Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
.ph0x
It's also been a bad year for the stock market, most all technology fields and on top of all that, my sex life is down 5 points... go figure, I'm still blaming el nino.
---
ps -aux | grep mind
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.
At nearly the end of the interview, Lawrence Lessig makes the following statement:
copied directly from this article without permission, with all due credit, and with unknown intentions.
Yes. I think we should go back to the principles that defined us originally, which was about open societies with free people who should obey the law but you don't get them to obey the law by basically coding it so that they can't do anything different [italics added]. You get them to obey the law by making the law reasonable and getting people to be respectful of it, and that's the direction we ought to be going.
end quote
This statement interests me, because it seems that there is an even stronger statement to be made, namely that: Replacing the responsibility of the individual to obey the law with the inability of the individual to break the law not only encourages an ignorance of the law, but also encourages a lack of basic moral judgement.
Now for some justification.
Historically, moral philosophy has often considered the ability to reason practially about ethical and moral issues to be a sign of some maturity. Rousseau's Emile encourages this view especially with respect to children when it presents the advice that one not command a particular behavior from a child; rather, make it impossible for the child to misbehave. Similar thought has gone into modern society in every niche from electrical-outlet-covers to child-safety car-door locks. The underlying principle at work is that a child has not developed the practial reason required to go from an abstract commanded behavior pattern (Don't stick the scissors into the outlet) to the benefits (not getting electrocuted) without experimentation.
Very much simplified, in the case of persons without the ability to reason practically about ethical and moral issues (those who cannot understand *why* they should obey a guiding principle) technology is an oft-used preventative measure.
With respect to children, the profoundly impared, and other similar cases, no one argues that the use of technology to prevent a harmful outcome is innapropriate; however, I would argue that the continued use of technology to make impossible the breaking of a rule frees the faculty of reason from having any connection with that rule.
In other words, utilizing high technology to keep people from being able to commit a crime does not in any way educate the moral faculties of the people being so protected from their impulses. In fact, I would argue that through reliance on that protection, people become inherently less able to distinguish the moral reasoning behind the rule being enforced. Instead, it would be much like your telling me "It's illegal to fly by jumping up into the air and flapping your wings". Should you say that, I would give the moral reasoning behind it no thought simply because I can't accomplish the deed.
Certainly in such an imaginative case, giving the reasoning behind the law no thought would do no great harm; however, in a society where we are all in theory responsible for the health of our democracy (I seem to recall hearing that once with respect to the American legal/judical system) an inability to clearly reason about the morality and justification of the social contract under which we live spells the eventual end of that social contract.
Perhaps
it is better that way.
Except the "known spammer" in this case was the entire MIT community!
No, it was the open relay that MIT was running. If someone is running a relay that takes all comers, and someone else is using it to send spam to my network, I'll ask the admin to deny relaying. If they won't, I'll blackhole it. If someone doesn't prevent their resources from using mine in a manner I don't want, I disallow them the right to use my resources.
The key point is I don't tell someone how to use their resources. If they want to allow relay, fine. I just won't allow them to use my resources.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Yes, there is a large amount of free and open material out there. However, this does not mean that Napster is either necessary or superior at delivering that material.
First, relatively few major artists encourage or allow bootlegging. Second, those bands which do invariably have vastly better organized websites and ftp sites dedicated exclusively to that pursuit. I am a DMB fan, and I would far prefer to go to from the dedicated ftp/www sites, where I can download entire/full/non-corrupt albums, than a disorganized system like napster, where anything I searched for (any time during its existence) would result largely in his COMMERCIAL recordings. Third, given that most of the legitmate uses are not from well known/signed artists and the fact that Napster's user base absolutely plummetted after they blocked the various signed artists, how can you reasonably claim that even a reasonable minority was using it for legitimate means?
I hear all this crap about protecting the little guy, well that's fine and good. But the little guys interests needs to be balanced against the interests of society at large (and the legal claims of, what is in economic terms, the real majority). When the vast majority of the use is for piracy and the minority can have their legitimate claims answered by alternative means, in a superior way nonetheless, why bother? Even if we accept P2P as being important, P2P does not necessarily mean that we need a system of total anarchy, whereby any content is allowed. Napster could have implimented a system of trust for the much-hyped little guy, where they could register their songs and allow them complete access to the system, but they choose not to. I have very little sympathy for them.
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."
For me (and a lot of others in the anti-spam community), Mr. Lessig lost all credibility when he wrote The Spam Wars. In it, he describes a group of vigilantes looking to change the nature of commerce on the net. What he fails to mention is that it's just a bunch of network admins using a self-compiled and maintained list to drop packets from open relays and known spammers from hitting their own networks.
/. issues, all the while decrying network operators dropping traffic they don't want on their network.
I find it both amusing and disturbing that he can be so strongly in favor of fair-use, reverse engineering, and against the DMCA, among other hot button
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
"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.