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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.
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.
If you don't know Mr. Black, he's trying to buy up 100% of the news media in Canada. The idea is so that you only get "News for Robots - Stuff that matters to Mr. 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.