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The End of Innovation?
Simone writes: "2001 has been a bad year not just for dot-coms but also for people interested in preserving the public's right to fair use of copyright materials. From the shutdown of Napster and the DeCSS case to the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, federal prosecutors and U.S. courts have acted in support of copyright interests and against the public's ability to use technology to secure fair-use rights. OpenP2P.com editor Richard Koman talks about these turns of events with Lawrence Lessig." Not particularly coincidentally, Lessig has a new book coming out on this very topic.
This isn't a question of 'the end of innovation' at all, except possibly in a Microsoftesque "Help! Stop the bad man! He's depriving me of my ability to innovate!" sort of a way. The issue is an entirely separate one, that of fair use and the purpose and extent of IP rights.
There's nothing to stop people coming up with new and better ways of carrying out these same tasks, or entirely different tasks - the constraints that we're looking at here are primarily on reverse engineering, which has never really struck me as being an integral part of innovation...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
But that's exactly the point: digital copying is a new thing, compared to physical world stuff. The cost of many goods and services are based on not simply the IP, but also production, printing, distribution costs which can be very significant. When you obliterate those costs, it's unreasonable not to expect prices to drop radically in line with the new lower cost of distributing the IP. The whole 'everything must be free' thing is simply an overshoot of a shift in value that DOES need to happen.
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean that if I took it, you know longer have it. This is blatantly false. Copyright infringement is a more accurate term, though far less emotive.
It is only human convention that keeps copyright around, not some law of nature. And, at present, the original motivations for copyright are being perverted in the current implementation, so civil disobedience is a valid response.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Indeed, copyright law -- especially before the stillborn monstrosity called the DMCA -- recognized that, in creation of a work, an author is vested with certain rights and the public is vested with certain rights. Copyright has traditionally been seen as a balancing act between the public's interest in open sharing of the work, and the public's interest in encouraging other authors to come forward and create.
As noted in Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, it is only recently that the attitude has begun to shift toward investing "property" rights to the hands of copyright holders. Ironically, this means that almost all of the culture held up as a justification for the current system is actually a holdover from the earlier one.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
When they shut Napster down, you couldn't trade your recordings of Dave Matthews concerts unless the files were named undescriptively (read: uselessly). Many smaller artists were/are finding that their music is NO LONGER available for download over Napster. This is exposure they *depend* on.
Not all copyright holders are the RIAA. I've said this before and so have many others, but I will say it again. The RIAA represent themselves, and their own bottom line. They do not represent the artists. They think they represent all of music, when in reality they are crushing the "little guy" who is so important to musical innovation (eek, I actually used that word?!?) to preserve the status quo.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
"which has never really struck me as being an integral part of innovation..."
Almost all technology in use today is in part available because of reverse engineering.
Without reverse engineering there would be no interoperability between Windows, Macs, Unix, etc.
Without reverse engineering we wouldn't even have the current PC at all.
Without reverse engineering we wouldn't have the huge microwave oven market we have today.
Car manufacturers buy each other's cars and completely take them apart to see how competitors do things.
There is simply no end to how much technology is improved through reverse engineering. Reverse engineering has ALWAYS been a huge part of innovation.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The problem with the computer industry is that that wasn't happening, so companies had to turn to the courts to force it to happen. As for the dot coms, I think that was Wall Street's way of saying, "party's over, nerds, now get to work". I just hope things don't end the way I think they will (no more individual innovation in the computer industry, death of open source from IP lawsuits, etc.).
On another note, I'm going to play devil's (lawyer's?) advocate and defend the DMCA (sort of):
Seeing as I haven't seen a realistic, workable alternative economic system for what we now call Intellectual Property, I figure we should probably stick with the current concept of IP, and try to patch it up so it can survive the "digital age" without being too broken or stupid.