconvenience/harm you, not things we should have for free. I'm actually all for road tolls, it's a good idea, as long as we can actually move around fairly easily without paying them if we take the uncongested long way. (Which isn't any kind of moral stand, I just think it's not nice to lock people up who don't have money.) But this isn't very relevant to the discussion at hand. ;)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You're taking one comment, one parenthetical comment, from my post and obsessing over it. If what you want to do is encourage the free distribution of software and the recognizing of contributors, then you should like the Berkeley license; it explicitly requires users of the code to give credit to contributors. It's much more sharing-oriented than the GPL. The GPL is a political tool to that perpetuates Richard M. Stallman's delusional, destructive, utopian vision of the world.
Regarding medical technologies, please remember why all of these drugs and technologies got developed: to make money. Arguing over whether patent protection lasts too long is completely different than arguing over whether or not patents should exist. And unless you want to create a huge, centrally-planned, government-funded research establishment, you're not going to get technological innovation without intellectual property protection.
Regarding your second rambling, incoherent "argument", no one puts a gun to an artist's head and says, "Sign this contract or else." Artists sign contracts because they want to get rich through the labels' distribution and promotion efforts.
The issue of artist compensation is completely unrelated to labels efforts to undermine fair use rights. And I fail to see how destroying the recording industry is going to make anyone's life better. I can't express my frustration with your brand of idealistic delusion. But let me try to explain why you're a complete idiot:
What does a label do? Yes, it manufactures and distributes music. Whatever. What it really does is tell people what music is important and what music they should listen to. Mass media students would call them gatekeepers. Labels shape public opinion. That's why artist sign up with labels.
So what happens if you destroy every major label on the face of the planet? Other people are going to step forward to assume the role of gatekeeper. "But, no, there will be no gatekeepers in our beautiful new utopia. No one will tell you what to listen to!" Uh, yeah, whatever. Radio stations, MTV, Mp3.com, sites like Slashdot, and millions of others will get into the business of recommending music. And guess what? You're going to need to pay a fee or suffer through advertisements to get their opinions, and these people and organizations will become the new toll-collecting, money-making companies in the world of music.
When you page through a PC Connection or Datacom Warehouse catalog or go to Pricewatch.com, almost all of the products you see are there because of placement fees that have been paid. Why do you think the music industry will be any different? If I create a new single, I'm going to need to cough up some cash to get it featured.
Or wait, here's an idea: I'll found a company that will pay those placement fees, in return for half of your royalities. Oops! I just founded a record label!
To call the editorial well written is to ignore it's rambling incoherence. Also of note are its arguments whose conclusions are nearly identical to their premises. For example, to paraphrase: intellectual property law is evil because it is evil to deny someone access to something.
As a writer and programmer, it's going to take a lot of explaining to convince me that I should have no control over the distribution and use of the products of my work.
One of the justifications of real -- as in real estate -- property rights argues that when an individual puts work into a piece of land by by improving it (clearing, cultivating, etc.), he acquires the right of ownership. This concept still exists in U.S. law: if I occupy a piece of land and treat it as my own and pay taxes, after many years (ten or twenty) I become the legitimate owner of the property. If the prior owner cares so little about it that he is not aware of your squatting or does nothing about it, he does not "deserve" the land.
As an aside, notice the analogy to trademark law? If others use your trademark, and you do nothing to stop it, you lose the trademark.
Anyway, I believe that it's the work and not the physicality of the property that is important. In other words, this principle of ownership doesn't disappear simply because the thing being improved -- created, actually -- is not tangible.
But just as physical property rights are limited, so should intellectual property rights. The big problem we have today is the destruction of fair use through the passage of ill-conceived laws (DMCA) and shrink- and click-wrap licenses.
Remember that without copyright law, the GPL (which I personally think is evil) could not exist, and nothing would really change, because intelligent intellectual property holders will simply move completely from using copyrights to contracts and licenses to control the distrubution and use of their work.
What we really need is a law that roughly states that "Congress shall pass no law and no individual or corportation may enforce any contract that abridges the fair use of copyrighted material."
Just because I think something is the case, I don't necessarily think that it's a good thing. Case in point: Labels control the minds of (most of) the music-buying public. You think I like this. I don't, but it's not going to go away, even if you destroy the labels. Someone else will step in. And those people will make much of the money that labels used to.
This is why I'm calling you an idiot. It's like you're accusing me of liking George W. Bush because I recognize that he's the POTUS.
To review: SOMEONE IS GOING TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT MUSIC TO LISTEN TO, AND WHOEVER THEY ARE WILL MAKE LOTS OF MONEY. Regardless of whether you like their taste in music. Regardless of whether you consider it immoral. Regardless of whether you destroy record labels.
Human nature and society are not infinitely mutable. Nor are they static, of course.
Forgetting about the Dubya analogy, I find it hard to believe that any change of IP law is going to remove the gatekeeping role that is currently exercised by labels, radio stations, etc. Why? Because looking for music in a gatekeeper-less world would be like drinking from the proverbial firehose. Society needs people to make sense of, organize, present, and judge the merits of music. The people who assume this role will be able to become very influential and wealthy.
Look at Slashdot: Rob Malda is just Joe Schmuck Average who had a decent idea and a lot of good luck. He can now in a small way Controls the Fate of the Free World with his ability to focus attention on things he thinks are important. Who is better off, CmdrTaco or the web site that gets an occasional link from Slashdot? Rob doesn't really create any intellectual property, he just makes money (for VA Linux) by having a site that points other people to other sites.
Now, Slashdot is a lot more than just Mr. Malda's work, and it would violate the overdeveloped, self-righteous sense of morality of Slashdot's readers to do things like sell coverage to the highest bidder, but it works for a lot of sites out there. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, that's how a lot of mail-order and e-commerce make a lot of money.
I used to work for CDNOW, and one of the repugnant things they started doing was collecting fees from labels to feature albums in various parts of the store. Amazon does the same thing. These sites get people's attention, and they sell that attention to artists (through their labels).
I'm not being a defeatist victim of a "slave mentality" for recognizing that this is The Way Things Are. I would like to hear someone's plausible alternative scenario for organizing society.
The real problem with patents is that people on slashdot don't know what they are. For example, this thread is about Copyrights, and you're talking about patents.
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
But, the property is in no way a part of the actual trade for services. You aren't renting your body or mind to someone for an hour. You aren't lending the person your lawnmower, you're making an agreement to make sure that something is accomplishmeded. While property may be used to cary out your end of the contract and things you do may affect someone else's property, the property itself is not the subject of the monetary exchange.
I just felt the need to be nitpicky.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I can make a copy of Enya's new album, I have not taken away someone else's copy.
copies of enya's songs may be made essentially for free. what is not free is enya's creation of those songs. that is what you are paying for. it is the creation, not the recording, that is being freely traded. to pirate her work is to take from her the ability to participate in that free market.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
Do you not see? All of your arguments are about MONEY. Making an honest living would be SELLING software and not LICENSING it. How do you know that if the books were copied for free no one would want to be an author? ahem.. GNU/GPL/BSDed software. Point is made.
All your base are belong to us.
-=Gargoyle_sNake
-=-=-=-
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I encourage everyone to purchase this t-shirt from copyleft.net. These t-shirts contain some of the DeCSS. Printing the code on the t-shirt is exercising you rights to free speech. Part of the profits (4 dollars) go to help defend the people being sued by the MIAA.
Justen Stepka
So BigExistingCoInc takes an idea that is unpatented and implements it themselves, in the process having to sell it at a lesser price or even give it away free. Fair play, that is called Freedom and it shouldn't stop just because a large number of people are acting in unison. (Microsoft or not).
The problem is that the BigExistings often find ways to remove that freedom from others - including the real SmallNewGuys who are just using their computers / instuments / whatever to entertain and help others.
Personally, I think the removal of the assumed income from 'pattern control' is a low price to pay in exchange for the open ability to improve on what is available without worring about stepping on other peoples patents and copyrights etc.
The only supplied counter argument to support those mechanisms ('that they encourage generation of new works of art and science' - rather than the real reason - 'that they can ensure enourmous profit') is quite weak when you remember that lots of works of art and science were created without such control systems in place and any scientist or musician would be happy working without such an offer of massive wealth (many do already and plenty of good scientific research is government funded). Further the ability for them to work according to their own abilities unrestricted by patent and copyright control will, I think, be a very good thing for the majority of people on this planet.
This is absolutely absurd. Do you know anything about Canada? This type of post reminds me of the segments on This Hour has 22 Minutes (Canadian comedy program) where they go to the US and ask questions like "What do you think about the war in Saskatchewan?"
Are you saying that production and distribution in Canada is not privately owned? Or are you suggesting that there is no free market here?
Canada's economy is very much capitalist. Our goverment may provide "socialist" programs such as universal health care, but we are far from being a socialist county. Maybe you should do a little more research before posting such ludicrous claims.
-- themenace
Do you not see? All of your arguments are about MONEY. Making an honest living would be SELLING software and not LICENSING it.
Strangely enough, this is exactly what the author of the piece is proposing: replace the blanket protection of copyright with a hodgepodge of legally enforceable licensing contracts. All easily reproducible media would be licensed under contracts, much like most software is today. Facilitating anything like this for the millions of currently copyrighted works sold daily would certainly require new contract laws, laws many might find distasteful. Imagine entering into a binding contract with a record company every time you buy a CD -- one that wouldn't have to include fair use.
How do you know that if the books were copied for free no one would want to be an author? ahem.. GNU/GPL/BSDed software. Point is made.
Pointing to a few examples of software made non-commercially hardly demonstrates that the elimination of copyright would not have disastrous effects. I'll repeat the tired point that it is only copyright (and the dubious right of license interpreted to accompany the installation of software) that prevents GPL code from being used in non-GPL products, or BSD code from being used without credit as such. In addition, there are some creative works that simply could not be financed without the kind of IP copyright ensures. Each of the 25 top grossing films of all time, for instance.
Copyright law may be broken in several ways: DMCA restrictions on free expression and fair use, seemingly infinite extensions, etc. However, rewarding creators with exclusive rights to their creations is, I think, a noble principle.
Property right is the power to control or dispose. Any right which is undefended, i.e. the gov't won't intervene to protect, is no right at all. You really have no right to your house if you come home from work and find a poor family of squatters occupying it, and you have no legal means to expel them.
It is not. The error of your formulation is that it is negative. The 'free' is free market is not a 'freedom from' but a 'freedom to', a positive exercise of power by the participants. None of the participants will have much power unless they live in a society that acknowledges and defends property rights. It is difficult to trade that which one does not own.
"To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individu
I agree with you that the author of the linked article uses Libertarian vocabulary and thoughts, but it is just inconceivable that Rand, author of the Fountainhead, would ever be against intellectual property.
The GPL is not sacred, it was created as a piece of legal ju-jitsu against the copyright system. I'm sure RMS and the anti-IP bandwagon would be happy to dispense with the GPL right after the abolishment of the copyright system. I would rather keep both, and I don't see either position as contradictory.
"To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individu
If I may be so bold as to exercise a little fair use here I find one thing King said to be telling.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Your model would also fall apart in implementation. It would add additional red tape to the patent process. How am I to prove how much I've spent and how many man-hours my company has put in to coming up with patent X? What takes precident - impact of the invention or the return on my investmest. I could spend ten years working on somehthing that only has an impact for two or I invent something I saw in a dream that completely changes the industry.
Point 2 is also flawed. Who in the W3C is going to look over that patent or the 10K other web patents? How long will they remain "respected" in the industry when they approve a few patents or turn down others?
Is it really worth wasting the resources and more than likely the reputation of a standards organization to get a "fair" patent?
IMNSHO, the only resolution to business model/software patents is their elimination. I look at the software industry and do not see a need to hold out the patent carrot to get the software donkey to innovate. And at the same time, I see segments of the software industry that relies on collaboration and altruism which would be hindered by the barrage of patents currently being issued. Just because the courts currently hold the opinon that anything under the sun invented by man can be patented does not mean it is society's best interest to do so.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Individuals and corporations need some sort of incentive to perform research and, for example, produce new drugs. A basc motivation for patent protection is to grant some tangible 'value' to these pursuits.
To which the author of the article replied that there are other forms of protection available, such as trade secret and (a libertarian's favorite) contract.
I wish I could agree with the article, but I don't think he addressed this point very well. The field of drug development is an excellent example; I don't want to start taking any drugs that have been developed under trade secret, do you? And it is rather unlikely that the researcher is going to get a contract with everyone in the world to only use the new drug information under royalty bearing license.
It seems to me that patents are necessary in this case. What is a patent but a contract with an entire nation? If anyone can suggest another alternative, I'm all ears.
Now, as to whether the patent system is currently well serving the needs of the general public, that is an entirely separate discussion.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Simple: copyright (so it is being argued) creates monopolies; I would argue that this has been particularly true in the software industry, where different products must interoperate with each other to be useful (so by having market power in one area, you can leverage it into another). Monopolies are less likely to pay attention to what you want than businesses in a competitive market. So consumers, particularly non-average ones like nerds, lose out.
Think about it. How often has it been the case that the Best software program has not been the one which won out? I think it's lots; you may disagree. But it's obviously a question dear to many of our hearts, and a question directly affected by copyright, so I think copyright matters to nerds.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I disagree. Creativity existed before copyright. Creativity would exist without copyright. Throughout history, people have profited from their creativity without using copyright. Today, various businesses profit from writing open-source software without making use of their legal ability to stop others using that software.
Copyright causes some incentives to innovate. It destroys other incentives to innovate (because it limits my desire to build on someone else's good idea). I don't think that removing copyright would have an overall negative effect on innovation. Sure, the marketplace would be different, but creators could still benefit from their ideas, just in different ways from before.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Sure, but you have to stop somewhere. Your free use of the air stops me (making use of my air by selling it to you). You are saying that my use of a program stops you (using your copy by selling it to me). If the difference is that you think you have a moral right to exclude me from using a pattern of bits, then that is a *moral* argument based upon beliefs you have. That's fine, but don't confuse it with an economic argument, based upon what maximises the success of the economy overall.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I freelance nature photography to the national magazine and book market on a very, very part-time basis.
I also have a website with scans of over 1,000 of my photos, which I make available for free for use by grassroots non-profits, students, individuals who want to use them on their own personal websites, etc.
Without copyright protection, I'd pull it down because I have no interest in seeing businesses, the press, government agencies etc using my photos without permission. I'd only let my scans or photos out of my personal possession after having signed an agreement strictly limiting usage by the recipient.
The only alternative would be to require visitors to my website to read and agree to terms of visitation, something I hate.
OK, the above ignores enforcement issues, but we're talking about whether or not I, as a photographer, have the right to decide who will use my photos gratis and who won't. I'm pretty generous about it, but by God it is *my* decision one way or the other.
Sure, I'm certain that there have been businesses, etc that have illicity used my photos without informing me, but that's a risk I've chosen to take. Again, it's *my* choice.
I'm curious if the writer of this article solely works for hire, or if he freelances or otherwise publishes in markets which allow the writer to maintain copyright (which makes resale possible)?
John Locke's political writings are pretty much the basis for the constitution of the USA. And it is an economic fact that scarcity preceeds property.
Well Locke's theory of property was that "the act of creation" (or more precisely the admixture of Labour and Nature) brings property into existence, not scarcity. The piece is so badly written, however, that the author seems to imply the opposite.
Here's what Locke wrote:
The propertarian argument in favour of IP is that such an argument can also be extended to the products of people's intelligence. On this view the limited duration of various species of IP amounts to nothing less than an illegitimate expropriation by the state.
I should note that this is not a view that I would personally endorse, (unless of course I was being paid to do so. :P)
Sorry, I negleted to give a citation for that quote. It is from Book II of Locke's Two Treatises of Government, at sn. 27.
And most importantly nowadays, TRIPS, which is annexed to the WTO treaty. This give internation IP real bite since you can effectively be excluded from world trade if you don't play ball.
<I>
Say I write a novel and you decide to film a movie based on my novel's plot, using your own filming equipment. Were I only to proclaim I owned the ideas in my novel, I would merely be exercising my free speech. But when I want to prohibit you from using your filming equipment as you please, and can use the force of law to do so, I am violating your property right. Under the law as it now stands, my act of creation is all it takes for me to be able to exercise control over your filming equipment.</I> <p>
Interesting, in which country this should work? You may prevent him from DISTRIBUTING, PUBLISHING and PUBLIC PERFORMANCE of HIS film. <p>
However you have no controll over his filming equippment as long as he is not filming your person.<p>
Regards,<p>
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Tangible goods, we all agree, are properly the objects of property rights. This is because they are economically scarce. But the notion that the mere act of creation confers ownership is problematic. and further: Economic scarcity results when my use of an item conflicts with your use of it. This is an interesting definition. However I think this is not the right definition to use as a base for the arguments against intellectual property. ... my use of this particular PC excludes your use of it
Especialy: your use of my Intellectual Property in selling it DOES exclude my use in selling it.
Anyway, if you argue again with technical issues then please lets directly got to the point:
a) I like a c++ compiler which compiles to java byte code
b) I like my private space craft with should be able to accelerate at least for 6 month with 1m/s^2
c) hm, I think one of you know how to mak ea warp drive, you OWE me that information
No no, you have not invented it so far? This does not cournt I WANT you to invent it right NOW and to publish the information that I can combine c) with b) for my private space yacht
Surely a) is easy to manage, so why CAN'T you morone who have it not simply GIVE it to me?
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
P.S. my point is: I have the strong impression that intellectual property(non tangible goods) are even more scarce than tangible ones. At least a sailing yacht I can buy everywhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Teething troubles" would make sense if the patent system were new and we were working the bugs out of it. On the contrary, the system is quite old. It seemed to function OK prior to computers. Since the advent of computers, the patent system is increasingly ridiculous, unjust and disconnected from reality. It's more like an old dog that's lost control of its bladder.
Drug companies, like all companies, are looking to make money. If drug companies are only making drugs to alleviate symptoms, maybe the government should step in and provide incentives to encourage these companies to develop drugs that actual cure or prevent disease.
It is not difficult to think of drugs, such as antibiotics and vaccines, that are counter-examples to your claim that drug companies focus on producing drugs that only alleviate symptoms.
That said, my original point still stands. Drug companies are not going to produce drugs (even ones that only alleviate symptoms) without some intellectual property/patent protection.
Can't they do this very thing today? As long as they make sure no one talks and nothing fishy shows up when you run 'strings' on it, you would never have solid evidence if IE12 was really 99% Mozilla alpha release#200345613 code under the skin.
Besides, in a copyright-(and left-)less world, nothing would stop anyone with a CD burner from copying Windows2023 and Microsoft would have to switch to a service and support model, and they would have no real reason not to release their source code. So, in the end, we would have a lot of businesses switch to copyleft-like behavior. The only reason copyleft needs to exist as it does today is because copyright has such a stranglehold on us already.All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Copyright is crap.... blah, blah, blah, blah.... copyright is crap...
...
Copyright © 2001 National Post Online | Privacy Policy | Corrections
Um. Ok, dude. Whatever.
On the subject of patents, I believe reform is in order, as relates to Internet technologies. Here's my idea.
1. If amazon.com or some business legitimately creates a cool new concept for web sites (they did *not* with 1-click, IMHO, BTW), then grant them a patent; but it should last for some short amount of time commensurate with the relevance of the claimed discovery. If were examining their 1-click patent, I'd grant them 6 months on it. The time and money they spent on it, combined with the fact of it being almost obvious to a web programmer, makes it much less of an innovation, than say a biological filtering process which cost a company $25,000,000 and took 7 years to develop, or a cure for AIDS which took 25 years and countless dollars. I would recommend having classes of patents to make things simpler. Class A could be 6 month patents for minor improvements to existing technologies in which you spend less than $10,000 DIRECTLY and less than 2 months IMPLEMENTING; Classes B, C, D get higher on the expenditures and importance; if you don't meet the requirements for your claimed class, you are bumped down to the most appropriate one.
2. An entity independent of the USPTO and respected in your industry must certify that your patent meets existing patent laws plus the appopriateness of your class in the class system I outlined above. For amazon's 1-click patent, such an entity might be W3C, IETF, or some web developer's guild. USPTO would pick the entity and the applicant would pay a fee to the USPTO which is passed on to the entity for consideration of their certification service. The general public could petition the USPTO to help select the entity - perhaps for that particular application or just all applications within an industry group. If the entity won't certify, it can recommend a class downgrade or reject the application (for prior art, perhaps).
This eliminates the need for the USPTO to be an expert in every single industry, and eliminates the need for all patents to be tested in court before being worth anything (as is now). Currently, companies can get patents on damn near anything, and then use it against thousands of small businesses; it's not until a large competitor comes along to defend itself in court that the patent gets overturned.
I leave ther rest to the lawyers. :-)
Your scenario is a bit inconsistent, because software companies as we know them would not exist without copyright. It's not very profitable selling copies of software if anyone can produce those same copies. I think removing copyright would make the software industry a lot healthier, it could become more like carpenting or something like that. Companies could still keep things binary-only though, but I'm not sure it would be an advantage in a copyright-free industry.
The point of view in this article doesn't strike you disctinctly leftist?
The article fails to mention that Steven King has abandoned his online book experiment, because the percentage of payers dropped with each instalment.
Not the U.S. patent system. If you conceive an invention first, then diligently develop your invention from the time you conceive it to the time you reduce it to practice, you can get the patent even if someone else reduced to practice or filed up to a year before you.
Welcome to the real world...
This happens everyday in almost every industry.
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
The problem is that it's not that simple. If a patent is a contract with the government, then the holder of the patent potentially has the power to sit at both sides of the table, so to speak. They get the benefits offered by the agreement, but they can also influence the government to remove or tone down undesirable elements, such as the requirement that the contract expires within X years.
Even if copyright were abandoned there would remain many people/corporations who would not change their way of thinking or their business model. not just that, but dumbass attempts like CCS, SDMI and that ATA copyprotection scheme etc will explode tenfold. You might think you can hack them like you hacked CSS, but the only reason CSS was thoroughly hacked was the (now nonexistant) US cryptography export laws. Until public key encyrption is hacked these schemes don't have to be breakable (so you pulled the key and algorithm out of the firmware's chipset, the next peice of software for it will just use a different key)
I think the world could run quite nicely without copyright, and artists would still get paid (possibly paid more). But it's a moot point because it ain't going to happen (at least, not until the invention of replicators).
The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA), meanwhile, may protect Napster users since the AHRA allows audio music swapping for noncommercial use.
From the back cover of several CDs I own:
...
Unauthorised copying, lending, public peformance and broadcasting of this record prohibited.
Can the record company really stop unauthorised lending? I am not a lawyer, but it would seem to me that would be against the law for the record company to make such a statment. Although, that the way things seem to be going now. Albums you purchase are for your ears only; software you purchase is for your computer only; books you purchase are for your eyes only. Where is this going to end?
Also from the article:
Here, manufacturers like Yamaha or Philips who market digital audio tape recorders and CD-R burners must pay a statutory royalty as a penalty for making devices that could foreseeably be used to infringe copyright. Such manufacturers must pony up for the potential undermining of the value of copyrighted material. Notwithstanding the incoherence of assigning rights in some imagined value the copyrighted material may have, wealth here is distributed from manufacturer to music industry. Similarly, consumers who purchase blank recording media must pay special excise taxes to the music industry.
Does any industry have the right to charge consumers for possible losses? This remindes me of a cartoon I saw in the paper a few days ago:
"Do you remember that loud mouthed lawyer on TV? He's suing me because I changed channels during his commercial."
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
The first argument is strong, but I'll take a moment to split the hair of this second argument. I believe it was Jefferson who said something about it being unnatural to restrict an idea once it has been uttered publicly.
A hypothetical example: Let's say someone writes a book which outlines a conspiracy on how to take over the government; it identifies phrasewords by which the elite conspirators will identify each other. Now, as the conspiracy based on this book progresses in real life, then clearly if I am prevented from reading or using this material, it detracts from my life. Ideas can be powerful, not merely entertainment.
I think this situation is broadly analagous to genetic ownership of plants which supersede and potentially replace "natural" crop strains. Or, the case of the Church of Scientology in the way they jealously guard their institutional writings. Or, generalized issues about access to information technology and the power differential across the "digital divide". A product/idea which causes older ideas to no longer be supported will harm me if I don't have access to it.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I am not opposed to patents -- restricting others from exploiting my idea... as long as those others have agreed to do so.
From a contractarian perspective, actions are either moral, immoral or amoral.
A moral action is one where those involved agree to the action. If you believe that prostitution, or illicit drug use have little measurable effect on non-participants, then these are moral acts because the participants engage in the action willingly. Many libertarians who base their political views on ethical contractarianism accept prima facie prostitution and drug use as acceptable.
An immoral action is one where there is no concent between participants. Rape is an immoral act.
An amoral actionm is one where concent can not be determined. Generally, any law passed by government is amoral.
So, patents are fine, for those who accept their associated restrictions. One can imagine a drug company, for example, coming up with a cure for AIDS, but only offering it to affiliate hospitals that accept their terms, including scrutinizing administration to patients, to avoid copycats.
Many new ideas are the result of millions of dollars worth of research, even though they are "obvious" once discovered. Traditionally, they get patent protection. In a non-patent market, they would require enforcable contract protection.
Would that be better? I think so, but it would certainly be different. Machiavelli noted that any atempt to effect change will be opposed to those who benefit from the status quo, and thus, abolishing patents would be met with much opposition and FUD.
You could've hired me.
Walk into the bookshop of your nearest university and pull the IP textbook off the shelf. If it is a decent text it will go through the rationalle of the rules in depth as well as giving a much more in-depth treatment of the contents of IP law than you'll get in an essay or newspaper article.
However, I think if someone takes something that's 'yours', and uses it without damaging it in anyway and without inhibitng your use of it (Say they ...copy your music...), I think they should be able too.
My point was that living in my house while I'm away is equivalent to copying my music. While the acte of living in my house or copying music does not directly harm me, it's consequences can do. You living in my house can inhibit my use of it (because the house gets damaged), you copying my music can inhibit my use of it (to earn my living) because now anyone can get a copy for free. If you want you be consistent, you should either accept protection for both houses and music, or reject it for both.
And that is precisely why property rights should be assigned. If something that I do benefits me but harms you, either I should be assigned the right to do it, and you the option to buy that right from me (if we can strike a deal), or you should be assigned the right to stop me doing it, and I the option to buy that right. The important point is that someone should be assigned the right. This leads to the further question: who should be assigned the right. When rights concern things that are costly to produce, it is best that the right be assigned to whoever produced it, so that producers have a greater incentive to produce things. (Of course, if the producer is public spirited, then they are free to give up their rights without financial compensation if they so wish).
Incidentally, you mention that in driving down the street you can inhibit me from doing it at the same time - this is why there is a good argument for road tolls, so that drivers pay for the extra congestion they cause.
Now for the slashdot comments and loafing about arguments. If you really believe that your comments significantly benefit others and you need an incentive to write, maybe you should go on strike until you are given some of the slashdot advertising revenue. Likewise with loafing about the net, if it really does benefit others and you need an incentive to do it, then there is a good case for setting up a system to compensate you.
The author has it back to front. When produced non-scarce items depend on humans, they need protection. If people are not rewarded for producing such items, fewer will be produced. Of course, you're going to object that some kind souls will produce things without financial reward. Good for them. They are free to do that whatever the system. But at least let there be some way to reward those who are not so public spirited or perhaps whose circumstance prevent them being so.
Now you may you reject this argument, but if you do so, and care about being consistent, you should also reject any property rights. I.e. why should I be able to stop you using the empty house I own but don't use? Sure enough, if I'm actually living in the house, you should be prevented from kicking me out; but while I'm not living there and have no intension of doing so, I should have no right to stop you moving in.
Of course the objection to this last point is that if you are allowed to move into my house when I'm not using it, you have no incentive to look after your own house and likewise I have no incentive to look after my house, since I can just move into an empty house belonging to someone else. This is a good objection. The problem is that it is the same objection as to why you shouldn't be allowed to use the program that I write if I so wish because otherwise I may have no incentive to write it.
"...a separate entity to deal with technology patents"
Exactly what patent isn't a technology patent? Jeez, how computer centric can you be? patents are for things that are new. Technology is by definition, of or relating to new stuff. I agree that there should more computer oriented patent examiners and judges, but give the system time. It is a great system that has worked for many years, let it correct itself.
Mr. Black is known for extreme right wing ideas. But that's not what scares me about him. He has a history of taking over the editorial department to match his ideologies. Having said that, I am rather surprised that he would even let such an article published. Mind you, there was another article published in the Vancouver Sun (another Conrad Black newspaper) about Napster and anti-free market issues a couple of months ago. Wish I knew the references.
Mystx
What I was trying to mean was that when you publish something on the web, you give it to the people.
As long as that site's up I can link to it and anyone can enjoy the content for free. If it was in a book, though, I'd only be able to provide a bibliographical reference and directions to the library of congress.
I know that copying the article verbatim is verboten -- and literally, I said the opposite. I'm sorry, sometimes secondary meanings don't come across so well in print. I should be more clear.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
(Check my response above).
:-/
Yeah, sorry... didn't mean for that sentence to be read like that; I should have chosen other words. Oh well - can't win 'em all.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>If anyone knows how to do so, please write me!
s t. html
Try these:
http://www.nationalpost.com/contactus/
http://www.nationalpost.com/contactus/contactli
(warning: slashdot sometimes puts spaces in posts for no reason. There are none in the links above.)
That last link has PILES of email addresses at the newspaper (not the one you want though). Try sending one to customer service, asking for his/her email address. If they can't give it to you, ask if they'd just pass the letter on for you.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Sorry man. I never realized that _you_ where the one that posted twice. Ooops... damn, I jumped the gun twice today. Yeah, I'm an asshole. Don't take that last comment seriously either...
Must... stop... posting... late... at... night.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>WHICH I WROTE THIS MORNING ALL BY MYSELF
The author is talknig about abolishing copyright. This doesn't mean removing an author's name from a work. The author never even mentioned that.
But then again you are the idiot author who is defending himself by no mentioning what your entire stance is about, right?
If you are going to take an article and pretend to publish it without a name, ahem, try to make sure it defends you instead of simply leading you totally off topic.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Please visit this site, as it is an important starting point that explains the necessity, rationale, and history of patenting,especially biotechnology. Please moderate down the guy who said patents should last only 2 years. It takes at least that long to get pharmaceutical drugs through clinical trials. Exclusive distribution for drugs for patents based novelty, enablement, and usefulness provides for incentive for research. Let me put it this way: How many documentable, tangible senior citizens will suffer because of GWBUSH's inaction on perscription drug plan vs the untold, unseen, millions of people that would have died if Gore got into office and got his way on price controls? Gore's plan would have gutted the venture capital for research and investment that goes into creating intellectual property, (yes property) that saves lives through medicine if his price controls were in place.
The end.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Music, software, books, and the like are fundamentally abundent. I can easily make copies of any of them and increase the world's supply.
You can easily copy books? Great! I'll take _War and Peace_ by Tolstoy.
Music and software are more abundant than books, but the media they're on aren't. You can't make 60 copies of Civilization II if you don't have 60 CD-Rs and/or the necessary hard disk space.
It makes sense to me that when you "buy" music, you pay not for the music itself, but for the privilege of time- and space-shifting... with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, I don't have to wait for the local classical station to play it, I can just toss it in the CD player.
Software is a different animal entirely. Spacetime shifting isn't important. So you have to pay for a share of development directly. The problem comes when the price never drops below $70; anyone not willing and able to pay that, with access to a copy from someone else, becomes a pirate.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
One or two years isn't long enough for most industrial patentees. It often takes five years or longer for industrial processes to reach production, so the patent holder may has only a short time to recover research and development costs.
Ideas that involve little or no associated development costs and are not part of some larger mechanism or process shoudn't receive the same protections as those that do, but it would be virtually impossible to differentiate them in the law.
Those who create books, music and other works covered by copright deserve to benefit from their work, just as a factory or office worker (or, gasp! code hacker) deserves a paycheck. Current U. S. intellectual property law has been developed from the whole cloth mostly by the film industry, which determined from the very earliest days of its existence to protect their work. The problem is that it all seems to gotten out of hand. Authors of books, plays and music and musical performers receive only a tiny percentage of the sale or licensing of their work, about ten percent. So the biggest benefactors of copyright are not the creators, but the publishers, distributors and all the other peripherally involved folks who distribute the work to the public.
The whole problem is that things seem to have gotten out of hand, and that is why so many seem to intuitivly recoil against patent and copyright protection. Almost every publisher (book, film, TV, whatever) would dearly love to force the public into pay-per-view. So we have had divix and now various kinds of e-books foisted on us. While few movies could be indicted for intellectual content, ideas have long been conveyed by print, and it is critically important that ideas be freely distributable. It is sad to note that many of the ideas most important to modern society yielded little or no benefit to their authors. We must ensure that all authors (and performers) receive compensation to encourage them to publish their ideas. But how to keep the parasites from getting too large a share?
Who is a parasite? The publisher must buy presses, ink and paper and the film maker must pay for studios, cameras, film, actors etc. So it really resolves down to who is getting an excessive share of the boodle. And, except when monoply or near-monoply is involved, the law (in the USA anyway) carefully steers clear of regulating prices for goods and services and the proration of sales values between all the parties. So the REAL issue here is attempt to create near-monoply or monoply market controls for very long periods of time. So the film studios bought Congress to extend copyright so Disney Studios can continue to have exclusive control of Mickey Mouse for many more years. Well, I don't begrudge them Mickey Mouse, but it really steams me when they con national governments into collecting a tax on recordable media "to make up for all the stolen goods."
I appoligize for not writing more. I wrote my entire response and then lost it when i accidentally closed the window. I have stopped caring.
- email account is @hotmail.com
Discussion Never Hurt Anyone.
Discussion Never Hurt Anyone.
Libertarians
Was that tongue in cheek? You say that like that doesn't happen now. Anyone remember Stac Electronics? Makers of the only hard drive doubling software that *DIDN'T* corrupt your hard drive? What happened to them? M$ stole their source (didn't even bother reverse-engineering it), modified (broke) it, and gave the world DoubleSpace, early versions of which were prone to wreck hard drives. Anyway, Stac was pissed, they went to court, and M$ dragged it out for over a year and a half, eventually lost and had to cough up several million to them. However, that didn't matter to M$ since that was only a puny percentage of their profits, but to Stac, their market share was decimated since DoubleSpace was included in every MSDOS from 6 on up. The award ran the company for about a year, but they were a "bunch of Talented People (tm)" that were a one trick pony, and since nobody wanted to buy their trick anymore, they dried up and blew away. So don't tell me that copyright protection in its current form stops the Big Companies from taking things they really want. All it does is give them a little bee sting as they do it.
Okay, Fervent, I'll be a man. This is not meant as an insult, and it may even get modded down as 'ot', but I am tired of people blabbing on about how 'this topic is stupid' and 'I was a /.er when it was cool and we had topics in those days that Mattered' yadadyadayada... its getting worse than the flames. Why don't you go where Roblimo and Kiss the Blade went and we don't have to hear this crap anymore? If you think the rice genome and stem cell thing is topical, important, and worthy, fsckin submit it, okay?
:)
Oh, and by the way, what people are thinking about IP, and copyrights, and DeCSS is Very Important right now, and definitely belongs in this forum. It is not about l337 4ax0r5 stealing; it is more about the future of ideas and whether corps can sew them up or if people can freely access them. Your opinion is not absolutely required here. In my opinion.
Sorry, guys... I kinda lost it there... okay mod me down now...
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
I don't know what jurisdiction you're living in, but you're mistaken if you're talking about U.S. copyright law. Try doing some random websurfing on commercial web pages. They all have copyright notices somewhere on the page. You don't lose your copyright unless you intentionally sell it or proclaim that your work is dedicated to the public domain.
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I assume you're talking about U.S. law. You're wrong. You might want to check out some of the articles in the relevant Open Directory category to correct your misunderstanding.
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When are you talking about? The 17th century? Musicians have to pay royalties when they perform music they didn't write. It's been that way since before jazz existed.
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(3) The author seems completely ignorant of the free information movement and the concept of copyleft. Stephen King's deal was nothing more than an unusual use of shareware sales techniques in the book industry. His book is copyrighted. An guess what? If copyright was abolished tomorrow, there would no longer be any way to enforce the GPL or any other copyleft license. The only reason you're bound by the GPL is that if you don't agree to it, you don't have permission to download the (copyrighted!) information.
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Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to duplicate my own comment.
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James
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Good points there. I am a libertarian, but I think that some ideas were slightly tilted to help bolster the argument. I do think the article was a good one, in so much as it made me think, and it wasn't a lopsided rant. But it may fail to persuade people who aren't already inclined to follow a certain point of view.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Your quibble is completely beside the point.
Remember, the author stressed that contracts would replace IP protectionism. The author of this essay can easily engage in a contract with the National Post for payment for permission to publish her essay. Once that contract has been made, and the essay is released on the web (or in print), any other copies can be legitimately made by third parties who have not signed a contract. No problem. The NP gains no "rights" to the duplication of the essay. Nor does the author. But the NP, like all newspapers, is in the business of providing content, and is forced to make contracts with writers to obtain its product. The writers win. The National Post wins. The readers of the story win. Everybody wins. Except the recording industry's business model. Too bad for them.
/bluesninja
The basic problem with this argument is that it does in fact discourage the creation of art. I will be the first to argue that art should be pursued out of passion, and for its own merit as an improvement to humanity. That's great, but the wonderful "free-market" system we have created, the same one that lets me buy things I like and live in a nice house, means that most of the time we assign value in financial terms. What is a successful artist? One whose work is appreciated for its own intrinsic value, or one who gets paid a lot for his work, or both? Sure, you might argue that if one other person looks at, listens to, or reads your artistic work, you have made a successful contribution. But without the old patronage system, an artist needs capital to keep producing, because art, like most other things in our culture, is seen as a commodity, whether it is scarce or not. Take away protection, and in principle, you take away the ability to earn income from art. Here I must apologize, because I do not have a counter-proposal. I don't know how to allow for the introduction of digital mass-ditribution and portect the free-market economic value of art in modern culture. I do know, however, that until that culture changes to include a reckoning of non-monetary value, we must continue to provide protection of authorship and artistic production.
(Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative).
Shakespeare is a poor example, The concept of Copyright didn't exist until the old bard had been worm food for quite sometime. IIRC, copyright came about in 1710, and Shakespeare died in the 1660s.
This doesn't even address the fact that Shakespeare may not even have authored what it is often claimed he did.
Toodles,
Nephs
obviously I didn't wrote that post clearly enough.
The world would be a poorer place if some of the old Masters had had to work in a pub instead of creating one of their paintings.
This was trying to point at that when an artist has to do something other than art to support themselves, they are losing the opportunity to create (opportunity cost for those who've done Economics). For those Masters without patrons, art comes second after survival. Therefore, any Masters that did work, are probably short a few paintings than if they'd had a patron. I know copyright didn't effect the Masters directly, but their source of income was the patron. Now the source of income is the copyright AND the originals. A copyrighted painting can be printed as a poster or whatever, and additional money is recieved from this.
My biggest point however, was that the world will be a poorer place if it IS minus some art.
this was a reply... It's only "stealing" if it's property. The point of the article was, it shouldn't be considered property.
my point is that if you're taking away someone's income, it feels like stealing to them.
David can't believe an artist would keep work to themselves... Are you serious here? They might not have incentive to create, or they might not have the time/money to create even with the incentive, but surely, if they create the work, they aren't going to lock it up in the cellar just cause they won't get paid for it!
most artists (and I have been referring to painters throughout) actually have to pay some sort of money for their work to be public,. If they're not getting paid, and people are going to copy it all over the place, why would they pay for it to be public? if an artist doesn't want an ego stroke, it's far more likely their work will end up in the houses of friends, or in their own home. There won't be a lack of public art from spite, just a lack of incentive. Not all artists are after recognition, for some it means nothing, or even embarassment.
Additionally, buying materials to produce their paintings will be much harder (in a copyright-free society they're only getting money from the original), and less art will be produced.
enochian skipped over to music copyright, which I wasn't actually referring to... *most* artists don't make money on albums, but rather touring and the like. (musicians)
I think it depends on how big a band is as to what they make money from, a pub band is hardly going to make much money from an album, but maybe a little in touring. Songwriters also get royalties from people doing "covers" of their songs, this would not exist in a copyright free society. Which also means your favourite band could have their song used in a bad commercial on tv.
. there are ways of *protecting* your art without out copyrights. I have used such methods. One only needs to prove that the art was done at a specific period of time. ie. with music, make a demo of the song and mail it to yourself so that you have the post office's time stamp. There are many cases where this is accepted.
Mailing things to yourself is only useful to back up copyright law, it relies on copyright. If you can prove you had your work before a copier, then the copyright is held up.
3. steal their stuff? If someone plays a song and says they wrote it when they did not, that is wrong. Playing some elses song isn't. The Jazz world is full of other artists interpretation of jazz standards (music).
wrong doesn't mean diddly squat when it comes to the law, either it's illegal or it's not. Even now you'll see interpretations in the music world, most do not end up in court (it helps if you're polite and ask it they mind, courtesy isn't dead). Then there's all the sampling that goes on. I don't think musical expression is being held back by copyright.
I myself am not in favour of blanket copyright nullification. I am also not in favour of the current system as it stands. Some industries are going to be hit very hard if there's no copyright at all, especially groundbreakers. Whether it's R&D (science, computer hardware) or anything else that takes a large outlay of money, with no copyright it's never going to pay off. None of the artists I know are well off, which is why I think money is an issue. Some artists don't have a choice but to create, so unless they can earn a living doing art, they won't get far.
I do not like the RIAA, I think musical copyright has it's points, but the RIAA is NOT copyright, it's an organisation, which doesn't actually look after the rights of it's artists, merely itself.
I think big record companies as they are will be become a thing of the past. They're still thinking they're back in the 70's... we've moved on, we've left them behind. We're looking for a new way of doing things
I hope music artists of the future will look after their own rights, not have someone tell them they don't have any.
the artists themselves. And I'm not just talking the very famous ones. Your average Joe artist NEEDS copyright in an extreme way. Most of them don't have money for their own lawyer, if people do steal their stuff and copy it all over creation.
Artists who receive no payment for their hard work will simply keep it to themselves. Some artists love the limelight, but most just love to create.
Not many people like to have their hard work stolen.
I'm not on the side of the RIAA, I don't think they're much good to their artists at all.
But blanket copyright nullification is just not going to work.
It takes time to create, and it takes money to live. Even if art isn't gone completely as a goal, it'll be on reduced time.
The world would be a poorer place if some of the old Masters had had to work in a pub instead of creating one of their paintings.
Well-written, perhaps, but not well-argued. She puts forth only the arguments against copyright, not any of the well-established arguments for it. Intellectual property law, for many, many years, has tried to balance the problems she brings up -- essentially, the economic inefficiency of IP rights -- and the rights that inhere in an author's unique creation. IP law has *always* struggled with this. Don't think that lawyers or judges or even legislators have never thought about the "anti-free market" aspect of giving IP rights to creators. We all know that monopolies -- state-sanctioned or natural -- are economically inefficient. It's just that hundreds of years of authorship and trying to protect people's rights in creation have demonstrated a clear countervalue that needs to be addressed in the balance of trying to promote the social benefit of having IP in the public domain. In the same way, pointing out the "economic scarcity" and inapposition of IP and real property issue is pretty shallow, because IP law has recognized this for a long, long time. The upshot is that the focus of IP isn't promoting a free market: it's striking a balance between letting authors decide what can be done with their creations and letting the public enjoy these creations.
That said, there are still many problems in IP law and legislation. But the reason there are problems comes from the trying to strike an equitable balance between two important values.
Finally, it's funny that she puts so much importance on real property rights. No one has perfect control over the use of their real property, because perfect control would infringe on so many of other people's rights. Locke -- whom she so casually name-dropped -- gave a "fruit of the labor" justification for real property ownership: that someone who takes a piece of wood (say, from a publicly accessible forest) and spends a week of hard labor in fashioning it into a nice desk arguably owns the desk. (Or, for example, the fisherman who spends an arduous month on the open seas catching fish to sell. Or the farmer who spends a season cultivating crops from seeds...) Locke came up with this justification because of the strong counterargument that there's no reason why anyone should own anything, since everything comes from elements that "everyone" ostensibly owns (the world environment, mainly; the trees, the mountains, the oceans, etc). So Locke has a good justification for "owning" tangible property. But it can easily be used for IP -- the author who spends years writing a novel, the drug company that spends years and billions of dollars coming up with a drug.
My point is that we've been struggling with the concept of ownership in IP (and in real property) for many years, so shallow arguments like Mercer's aren't very helpful.
"You will gain money by an illegal action."
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I know... I work there. - Ben
Absolutely. The idea that intellectual labor has no value and only physical production should be rewarded isn't some new insight from the "Austrian libertarian school" -- it's an old staple of populism and one that Rand reviled.
That said, I do think the author is trying to justify her anti-IP views in a Randian framework and that her point is wasted on anyone who does not operate on the assumption that the right to property is the be-all of life and law.
The "author" I was referring to is the author of the article, not you. I'm making the same point I think you are - that the justification for IP isn't based solely on the premise she's attacking.
I took the date from the article a couple days ago on copy protection and the CPRM standard, where John Gilmore made the claim
. I'm inclined to agree with him because that's the nature of copyright law such as it exists today. I'm not sure about It's a Wonderful Life, but I believe it's a special case. Somebody got generous or something, but I don't really know. I do know the extent of copyright because I had to deal with it recently in copyrighting website content.They're a form of protectionism, yes. They're also a necessary form of protectionism, because a true free market involves Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (in the words of George Carlin) holding up an extended middle finger to a lot of people. So I think certain "protections", though not so great by themselves, are necessary within the context of the free-market system. Sorry if that doesn't fit with your ideology.
Ofcourse they will. However if it then takes 2 billion to develop that idea into an actual product, things change. Without copyright or IP protection, nobody will spend the 2 billion to develop it, and the product will never see the light of day. Why waste 2 billion if, once you're done, anyone can take your finished product and copy and sell it, making it impossible for you to recoup the cost? People will always have ideas, but copyright/IP isn't so much about ideas as it is about providing an incentive to bring those ideas to market. Yes, the system isn't perfect, and some people abuse it. That does not make it inherently wrong.
That probably has more to do with the fact that nobody really uses disk-compression anymore. With current harddrives, why bother?
The essay argues that if someone has written a book, and owns the ideas in the book, and someone wants to make a film of it, it is a violation of the filmer's property rights to use copyrights to forbid him or her to film it.
While this much is true, it must be remembered that if the filmer then goes and makes a shitload of money off of his or her new film, the author of the book deserves some small amount of that.
On the other hand, it's too bad the filmmaker doesn't just give some of it to the author (in other words, why doesn't he or she be nice?), so that copyrights don't even have to exist?
I suppose that's a bit too close to communism. But isn't the Internet fairly communist, other than the bandwidth issue? Everyone's equal in a chat room, unless there's a moderator. Everyone on a Gnutella network is equal. IRC is probably the last residue of capitalism to be on the Internet, or will be at some point.
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
While we obviously disagree about some fundamental things, I completely and unreservedly support your last comment: we should be open to plausible reorganization of society. I think that a big step towards doing that is looking more at the effects of policies than that rationale/reasoning politicians give for them. Not to engage the Dubya thing, but US citizens will be hearing a lot of explanations for social policies that many people consider very dubious.
Slashdot is an interesting example. It serves a commercial interest, as you point to, but it often has quite a wide range of perspectives and a well-developed moderation system. Much of the advertising concerns open-source / Linux commerce, which is much more positive and inclusive than other businesses. Even with the anger and spitting of some of the arguments on the site, it's a really fascinating business model. I'm a consumer like everyone else, and I get some of the best advice from the people on here--my chosen gatekeepers, so to speak. It is something qualitatively better than, say, the advice of a record exec or movie producer. In one way I agree with you--with the sheer amount of cultural material that is generated, we look to certain people as critics we trust. And what I really want to advocate is to be critical ourselves, to consider the interests and judgement of these others.
Nice to have this discussion.
No. It's not like recognizing George Bush is the President. It's like saying he and others like him will ALWAYS be the president, like it is some sort of universal truth. Quite a difference. Read closely before you respond. Your argument ends up becoming a handy apology for these people, rather than real analysis. It's a slave mentality.
Good point. The argument as I understand it, though, is not the application of Locke's views on ownership, but his views on property law. There is a big difference in these two concepts: property law is based not upon owning anything in the traditonal sense, but upon getting a set of rights when you live on a piece of property. By living somewhere for a certain time (or getting a transferrable claim from someone who has) you get the right to not be removed from that land, to use the land as you see fit (building, farming, etc.), you have the right to profit from such actions, etc. This is different from "possession is 80 percent of the law," since there is an abstract system at play where essentially nobody "owns" the land (it's all public domain) but you get certain protections that allow you to use it over time (and pass it down to your children when you're done).
Today's sig brought to you by http://www.swankypimp.com
...Which is the point exactly. Copyright is an attempt to proect artists and artisans from a different era, and may need some revamping. Seeing a Mozart impersonator in Vegas is much different from listening to the real deal: if there were, say, bootleg wax cylinders of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," I bet he would've been pissed. The reason for copyright (to protect an individual's creative works and allow him/her to profit from those works others find useful) is not linked to the current implementation of that policy, which should be modified for new economic moment (we're moving from a need-based culture to a gift-based one; the whole "end of scarcity" argument in the article). Of course, how to modify the system while still accomplishing its goals is the million dollar question.
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The question is: if I use my computer to create this text, do I have all rights to it? I don't know the answer. If I say "I prohibit you from reading this", it is a noncence, since I made the text available for unrestricted reading by posting it. If I say "I don't want other people use my words without mentioning my name", this sounds ringht. Music companies make music available for unrestricted (well, easy) copying by releasing CDs. If they tell us that we cannot rip these CDs, it doesn't sound convincing. But I would certainly avoid publishing their music with my name on it. I might not mention the label name, but the artist name is always there when I share something on Napster. This is approximately where the dividing line is for me on the copyright issue.
It is not the basic concept but rather its implimentation that is at fault. (C) used to protect one for a maximum of 28 years in the US, and now it is lifetime + 50 years in the US. The result is that expression is more akin to real estate today than a comodity. This is what kills the free market.
OTOH, the more IP law becomes strong, the stronger the GPL becomes. So, the General Public Virus (as a friend of mine once called it) will become more pernicious as the laws become more strict. I think that this is a step in the right direction.
I say, fight for a reasonable system. Shorten the period of time copyrights are good for and then allow the market to do its work.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The only "free" market Lord Conrad Black and his like-minded cohort (murder?) of cronies is interested in is a "free" market where they (and people just like them) have the freedom to do exactly what they want at everyone else's expense. (They sure don't want a "free market" because they think it'll be good for the commonweal.) They want, say, for example, the freedom to own 56% of Canada's total media and the freedom to get more, more, more; the freedom to drive smaller, independent papers (as in St. Catherines, Ontario) into the ground simply because they're eating up Black market share; and the freedom to basically run roughshod over anyone who doesn't happen to agree with them, anyone who doesn't kowtow to them, or anyone who doesn't make a billion $$ a year (hostile takeovers, anyone?), because no one can stand up to them in terms of clout, influence, or straight monetary magnetism.
/. don't need to help them out.
While I'm not the world's biggest copyright/patent-it-forever fan in the world (limited terms are good things), I can definitely see a use for IP laws...especially in light of arguments like that one. Specifically, IP laws basically exist from keeping people like that from taking your ideas away from you, exploiting them for profit, and then turning around and saying smugly that you have no right to complain after they've invoked the Golden Rule on you--that is to say, "He who has the gold makes the rules." Basically, IP functions here as a way of levelling the playing field slightly. As Harlan Ellison once said, "Equal time does not consist of your having access to the major networks and your opponent having a soapbox on the corner."
As much as patents and copyrights might be a bad thing (not always; artists deserve to eat too), attitudes like that are tantamount to their stealing our soapbox.
Also, can you imagine what a boon for the Post it would be if suddenly copyright and IP were just thrown out? They'd no longer have to pay for reprint rights, wire service fees, photo fees, and all that good stuff... Conrad must beat off thinking about it...
So, don't agree with these people for the wrong reasons. Think about it. We're already getting screwed badly enough by Ld. Black and his Stepford friends. We here on
This has been a public service announcement from the Unfriends of Conrad Black Foundation. Have a nice day.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Once somebody creates a convenient pay-per-stream-by-card system, there'll be a way to get all the content you want legally AND conveniently. Today you get legality or convenience, not both. The sooner somebody creates the ideal system, the sooner the moneymakers will have something worth paying for, and the sooner most pirates (Napster users) will get back to legal means.
Heh no thanks. We heard what bush wants to do with a national park in alaska :)
Canada rules!
If I took his essay, put my name on it and sold it, he might sing a different tune.
Why did you automatically assume the author, Ilana Mercer, was a man?
Just moderate this (-1, offtopic)
Jetgirl
Copyrights are designed to protect expression, not to allow the supression of facts and information. I've seen no evidence that this isn't working. I don't need open rights to Mickey Mouse to further my life, if I'm not prevented from making a cartoon myself. Copyright isn't keeping me away from anything I need - only things I might want - and that's where people begin to complain.
It's all about money, huh?
:::: Mike Snyder
The problem is, you're not encouraging them to do so. What you're doing is DEMANDING that they do so -- saying they have no RIGHT to sell what they've created. You're removing their right to choose.
Let me ask you this. Why, in a system that already allows people who create intellectual property to give it away at no charge, would stripping away the right to protect this property be better? You don't have to remove copyright protection - you simply have to convince everybody that they SHOULDN'T use it.
This comes down to wanting something for nothing. The lack of a copyright system isn't necessary for those who do it "for art." Electronic duplication makes now the best time in HISTORY for such "labors of love" to be shared with the world. Let those who create for free do it. Allow those who don't the protection of copyright. There is no NEED to change this.
Without protection, I think you'd be shocked at how little "art" you'd find.
:::: Mike Snyder
This seems true at first, but with closer examination this arguement falls apart. One thing that you must realize is that IP is fundamentally different from normal property (physical things). What makes IP IP is the fact that it can be copied for no charge. When you buy a CD, you are not paying $15 for the disc itself, but for the artist. In the comment I am replying to, the author said, "..and we'll keep doing this until the price is just barely above the cost to actually make the CD." The flaw with this idea is that the marginal cost must in some way include revenue for the artist. Without a copyright the CD's would be produced without paying money to the artist. This would make singing a very bad business to be in, resulting in no more songs (and don't get started on people doing it for free; we all know how much free music there is). The CD market would be better if there was no RIAA and producing companies, which would make the market monopolisticaly competitive (many firms with somewhat different products) instead of what is an oligopoly (the major producers). Although a more competitive market is better, forcing one will destroy the industry.
The moving pictures, sound effects, and dialogue of It's a Wonderful Life are in the public domain (simple matter of lapsed copyright), but the music is not (it was licensed for the film rather than granted).
Someone figured that out 5-10 years ago, and started suing any television station that showed it with sound (istr one tried showing it without sound; ihniw they used subtitles). The number of instances of IAWL across the dial during the holiday season has dropped from several per day to a couple per year.
Of course, someone here could find a way to strip the music from the audio track and overlay some Phish and it'd be a wonderful capracorny phatty PD life again.
--Blair
And can anyone clear up international patents? What stops a Japanese company from doing '1-click-shopping'?
Treaty. Berne Convention, etc.
No treaty? Fair game. It's a big problem in some countries. And a reason WIPO was created (www.wipo.org).
--Blair
"And CmdrTaco has ALREADY stated he is OK with this -- he found someone who registered something similar to slashdot.org, and simply framed slashdot with ads. CmdrTaco told us he wasn't worried. Why should be be? What the heck is the point of going to the wrong site?" I bet he would feel quite differently if someone set up a site and was able to re-route traffic from slashdot to the slashdot copy. That means they could get all of slashdot's visitors, and all of the banner ad profits, without having to actually give CmdrTaco anything. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what copyright law protects against. If you illegaly copy my music, and then use that music to generate ad revenues, subscribers, or sales of any kind, then you are using MY work to generate YOU money without compensating ME. Which seems to be fine with many people here, since they don't actually have to make a living from music and nobody is threatening THEIR method of making a living.
"He was paid quite well to write new items. His music was in the public domain after the first performance and was performed by many cut-rate houses without his consent."
sorry this is incorrect. while he certainly did commision work, he also published work as well and recieved royalties on their sale.
from the grove dictionary of music:
He wanted a post at the Imperial court in Vienna, but was content to do freelance work in a city that apparently offered golden opportunities. He made his living over the ensuing years by teaching, by publishing his music, by playing at patrons' houses or in public, by composing to commission (particularly operas); in 1787 he obtained a minor court post as Kammermusicus, which gave him a reasonable salary and required nothing beyond the writing of dance music for court balls. He always earned, by musicians' standards, a good income, and had a carriage and servants; through lavish spending and poor management he suffered times of financial difficulty and had to borrow
so as you can see, he was compensated in numerous ways for his work. which is quite reasonable, considering how talented he was.
"I think you will find that Mozart did not have any copyright protection!
well that's not quite right either:
"After all, the first copyright law in England dates from 1710 (and gave much less protection than modern copyright law), yet publishing had flourished for hundreds of years in England despite censorship and wide-spread illiteracy. n11 The point is a little misleading, however. In the old days, the costs of making copies were a higher fraction of total cost than they are today, so the problem of appropriability was less acute. Also, there were alternative institutions for internalizing the benefits of expression. n12 And before freedom of expression became generally applauded, publishing was often believed to impose negative externalities--so there was less, sometimes no, desire to encourage it. Finally, while it may be difficult to determine whether, on balance, copyright is a good thing, it is easy to note particular distortions that a copyright law corrects. Without copyright protection, authors, publishers, and copiers would have inefficient incentives with regard to the timing of various decisions. Publishers, to lengthen their head start, would have a disincentive to engage in prepublication advertising and even to announce publication dates in advance, and copiers would have an incentive to install excessively speedy production lines. There would be increased incentives to create faddish, ephemeral, and otherwise transitory works because the gains from being first in the market for such works would be likely to exceed the losses from absence of copyright protection. There would be a shift toward the production of works that are difficult to copy; authors would be more likely to circulate their works privately rather than widely, to lessen the risk of copying; and contractual restrictions on copying would multiply
I just submitted the following reply to Ilana Mercer's article. Maybe the National Post will print it as an editorial... who knows?
----- : cut here : ---------- : cut here : ---------- : cut here : -----
Ms. Mercer recently wrote an article on her predictions of a copyright-free society, ostensibly drawn from the difficulty the music industry has faced in their attempt to shut down Napster. While I largely agree with Ms. Mercer's comments about the weakening of copyright protection - and the potential consequences and benefits of this development - I contest her comments about the patent system.
(My background: I'm a third-year law student at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in Cleveland, Ohio. I've been studying patent law and clerking for a patent firm for about a year, and I recently passed the patent bar exam. I recently conducted several months of extensive research to write a treatise chapter on the history and development of patent law throughout the world, and my comments are based on this research.)
Ms. Mercer calls the patent monopoly "egregious" because of the potential unfairness to competitors, and even noncompetitors, of enforcing a monopoly against them. She applauds the court's rejection of the Prozac patent, recently stricken down to the benefit of consumers and the detriment of investors - ostensibly for the benefit of the free market. "Clearly," Ms. Mercer concludes, "to sanction state-granted, exclusive monopoly privileges on the central planning grounds that this redistribution of wealth promotes prosperity in society is not an enduring basis for principled legislation."
Ms. Mercer's comments, however, miss the central principle of the patent system: In a free market, Prozac would never have been invented without the protection promised by the patent system.
Regardless of their value to society, complex inventions typically aren't created unless they may be commercially exploited. The reasons behind this are obvious: the inventive process is very expensive and very risky. Private investors don't like sinking huge amounts of money into projects that hold little promise of profit. Complex inventions - those that can't simply be knocked together in a garage in one's free time - need a source of funding, in the form of investors, who obviously want their money back at some point. That's just how the free market works.
But one of the biggest challenges to the profitability of an invention in a patent-free market is that even if you A) attract funds from investors, B) succeed in your inventive efforts, and C) find a way to make your invention profitable - your competitors can simply cobble together their version of your product and sell it. So all the risks you took and resources you spent inventing this great new product are wasted! What greater unjustice can there be in a free market? What greater challenge to a necessary element of a free market - innovation - is in greater need of strict measures to overcome it?
More specifically: What investor would dump billions of dollars into the planning, creation, evaluation, clinical trials, FDA approval efforts, and marketing of Prozac, without some assurance that their investment may be rewarded?
The free market, which Ms. Mercer so highly prizes, has a few inherent problems recognized for centuries, and this is one of them. Like the class cheater in fourth grade who copied everyone else's answers, it makes more sense in the modern business world to sit back and copy your competitors' ideas than go through the expensive and uncertain efforts of deriving your own ideas. By unburdening themselves of the costs of invention, the sharks can outcompete inventors.
Granted, at first blush - which seems to be the extent of thought Ms. Mercer has given to this system - a patent monopoly may seem unjust. Basically, someone who expends the effort of inventing something on their own and trying to produce it may be barred by the government from doing so, simply because someone else invented and patented it earlier. This might seem monumentally unfair to the inventor. But bear this in mind: Would it be better to let this second inventor practice the same invention, simply because he claims to have invented it independently? If so, then how can you distinguish between an honest "later inventor" and a competitor who just reverse engineers the inventor's invention (or, worse still, just follows the steps laid out in the patent) and claims to have invented it independently? It's simply impossible. Again, the sharks will rule the fountain of invention.
In closing, I'd like to point out that the governmental protection of invention dates back even to the Greeks and Romans, and our current patent systems were born in ancient Venice and cultivated by Queen Elizabeth. Surely, if patents were such a great hindrance to the free market as Ms. Mercer implies, the system would not have survived several hundred years of development.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Oh sure, some things will be done for the fun of it, as in a hobby. But does anyone want to compare the quality of things done free vs. things done for money? (Hold it!!! I'm coming to Open Source.) Is Slash a better guitarist than the school band's six-string plucker? Why doesn't Slash compose/play for free? Because, his guitar is his living. Just as I (and most of us) drive to work in the mornings, he plays the guitar!!! I don't hear anyone suggesting that all of us should work for free.
OK, once decided that Slash plays his guitar to earn money, why not charge only once and let everyone else make clones of it? It doesn't cause Slash to do any extra work. Well, if more and more people buy Slash's music, he'll get more money. If anyone thinks, his music is not worth the price, they are welcome to stay away.
Open source is done mainly by people who do it as a hobby, while maintaining steady jobs at some commercial outfit or the other. Think all the people who contributed to Linux can make a living of it? No. They have to work, developing commercial software for some money-minded corporation. That's where the gravy comes from.
... over a month ago? Because people stopped paying for it? The writer of this article ignores the need for creators of these "valueless intangibles" to be paid for their efforts, to receive the necessities of life in return for devoting their lives to creating art. I think "The Plant" really anti-proves her point.
I want to read a longer, more thorough treatment of intellectual property that argues for its reduction. Most essays on the topic spend so much time introducing the idea that they never get around to addressing all of the concerns/objections to the idea. Can anyone recommend some longer essays/books on the topic?
And you know what - if you say screw the RIAA, all that is left are artists and songs. If you feel that marketing, sales, and distribution do not make bands popular, I have two words for you: Milli Vanilli.
So you're saying that if the record companies packed their bags and left town today, radio stations would prefer to shut down rather than download MP3's and play those? MTV wouldn't download videos from artist's sites?
Promotion does have value independant of royalties. A smart new band would work out a promotion deal in exchange for a share of future profits (from live performnces, television appearances, merchandising, and perhaps street performer protocol and patronage as well).
He was paid quite well to write new items. His music was in the public domain after the first performance and was performed by many cut-rate houses without his consent.
Well, duh. If copyright was abandoned tomorrow we wouldn't need the GPL any more.
Anytime the subject of Intellectual Monopolies has come up on Slashdot lately you see this argument posted over and over again - and moderated up immediately as "Insightful", despite the fact that anyone who has spent any time looking at what the Free Software Movement is all about should be able to discard it as "Redundant" (or maybe "Troll"?) in 2 seconds.
I don't believe you. Give me some proof of that.
Do you really believe that products aren't created without government-granted monopolies to secure a fat return on your investment?
How would the absence of patents make commercial exploitation impossible?
Your arguments fail to convince me. I think Prozac (or something similar) would have been invented. Here's why:
The patent system not only carries a promise of a lucrative monopoly. It also carries the threat of someone else getting there just before you do, and obtaining the patent. Now your investment is completely wasted.
If, however, you know that the government isn't going to stop you from making the drug you invented just because your competitor makes something similar, you are guaranteed a return on your R&D investment. Granted, not as high a return as you would have had if you won in the first-pass-the-post patent system, but a return that fairly reflects your efficiency in production.
Your view of investment in innovation only holds water if you believe inventions happen in splendid isolation. Which they don't.
Sure they do. The copyrights enable musicians to get royalty payments. During the bebop days, there was a recording strike over royalties. Musicians can and have taken industrial action against record companies, to make sure that the copyright benefits are passed on. They are not helpless victims as some slashdotters would have us believe.
MP3s (and their successors) can offer musicians the ability to advertise their wares directly, and to sell their productions without submitting themselves to editorial criticism by accountants.
I do not see what is stopping them from using MP3s today, and I see no justification for your implicit assumption that the current copyright system would have to be abolished for artists to distribute their music via MP3. I'm all for artists deciding to give away their music for free, but they should be the ones to decide, as opposed to having the napsterite mob disposses them.
One important point that he ignores is that copyrighted works are scarce. It's true that copies of a given work may not be scarce, but the work itself certainly is scarce, and it takes very tangible resources to produce (no money in == no copyrighted works out).
I forgot to add -- during the bop era, a recording strike resulted in a lot of Charlie Parker's great music (as well as that of a lot of other great bop musicians ) never getting recorded. Basically, the artists were getting screwed, and refused to record because of it. The bottom line is that when you start screwing the artists, you inevitably lose some great music.
Strangely enough, the article was making the point that copyrights and patents are actually not a part of the free-market system and are really a form of protectionism.
Of course, actually addressing those points would've prevented you from making this long hand-wringing rant complaining about what the end result of having a copyright and patent system are and wanting to go back to the 'good old days' so the cycle can start all over again.
I long ago decided that copyrights and patents are not strictly necessary. I had kinda felt that way, for awhile, but had many of the same qualms you did, and then I heard about Cygnus (now owned by RedHat), and I never had another.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You know this. I know this. Napster knows this. The industry knows this. Artists know this. Pirates know this. In short, everyone knows this (well anyone who is concerned). It's simply not convenient for people to admit when they're making the small artist "use" argument.
Speaking of which, I strongly suspect that Napster could employ archiving more cost effectively than running these massive databases, 99% of which contains pirated material.
It is ironic though that you choose to criticize me for making assumptions about the rest of the population, when you purport yourself to know what their ideas are. I, in fact, implied nothing of the sort, whereas you clearly just did. What I did was imply that I know the accepted arguments reasonably well. Having studied business. Having known numerous inventors/innovators/entreprenuers, I am quite qualified to comment as to what are the common arguments. The author's definition as to what is or is not property is simply not pertinent to the arguments that you'll hear from academia, business, or most inventors, by and large. [If you want to demonstrate otherwise, then please do so.]
What's more, I suggest to you that most people in this country are far more reasonable and moderate than those on slashdot or in the Open Source community. Those that don't know or aren't concerned simply aren't party to this argument.
Where are you going with this? What is your point?
Still unclear.
I agree with you here and I've called them and others on slashdot on it a number of times.
I simply think these are unreasonable stretches. If ADM, Monsanto, or whomever create a super seed (disclaimer: I'm not too familiar with agriculture), it's not as if the farmer is directly harmed. Their own little plot of soil will, in all likelyhood, continue to produce just as it always did. The only difference is that the competition can do it more cost effectively. You can argue that the competition may then hurt that farmer, but that's extraneous to the argument that intellectual property itself is robbing the farmer of his rights. The same goes for so many of these other ideas. What's more, I'd assert that that is the nature of capitalism, as unpleasant as it can be at times. If the idea is so powerful as to make the competitors significantly more cost effective, that's a good thing. If the only way to secure that progress is with intellectual property, that's still a good thing on the aggregate. If that farmer is unwilling or unable pay, he's probably not equipped to compete in today's world with vastly lower production costs. Making exceptions for the farmer is just delaying the inevitable and will ultimately cost the consumer more.
The same goes for many of these other arguments, however, I don't feel like getting into them at the moment. Perhaps later...
The GPL requires you to publish your source if you use GPL code. This by no means comes automatically with the abolition of copyright. In fact, there is every reason to think that if copyright were abolished, that software developers would keep their source very private, not to mention throwing in a zillion trapdoors, obfuscation, etc. Abolishing copyright may make pirates happy, but it's quite clear from the letter and the intent of GPL, not to mention RMS's own words, that its chief concern is the source, not the ability to copy or modify the binary.
What's more, I suggest to you that if copyright were abolished, a great deal of commercial software development would be devastated. This would result in a reduction of paying programming jobs. The reduction in jobs would, in turn, force the would-be OSS developers of today into non-programming jobs, resulting in a loss to GPL software. In short, it'd be a loose-loose situation.
At issue, though, is that from one perspective, the providers of these recorded performances (records) are merely providing a service. This service is specifically that of providing a recording of a performance I couldn't/didn't attend live. The cost charged to me is for the service, and the costs incurred in providing it to me (the media, production, distribution, etc). If I am suddenly able to obtain a similar (MP3's do not equal CD or Anolog quality recordings) copy of an artist performance, for a lower cost or free, then I should be able to legally obtain that copy.
The artist still can earn an income from their live performances. The businesses who provide the service of producing, distributing, and selling CD or other physical copies of the artist's performance(s) can still earn an income for the service they provide. The method I use to obtain some/all of my copies in no way prevents either of these parties from earning an income for their respective products. Especially since I may still choose to obtain another copy, in CD format from the latter, and by attending a live performance by the first.
In this scenario the only purpose for a Copyright is to prove original authorship. This is necessary to prevent me from, for example, claiming I have written a song that in fact you wrote. By Copyrighting the song, you have a record of your claim which will no doubt predate my claim to have authored the same song. This is what you mean by "owning the ideas of these music makers/movie makers/software makers". I only steal an idea when I falsly claim to have thought of it first - not when I copy that idea without denying the original author due acknowledement. Take note though, acknowledgement does not automatically infer monetary compensation, merely the statement that "so-and-so" is the original creator of this idea.
Here, though, we are talking only of recognition of original authorship - not any type of control over the use of that song. This is exacly where the current scheme falls flat on it's face. By adding the layer of control on top, we pervert the original intent and create the legal and social mess we now have.
We need Copyrights as proof of authorship, we do not need them as control mechinisms used to derive additional income. A perfect example of the harm done to society by this perversion is the current limitations placed on consumer electronic devices. I, as a non-signed musician, cannot cost-effectively produce my own digital recordings because the components available to me at a price I can afford are hobbled so that I cannot output media in a digital format. This hobbling is done per "industry" pressure to prevent "pirating" of Copyrighted material. That it also prevents me from producing my own Copyrighted material doesn't matter one bit to them.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Under the current method of organizing the music system some very small group of musicians is awarded super-star status for some reason, which sure doesn't seem to be talent (except occasionally). Perhaps this is built into human nature, but I see no reason to encourage this particular tendency. MP3s (and their successors) can offer musicians the ability to advertise their wares directly, and to sell their productions without submitting themselves to editorial criticism by accountants. Of course, some won't succeed, but I would guess that a higher percentage would succeed than under the current system. It's just that the peaks (as measured in dollars, or other currency) wouldn't be quite as high.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
copyrights and patents grant a temporary monopoly in an effort to promote the the well being and the advancement of humanity and the sciences. the idea of property is based in greed. do you really think the patent system works perfectly well in the UK and Europe? are you that naive? how does granting this monopoly ON AN IDEA further humanity? 'promotes others to develop new ideas'? im sorry, but that doesn't flow with me. people will have ideas and be creative whether or not you give them a 'right to be greedy' excuse. thats all it comes down too.
There is no such thing as intellectual property. Every idea and every thing is a derivative of that that came before it, only God's first thought could be intellectual property. (and I use the word God not in the divination-praise-the-chruch-send-them-money way, but in the unknown-reaches way, im not exactly a church goer).
If you think patents and copyright are wrong, do not accept them. Ignore them. Fight them. Please do not simply give in and go along with what some magic talking head says to you.
-=Gargoyle_sNake
-=-=-=-
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative.
Well, Shakespeare's business model was to write material that he could use to attract an audience to his playhouse.
Copyright didn't really play a part in what he was doing.
First note: Of course a government monopoly is, in some senses, anti-market. This is true of all monopolies, including the right to exclusively possess real and personal property, by the way. In other senses, these rules, however non-laissez-faire they seem at first blush, can likewise be argued to be pro-market as well.
By providing for a police force to defend my property rights, I no longer need to do so myself. This makes easier the process of buying and selling real estate, and gives me greater incentive to invest in developing my property, which is less vulnerable to abuse by others.
Likewise the argument goes -- a copyright provides incentives to authors to create their works. Indeed, some authors have been screwed over the years by cabals of publishers, who have created a different kind of anti-market force, one that works quite powerfully against invention and creation -- and there are authors who have become powerful enough to buck that trend, such as Stephen King and Formerly-known-as.
However, neither SK or the iconic symbol who wants his old name back now have abandoned copyright, as the article suggests. (Prince, at least, continues to have demand letters written in his name for new songs when they are played in restaurants and by radio stations without his consent) -- they have just found an alternative means of distribution.
And good for them. Their "tipping"-based model is, IMHO, ultimately the new wave. But it is hardly an abandonment of copyright -- just an abandonment of the practices of the old breed of publishers.
And, by the way, Napster is **NOT** about copyright infringement -- it is about the SCOPE of a Copyright. There is no allegation of direct infringement in any of the complaints or briefs of that case -- there cannot be. Napster hasn't engaged in direct infringement. The question there is solely whether they have "contributed" under Copyright law to the infringement of others. And that, is another story altogether.
No movie produced since 1910 has entered public domain.
False. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, that staple of holiday TV fare, is in the public domain.
Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative[?]
... In a word, YES.
Keep in mind that Shakespeare was dead broke for a lot of his life. If his goal in life was to get rich, he sure picked a lousy profession. In Shakespeare's time, actors couldn't even be buried in the same cemeteries as "decent Christians".
Let's say for sake of argument that you've got a piece of software which, for entirely personal reasons all your own, you place into the public domain. Not only is there no copyright on it, there can be no copyright on it because you've explicitly waived your rights to it.
Can Sun then use it in the next (non-free) version of Solaris? Yep.
Can RMS use it in the next (free) HURD? Yep.
Is it free software? Yep. Even more free than BSD-licensed code, because you aren't even asking for attribution.
RMS would like to see copyright on software done away with altogether, because that means the free software community could disassemble Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and every other UNIX out there. The free software community could investigate how other software works with impunity, not being restricted by those nebulous "anti-reverse-engineering" clauses in software licenses.
While free software would lose a marginal amount if copyright on software were done away with, the community would post a much larger gain.
I think it does mention near-zero-cost reproduction in the article, which is maybe an important point (in those days, you had to be pretty big to run a printing press).
I don't think the differences between today and 1789 are just technological, though. There's stuff like universal literacy, and the fact that the economy is getting more information-based, which also matter (and like you say, aren't mentioned in the article).
Cool, I never heard of them before - interesting!
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
This article isn't necessarily promoting a libertarian viewpoint. In fact, it is working from the Western tradition. John Locke's political writings are pretty much the basis for the constitution of the USA. And it is an economic fact that scarcity preceeds property. Every economic theory that is worth taking seriously is based on that. If that weren't true, how can you even begin to explain concepts like supply and demand? Economics is a study of scarcity. We assign value to items that are hard to get. The more available they are, the less their value. The trouble with this notion of property is how we are to interpret it for IP, which is easily reproduced. Being that IP creators are now able to publish and distribute their works themselves, it is a valid excercise to explore the ramifications of removing the traditional "Middle Men" from the market. If you spend some time and review the history of copyright, you will quickly see that it was originally done to protect the IP creators, but has transitioned into a system that protects the middle men. Is this what we want to reward, or is it idea creation? Also, a large function of copyright is to increase the knowledgebase of the public after the author has had the opportunity to enjoy a limited monopoly. However, the Sonny Bono copyright extension act has extended copyrights an additional 25 years. How does this help the public? I don't see how any of these ideas are libertarian. They are just sane public policy.
I disagree; you can have trade which is purely a swap of services. A lot of business-to-business trade is essentially of this form. You only need a concept of property to deal in physical goods which have scarcity (i.e. cannot be duplicated for nothing), like food or computer hardware.
When trading purely services, you are in fact, using your own property, namely your own body, mind, intellect. These belong to you and any services you provide would be based on the use of your property.
If someone wants you to mow the lawn, you would be providing a service. You might use some property to do it more efficiently than otherwise. You might use a lawnmower you own. You use property all the time in the commission of providing a service.
A patent allows you to stop me using an idea which you thought of.
You rightly point out that a patent can even stop me from using an idea I thought about. That fundamental flaw strongly shows why laws to protect intangible "intellectual" property have no place in the information age.
For example...
The so-called "frowny" has been trademarked by Despair, inc. Admittedly, it appears that it was registered to make a mockery of the PTO. Though, my use of this trademark in conjunction with a negative comment would "dilute the value" of the frowny trademark, and would be cause for some lawsuit. :P (has the tongue sticking out emoticon been trademarked yet?)t ml
http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.h
Someone patented the use of a laser to provide exercise for cats. I have, on a number of occasions inadvertently violated this patent in amusing cats, and if it could be proven, I would likely be required to pay royalties for the use of this idea that was independently arrived at.
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05443036__
Some might argue that it's just a system that needs to be tweaked - fixed through some kind of reform to allow "legitimate" owners of "intellectual property" to be rewarded for their labor.
I propose that all "intellectual property" law does is prop-up old business models and keep new ones from emerging. If we lived in a world without copyright, patent and trademark, it would be different. The presence of such laws has slowed progress where progress would have naturally occurred. Who's to say that the progress such laws protects is more important than the progress that it discourages?
Some argue that without such protections, less innovation and creation would be performed. Kinsella and Mercer argue that there would be as much creation and innovation that the world requires - no more, no less.
In my view, the world would be transformed to the open-source model. That you give away the recipe and sell the chicken. That you can download music free but pay for the live performance. You'd pay to see movies on the big screen with great sound.
In the year 2080, when we get our first replicator at home, if we decide to replicate something, will someone claim ownership to that idea and only allow us to create an instance of it if we pay? Will someone own the concept of a chair and receive royalties everytime someone replicates one?
Laws should never be created to protect the way of doing business. The industrial age transformed the way things were made. If the Luddites had their way, chairs would still be made by hand, or at least those who use machines would subsidize those who make by hand. Laws should only protect our rights to hold real, tangible property.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
It's funny how so many people equate rich with evil. So if a poor guy took something from a rich company it's ok but if a rich company takes something from a poor guy then it's automatically a problem.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The RIAA has had their day. It is time to step down. May free art prosper.
The RIAA never really had control by having control of production. What they really have is control over marketing of young artists. Almost no artists that are successful today could have made it without record contracts fronting them a lot of money for an album, marketing the album, and providing a sales and distribution network.
And you know what - if you say screw the RIAA, all that is left are artists and songs. If you feel that marketing, sales, and distribution do not make bands popular, I have two words for you: Milli Vanilli.
The copyright laws in the US are designed under the US Constitutional sentence
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
This means that authors are guaranteed certain rights about performance of their artwork, copyright of their writings, protection from conpetition for inventions... the purpose is to encourage authorship and invention through MONEY.
It has little to do with whether something MAY be copied free. Would we even have ssh right now if the RSA patent had not existed ? Would we even have mp3 encoding without patents ? (Personally I'd drop the mp3 patent, but it clearly had a large impact on mp3 spread).
Those are the arguments that need to be made. I think you can point at bad patents, and problems with duration of both copyright and patent, and use of copyright to justify EULAs... but I find it hard to believe one would argue that all software and all digital artwork should be public domain.
That is anarchy.
For example, I value the chicken in the supermarket and as the chicken is currently the store's property I must pay them to acquire it and consume it. You may not value chicken and thus do not have to acquire it.
Weak, weak chicken analogy.
What if I value the chicken enough to want it, but decide that I don't want to have to pay for the packaging or the ambient Muzak in the grocery store? I have the means of going straight to the farm and stealing chickens directly. My only true marginal cost is my time and effort to seek out and steal^H^H^H^H^Hacquire chickens. I would be willing to pay a business to make this process of appropriation easier for me. Saving me time and effort has value.
But what about the chicken farmer? Clearly they have invested countless hours and dollars in the raising of the chickens that I value. Should I be forced at gunpoint (forced by law) to compensate them with my money? Should the business that helped me save time in the acquisition process be forced by law to compensate them?
I think the answer is clearly NO. But then how can the chicken farmer possibly make any money by creating chicken?
Several ways. First they can use the chickens as a loss-leader (open up your marketing 101 books) to bring more and more people to their farm for hoe-downs and square dancing festivals. A live performance is still valued by most chicken-eating fans and is a unique once in a lifetime service (either you were there or you were not, and no watching it on pay-perview is not just as good (unless the farm stinks--in which case pay-per-view can't capture that special essence)). Besides performance the farmer can hold other special events (e.g., cockfights) and charge for admission. If they truly want to be compensated for their chicken then they can release their chicks serially and demand a ransom to release the next one (e.g., buy this chicken or the eggs get smashed) (or next egg, whatever they want to). Basically this is the farm hand protocol and would work well.
This is long-winded, but my point is that times are changing and the internet allows for the traffic of chickens between people for virtually no marginal cost. Business models based on government enforcement of poultry monopolies will not last as people will find a way to get what they want.
If we don't give the drug company financial incentives to produce new drugs through patent protection, they will slow their rate of researching new drugs. Is that in society's best interest?
Actually, Yes.
Ask yourself, what is the prime motivator of a pharmaceutical company, of any company for that matter? Money.
How does a pharmaceutical company get a steady, dependable stream of money? By producing drugs that heal people? No way, then those people would be healthy and would not buy any more meds.
What then? By producing drugs that alleviate the symptoms but which do not cure the disease, making the patients dependent on those drugs for the rest of their life. Thats the way to make big wads of $$$ for the shareholders and nice fat bonuses for the fat cats.
Not very different from the business of the makers of illicit drugs, when you think of it...
To keep people healthy, we should do like they did in ancient China instead. The physician only gets paid as long as the patient is healthy. Or something like that...
/Dervak
Companies perform a cost/benefit analysis trying to decide if they should research, produce, seek FDA approval, and then mass produce a new medicine. With reasonable patent protection (not unreasonable like Amazon's 1-click) the drug company can spend more money on R&D with some hope to recover this investment before other companies can benefit from their hard work.
If we don't give the drug company financial incentives to produce new drugs through patent protection, they will slow their rate of researching new drugs. Is that in society's best interest?
We should reform patent laws, but I think we still want them.
Is that Copyright and Partent were both created (and still exist) to CREATE free and open markets.
Anyone who buys this claptrap needs to read a bit of history
The ideal of a free market is to have a system that operates without government intervention, is it not? Well, when you actually step back and look at things, copyrights, patents, and trademarks are all government interventions. Put aside the concept of ownership - none of the above terms have anything to do with that. Copyrights and patents are government-instituted monopolies on goods. In the case of copyrights, its a monopoly on artistic works. In the case of patents, its a monopoly on an invention. Trademarks I believe are necessary, or at least fraud laws that have the same effect.
-RickHunter
How can it be a well-written article if it doesn't even address the incentive for artists to create, which is the fundamental justification for the copyright system?
I, for instance, don't see any need to assume that scarity preceeds property. And the entire bit about a writer "unfairly" stopping a film maker from ripping off his story was pretty silly. It wasn't an argument against copyright, because you would have to already have rejected all intellectual property rights to see anything wrong with the situation.
In other words, the entire thing was a huge question begging, which doesn't strike me as particularly well written.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
...except for all the others. If we try to value IP based on the scarcity model, we arrive at zero. We know that "zero" is an irrational answer to the problem. We have no rational basis for evaluating products with such wierd elasticity of demand and supply. Therefore, the only sane thing to do is treat IP as if it were physical property, and that is exactly what copyright does. Until you come up with a better answer, you are just tilting at windmills. We have yet to come up with a better answer. The Stephen King experiment mentioned in the article was a flop.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
His essay was published on the web.
All can read it, save it, print it, give it away.
I think that pretty much means he has no IP rights to it. Except, perhaps, that the National Post has it copyrighted by default, like everything else.
I suggest you contact him -- I'm more than willing to bet that he would ask the National Post to release copyright on this one article. Otherwise perhaps he would be willing to release it himself in a show of good faith.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Use the source luke...
After the story and before the copyright notice appears this:
<!----End Story Content---->
The author didn't put that notice there. He had no clue it was going to be stuck there.
>If I took his essay, put my name on it and sold it, he might sing a different tune.
Dude, this isn't what he is talking about. He never said abolish the right to keep your name on stuff. He just said that your IP stuff should be availiable to all. The difference? One could, in a non-copyright society, consider removing someone's name from an item a defaming of the person.
>How about if I mirrored slashdot post for post, sold banner adds cheaper and took business away from VA.
Now you hit the nail on the head. You are keeping the stories names on them, and are providing a "value added" service. I have a small feeling, though, that you would lose out to those others that provide slashdot minus extra banner heads.
And CmdrTaco has ALREADY stated he is OK with this -- he found someone who registered something similar to slashdot.org, and simply framed slashdot with ads. CmdrTaco told us he wasn't worried. Why should be be? What the heck is the point of going to the wrong site?
>When will these guys realize their quest for free music will cost others dearly.
Cost whom? The RIAA? The MPAA? These aren't people. How about individuals, the mettle most of the world was built on? Yes, it destroys a company and benefits people. Boo-hoo. I feel really sorry for destroying something that existed only on paper to begin with. Do trees feel pain when paper gets shredded?
>If you think it is to expensive don't buy it, that's the way it works.
[Devil's Advocate Here]: Heh, well, you see, I don't understand expense because I couldn't pay the price for the books the idea is printed on. I guess I don't deserve to understand the way money is used in the world because I don't have enough to read a book. Heck, I'm surprinsing myself right here, right now, that I've been able to learn English from the book I stole from the bookstore.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I know that he sold some of his Canadian newspaper holdings, but I don't think he sold the Post (IANAJ).
Why did he sell them? So that he could step into other media temporarily, and make enough money to buy his papers back.. then he will TRUELY dominate, and there will be no such as thing as a free media in Canada.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Your Netscape example is a piss-poor way to make your point, because it is very factually inaccurate.
1. You can't copyright an idea (duh).
2. NCSA invented "the browser", better know as "NCSA Mosaic".
3. Netscape (closely tied to NCSA) and Microsoft Internet Explorer both have Mosaic code inside them.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It is my contention that removing the beauracracy that has 'seen its day' will not result in less art. It will result in less art for profit, at least the kinds of profits that make an A&R guy salivate. The incentive for true art is art for its own sake. If I were a musician (and I am), I would be loathe to suck up to the corporate culture and prostitute my creativity for their bottom line. Here in So Cal, I was "shocked" to learn that bands here have to pay to play, because all the venues are controlled by promoters.
I don't want something for nothing. I want nothing (no copyright) for nothing.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Then why was it necessary to invent copyleft instead of just putting free software in the public domain?
I'm trying to find an actual argument in your post, but there doesn't seem to be one.
One thing copyleft does is to prevent is free information from "backsliding" and becoming unfree. In a world without copyright, the only way to prevent this would be to hoard free information, trying very hard to make sure you always had a copy of the latest version. Otherwise the author could just stop providing copies, and you'd be out of luck.
The GPL also has the viral property that it prohibits you from mixing GPL'd software with non-GPL'd software. Whether yout think this is good or bad, it would no longer work that way without copyright.
I can only think of one feature of copyleft that would be obviated by abolishing copyright, and that's the protection against having other people try to take your free information and make it their own intellectual property.
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The point is, I'm not saying that corporations should be given any extra money. But somewhere along the line an artist must be getting paid somewhere, whether they are music artists or writers or whatever.
Fact: most authors get paid a small amount for creating the book initially, and get paid a small sum for each individual book they sold. If those books were copied for free, forget it. No one would want to be an author.
I think most hackers, myself included, have to figure out where that right line is between intellectual freedom and "getting free stuff" --- and learn not to cross it if we want our arguments to be taken seriously.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I think there is a need to be a balance between the need of the capitalists to make a profit (which motivates them), and the public (to liberty and the pursuit of happiness).
That balance seems to have swung far too far to the capitalist side. I'm not for getting rid of copyrights or the concept of IP. That would actually lead to a net loss of happiness by bringing many activities (like research) to a grinding halt. We must encourage capitalists to continue efforts that benefit society.
But the current laws have been unduly twisted and manipulated to create an environment that is ridiculous at best. Some one got the rights to : - ( and one click shopping. Please that is insane. Seems the system has become an amusing and vexing system that is proving it is in serious need for reform.
Personally I think there needs to be a more fair and realistic system. The only hope for this is new laws. Unfortunately capalists realized this and basically influence the current political environment to ensure that the laws will continue to favor them.
I would guess that a five-year limit on non-tangible and seven-year limit on tangible IP should be reasonable to allow a capitalist to make a reasonable return on investment. That gives them a lead that they could maintain through good business practices, but also allows competition that is essential to keep capitalist efficient.
And people talking about how it is better in the EU or Canada, are deluded at best. Europe was the birth place of many IP concepts, and currently has some of the most extreme IP laws. Canada taxes blank media, just incase you might use it for copying something. This is a global issue, that needs to be addressed while it still is possible.
With every election the politicians become more and more owned by the capitalists. We need new laws and reforms while it is still possible, and not just in the United States but world wide.
So who has the solution we can rally around? I don't know, and I would definitely not trust any political party's motives on this issue.
The biggest problem is the broadness issue. Most folks have no problem with someone wanting a reasonable amount of control over something they created, the issue is what defines reasonable. To use an old saying as an example: "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Great idea, but these days companies don't claim the rights to their 'better' mousetrap, they claim the rights to the idea of using some device for the purpose or detaining and possibly exterminating rodents or other offending small lifeforms. The first idea, that they own the right to their specific and unique version of a mousetrap is relatively reasonable, the second, that they basically own the entire idea of 'mousetrap' is not. yet, these days, companies can and do obtain such ownership [one click shopping anyone?]. That is the biggest problem.
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Reading between the lines, I get the impression the author is an Ayn Rand-ie with the common Rand-ie trait of speaking as though her basic axioms are universally accepted by every other person in the world. Sure, IP law conflicts with the idea that the law should only protect physical instances of property. But the law is not written on that assumption, nor is that most people's idea of a "free market".
Instances of an idea may not be scarce but the ideas themselves certainly are. It's that scarcity that creates the value the law protects.
Incidentally, what I find irritating is that I don't for a second imagine that Hemos and CmdrTaco actually believe any of this crap they endorse. Over the last few years, this anti-IP bandwagon has gelled around them and they're unwilling to disavow it. Maybe someday they'll explain why copyrights are bad but the GPL is sacred. No, calling it a "copyleft" isn't a valid explanation.
What's more, this is the first time in history of our country that works are not entering the public domain, due to the egregious nature of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA).
Not only has no movies been entering the public domain, but what recorded music has?? Maybe 78 records that didn't have the copyright notice stamped on them?? What abnout Winnie the Pooh?? Tolkien?? Robert Frost?? T.S Eliot??
It's really hard to listen to the MPAA and RIAA scream no fair! no fair! when they don't give the public their due. Of course they want copyrights to last forever, and they lobbied heavily for the CTEA.
The cries of the MPAA and RIAA ring very false to me too.
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There is a persistant pattern of people here who cannot see the forest through the trees.
You are all missing a very basic point.
The point of economics is so you, the human individual, can work and receive credit for your your work if others find it useful, and use that credit to trade for the works of others you find useful yourself.
How much your work is valued is determined somewhat subjectively (and neccessarily so) by how useful other human individuals find it, or perceive it to be (demand), and how difficult it is to create or obtain it (supply).
Since every individual has different needs, there will always be differnt opinions about what constitutes useful. Some people will find video games useful to relieve boredom, others will find diamond rings useful to bolster self esteem.
Since we live in a market based world, we must obtain credit to obtain basic neccessary to life items such as food, clothing, clean water and shelter. Everybody agrees these items are useful or they will die.
Intellectual property (patent and copyright) law is the only means of providing credit to the creators of new useful items so that they can obtain these neccessary to life items.
The creators of these new and useful items must receive some credit for their efforts or they will not be able to continue to produce them.
If Thomas Edison labours hundreds of hours, using thousand of materials, and works his brain (our most difficult to use tool) to create something as fundamentally useful as the light bulb, isn't it appropiate that we give him credit for his labours, so he can feed himself and his family? And isn't it appropiate that the ammount of credit he gets is connected to how useful the invention is?
If Amadeus Mozart works his brain and labours for a year to create a musical piece of incredible beauty that brings tears to the eyes of many who hear it, shouldn't he reap some reward from all the people who will make money distributing and playing his music? How will he get by and continue to produce if he doesn't?
How difficult it is to create or produce something isn't neccesarily tied to how useful others find it. I think that is what is driving you all crazy. But there is no general need for items that have been laboured over, there is only a need for items to be useful, and that is what our society is trying to reward with copyright law. The creation and production of useful items.
If I invent a new kind of water that tastes exactly like mud, that wouldn't be very useful, and I wouldn't expect to be rewarded for my efforts, even if I spent years perfecting the recipe. But if i invent a new drink made out of mud that cures cancer, I think it would be appropiate for me to become quite wealthy, even if it only took me fifteen minutes to make.
If the creators cannot be rewarded, they will still create, but less frequently, and more sporadically, with less ambition and effort, since their resources (time and money) will be tapped trying to obtain credit for their basic life needs.
The laws are imperfect and always will be, since laws are static and human interaction is dynamic. Perhaps someday somebody will invent a system of laws powered by fuzzy logic, that can dynamically and instantly adjust to changing market conditons as neccesary with an eye towards fairness and a level playing field, but for now we have to deal with the relative inefficienices of democracy which is the best working system we have so far to deal with these complexities.
So the skilled recipe-creator gets nothing, but the person who owns the chicken farm gets everything. So the band that has a good live show gets rewarded, but the anti-social electronic composer who makes music in his basement gets nothing. So the person who can afford the fancy home theatre system (or better yet, can afford to build a theatre and charge people admission) get all the rewards, whereas those who actually create the work get nothing.
A non-copyright society would just make the inequities of the current system even worse.
Relating to the software industry, the difficult-to-use always-breaks-down software would get all the support money, whereas the works-like-a-charm easy-to-use software would get nothing.
(BTW, that's a problem with the open-source system as an economic model, IMHO, as there's no incentive to make it easy to use in the long term.)
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
You didn't read the article, did you?
"Property is the basis of the free market....". Bzzzzt, Sorry. Please try again. Scarcity is the basis of the free market. There are some things in life (computers, cars, man hours), that are scarce. From scarcity comes property. There are only so many cars available. Who should I give them to? How about whomever will pay me the most? I want a computer. To get one, I'll need to convince someone else to give me their computer, so they'll no longer have one. I suppose I'll need to pay them for their computer. Part of this is that there is competition. I can purchase a computer, a car, or man hours from any number of sources. If I don't like your price, I'll look elsewhere. This is a free market.
Intellectual "property" is completely different. I can make a copy of Enya's new album, I have not taken away someone else's copy. Music, software, books, and the like are fundamentally abundent. I can easily make copies of any of them and increase the world's supply. Copyright, in part, takes an abundent product and makes it legally scarce.
A free market behaves very differently than modern copyright driven industries. Since you're apparently a bit light on economic theory, let be give you a summary. A product has a marginal price (the price to make "just one more"). The marginal price for a mass produced CD is less than a dollar. If you have a free market with competition, the price to consumers approaches the marginal price. If I'm charging, say $15 for a CD, a competitor will start producing it for $14. I'll undercut him $13, and we'll keep doing this until the price is just barely above the cost to actually make the CD.
But this doesn't happen. Why? Because of copyright. Copyright doesn't just make music scarce, it grants me a monopoly. There is no free market to keep costs down, if you want a CD of me singing, you have to purchase it from me, directly or indirectly (through a middle man or purchasing used). Either way, if you want it, you'll pay what I demand, or you won't get it. This is not how a free market behaves. This is a monopoly, the enemy of the free market.
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This is one of the weakest areguments I have ever heard against IP - that it interferes with the free market.
The 'Free Market' is no particular holy grail of goodness, and in fact the long history of the capitalism has shown quite clearly that an unfettered free market does NOT yield an economy that results in the best society.
A free market has no restrictions on the behaviour of corporations whatsoever. They are free to engage in price fixing, formation of monopolies, egregious treatment of employees, sale of dangerous products, false advertising, copying of their competitor's trademarks, mislabelling their products contents, and whatever forms of environmental rape that result in their greatest profit.
This argument would return us to the days of the giant monopolies of the early part of the 20th century, sale of tainted food (see Upton Sinclair), use of opiates in soft drinks, a workforce where 25% have lost body parts to unsafe machinery, and rivers that catch fire from their carriage of industrial wastes.
The free market is NECCESSARILY regulated to insure competition and control of the behaviour of corporations. Labor laws, environmental regualtions and contract law are all part of this, as is IP law.
IP laws improve the quality of our society by providing special incentives to the creation of new information - be it art,literature,music or technologies. The elimination of these incentives will impoversh us far more than the relataively small and temporary economic benefits that individuals would gain if the existing rights accrued to authors were eliminated.
I disagree; you can have trade which is purely a swap of services. A lot of business-to-business trade is essentially of this form. You only need a concept of property to deal in physical goods which have scarcity (i.e. cannot be duplicated for nothing), like food or computer hardware.
Here in the UK is the place where BT has its patent on hyperlinks, isn't it?
I don't think that's the point. A patent allows you to stop me using an idea which you thought of. Maybe I never knew about your idea and I thought of it completely independently. Still you get to stop me using the idea for 20 years. In IT, it's not often you can put your hand on your heart and say, "I believe nobody else would have thought of this idea for 20 years if I hadn't." That's not teething troubles, that's a broken system which is completely unsuited for the pace of modern technology.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
If the "Little Guy" is actually a guy as big as Netscape was, then today's copyright system could help that guy sometimes. But for a much littler guy - say a company of 5 or 6 people - it is too expensive to fight the legal battles neccessary, so today's copyright is essentially no protection. Meanwhile, such VeryLittle guys get sued for infringing copyrights of big companies.
The way the economy seems to be going, VeryLittle companies may become more and more important as the primary innovative force in the market. For them, today's copyright system is no protection and in fact a significant burden. Until legal proceedings become cheap (sometime after hell freezes over), it will remain that way.
The problem with this sort of thing is that big legal departments will find ways round things. E.g. let employees hold their own copyright over stuff they create at work, on the condition that they grant an exclusive license to the corporation. Or another such trick. Big firms are more agile than legislators and easily squeeze through loopholes like that.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Well, what's the best way to make the big companies that we all hate at slashdot so much to play fair? Obviously to withhold money from them when they get out of line. This goes not only for not buying CDs. We also need to stop investing in them. I'm sure lots of slashdot readers now have their pensions in ethical funds that do not invest in firearms, tobacco etc... Now what if you phone up the company that manages your pensions and ask if they invest in companies that abuse IP? What if everyone reading slashdot and interested in these issues did this? Pretty soon I'm sure somebody would cotton on and start a special ethical fund.
If you don't buy a few CDs, the no-one won't care. If an advert for a large pension fund denounces the RIAA for being unethical, that'd be better.
Any thoughts?
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
I think most of us (I mean Americans; flame me if you like, but Napster is American, the copyright and patent stupidness of the present day is mostly American, and I'm American...all you foreigners who think that talking about American issues is evil can just let us wallow in the consequences of our lawmakers' stupidity, and that should satisfy you) recognize that patents and copyrights are necessary in a free-market, capitalistic system. Otherwise, incentive to introduce a new idea goes down drastically and takes the rate of innovation down with it. So I don't think that the total abolition of copyright and patents is called for, no matter what kind of arguments Canadian (who do NOT live in a capitalistic economy, they have something called "democratic socialism" up there, and it doesn't work like our system does, no matter what they may claim) newspapers put forth about how copyright infringes your right to use your video camera.
The problem is when copyrights and patents are taken to ridiculous levels, such as the present situation in the United States, and it is not a problem with the idea of copyrights and patents. Copyrights and patents are supposed to be temporary, fleeting things that grant you a benefit for coming up with something on the assurance that it'll become public domain.
But nothing becomes public domain anymore.
Anybody remember the article a couple days ago from the EFF? No movie produced since 1910 has entered public domain. Now, it used to be that copyrights and patents lasted a reasonable amount of time, say 14 or 20 years. This is enough time for you to make some money off your idea, but not so long that it never makes it into public domain. Today, however, I can slap a copyright symbol onto any website I design or any music I record, and it doesn't become public domain until at least fifty years after I die...given that I'm not gettingo n in my years yet, we're talking well into the next century before anybody could do anything worthwhile with my work without my permission. That's just plain stupid, and that's one of the things that's wrong with copyright law as it exists in the United States today.
Then of course there's the DMCA and anti-circumvention and all that bullsh*t, and attempts to undermine fair use. That's even worse, because fair use is one of the few ways of dealing with the sheer stupidity of current copyright limitations - cut into fair use and it'll be the year 4056 or so before we can use copyrighted works for even academic pursuits. That's idiotic.
Bottom line: copyrights and patents are a necessary evil of capitalism and free markets. Abolishing them would be sheer stupidity. What needs to be abolished are the obscene terms for which copyrights last and the numerous attempts at undermining fair use which are being written into our law.
In a society without intellectual property, everyone is free to create whatever contracts or agreements to enforce the defense of their own material. But, in a society without intellectual property, what's to stop a record company's talent seeker from going to my concert, taping my show, taking the tape back to whichever band he wants and showing them the song? Their established, already popular group takes my song, and plays it as their own. I can claim I wrote the song, yell, scream, complain all I want. Certainly I have been screwed. But have my rights been violated? Intellectual property is flawed, and the concepts are outdated and often inappropriate, but can the total abolishment of IP be any better? Think about it...
"The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -- David Hume
- but, as an analogy, would the writer like to give away all the intellectual rights to his essay, and not get paid for it?
Don't we need copyright to defend copyleft? What is to prevent Evil Software Co., Inc. from picking up the code to a piece of GPL'ed software, improving on it, and then selling binaries based on the modified code, keeping the source code to itself? Also, think about this part of the GPL:
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Property is the basis of the free market, of any market, in fact. Therefore to strike against copyright and patents is to strike against the notion of property, which is to strike against the idea of a market. We should revise and modify the patent system - it works perfectly well in the UK and Europe - not just abolish it because it has teething troubles. That is to take an extremist reaction.
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First, the author wastes a good part of his time on Napster. Napster is not intellectual property itself, it's secondary to intellectual property. What's more, he glances over the legal minutia, while ignoring the bigger picture. The legal minutia may be important in the lawsuit, but it's not to napster's morality and, especially, not to the relative cost and benefits of intellectual property. He ignores the fact that, while napster may not be able to discern users (though that is debatable itself), there is little doubt that the vast majority of its use is for copyright infringment. On the balance, I'd say the current design and actual use of napster has far greater costs for society than any benefit it presumably brings about.
Presumably, according to Napster, lesser known artists will use Napster to get an audience. Though I have serious doubts about this (in terms of numbers), the fact is that it could design a system in such a way that the artists ENUMERATES what songs they want to share and submits it via some checksum (or what have you)--rather than rely on some algorithm to divine the artist. Alternatively, they could solve this problem entirely and simply create a massive server where artists can upload their songs, complete with web pages and the like. In reality, this offers virtually all the benefits of their purported "use" [ sometimes even more (e.g., a web page, faster downloads, assured quality, etc) ] without the costs.
Second, (back on point) the author attacks a few specific instances of IP and one or two of the minor (but poorly accepted) arguments for IP, but completely or mostly ignores the well accepted arguments for it. The first argument is that innovation is risky and expensive; the only way you secure difficult innovation is by granting the innovator the exclusive right to the innovation. The second argument is that one should be entitled to the product of their own mind. When those "products" might be indepedently reinvented, then there might be cause for complaint. But when we're talking about a recording or a book in its entirity, it's simply not going to be indepedently reinvented. My creating that product or idea and restricting its usage does NOT detract from your life, unless you take the fact that I generated that product or idea for granted.
...considering how The National Post is owned by Conrad Black.
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(1) None of the arguments relate to technology at all. Abolishing copyright was tried before the internet existed, during the French revolution. The result was a distaster -- all publishing ceased except for pornography and cheap scandal sheets. To convince me that the results would be different today, I'd have to see an argument that relates to changes in technology.
(2) The abolition of IP is just not going to happen, so why even discuss it? I'd consider it a great triumph if the U.S. government would just stop extending copyright terms the next time the 1923 batch came close to going PD. But even that is extremely unlikely to happen, since, e.g. Disney owns the 1923 Winnie the Pooh copyrights, and their lobbyists managed to get the latest extension passed without even having it debated.
I can think of some realistic political goals in the U.S., but they're a lot more modest. For instance, I'd like to see the federal government force all academic research they fund to be published electronically and copylefted. Arxiv.org has already shown they're capable of replacing traditional scientific journals completely in some scientific subfields, e.g. string theory.
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Imagine your proverbial Incredibly Rich Software Company (tm). Imagine that it spots a neat and useful idea that has been created by a bunch of Talented People(tm). With no copyright, the Incredibly Rich Company can become and Incredibly Bad Company and simple copy the ideas, reverse engineer it, and with the forces of Superior Marketing(tm) can produce it and out produce it take over the market, wiping out the competition.
Netscape is an historic example, even with the protection they had, because there was no copyright on the idea of browser. (I doubt that one could be arranged)
So the removal of the idea of copyright removes protection for the Little Guy. Some Big Bad Company with lots of big bucks can come in and steal people blind.
So Copyright might need to be kept around, but in a form that protects the little guy more than corporations.
off the top of my head, maybe copyrights by corporations could only be held for a shorter peroid of time than by an individual, so that the actual artist could profit vs corporations.
I need to think on this more
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
While I dont agree with patents, I can see some good uses for them. But a few things should be done to prevent people/corporations from patenting things that just should not be patented.
:-( shouldnt be trademarked, as it should be considered free-use.
The ammount of time that a patent lasts is way too long in todays world. A patent lasting 1 or 2 years seems more fair to me, but any longer than that basically prevents anyone from using the thing patented for a very long time.
I would like to see the USPTO gotten rid of all together, but this will never happen, regardless of how much it makes sense to get rid of it. Corporations want control of products, and patents give them that right to that control.
I think the best sollution would be to have a seperate entity to decide on technology patents. Hopefully with something like that we could stop the future Amazons from patenting outragious things. Trademarks are a little differant, I think you should be able to protect your name, but again, things like
But can we honestly ever expect things to change? The average American doesnt see anything wrong with what we have now, what politician would ever try and change anything? Who cares?
And can anyone clear up international patents? What stops a Japanese company from doing '1-click-shopping'? Especially on the internet, a US only patent doesnt seem to do much good.
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The author proposes a world in which protections for non-scarce items do not exist. In the same spirit as the Home Recording Act could not ban tape recorders, so Napster cannot be seen as intrinsically illegal. Well written, and a real challenge to the RIAA lawyers, et al.
I was discussing this very thing to colleagues yesterday: they had seen the PBS special by Ken Burns - Jazz - and remarked as to how music used to be literally free. A musician wrote a song and played it in a bar and got paid. Early recordings were produced in small shops, and profits were local. Then entrepreneurs moved in because they saw the profitability (nothing wrong with that) and reamed the artists (again legal, though possibly not moral).
Well, they have had their fun, and they have had their day. The One Thing that record producers had that the average guy did not was the Ways and Means of Production (i.e., record-making machines) and Distribution. Now, in the digital age, we All have the ways and means. We can all make recordings, try to sell them or give them away, and distribute them.
The RIAA has had their day. It is time to step down. May free art prosper. I think their proper attitude might well be 'screw them, Im not putting another thin dime into promoting one more artist.' Then they can take their wax cylinders and go home.
And you know what? Aside from the pretty CD jewel cases, I don't think I'd miss them a bit.
Bonus: no more 'NSync, Spice Girls, or Backstreet Boys! Yay!
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.