FTC and JD Holding Hearings on IP

hondo77 writes "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are holding hearings on intellectual property laws over the next few weeks (the first one was Feb 6). They're looking at the balance between IP rights and the free market."

Comments

Possibly Good?

[ScumBiker]

I suspect that the possibility of any outcome between Justice and the FTC is going to be a blatant corporate lovefest. Let's face it, Ashcroft is firmly in the pocket of big business, and the FTC, while trying to get a grip on reality, fails to do so much of the time. The big IP corps are goning to simply take the ball here and write their own rules. Is there any way to get in front of this bus and stop it? YES. Get off your dead ass and send snailmail to your congress critters. Write to the head of the FTC. I'm not even going to include links, your mostly smart people out there, you know how to use Google. Get after it!

Re:Possibly Good?

[Second_Derivative]

And the great masses of slashdotters arose and took the first step upon the great march to their congressmen, then sat down again panting from exertion.

I've heard "Write to your congressman!" too many times on here. Firstly I'm not even a USian so what congressman over there is going to give a damn for hat I've got to say? there's some, I dunno, 50,000 users on slashdot? even if every single one wrote to their congressman... well, they might notice the issue only to have their local RIAA "Public Funding Officer" hand them a wad of fifties and tell em to piss off.

If the great masses don't even know or care about this you don't have a hope. A better strategy would be to launch a mass campaign against every person in power who you dislike. Dig up all the records of who's funding who, and crosscheck it against what libery-violating statutes those people voted for. Boil it down to a level that can incense and anger the common voter; going after IP law is like trying to take the Reichstag when you're retreating from Normandy. Pull out the corruption and corporate puppeteering of the political process and make the people in power damn sure that this sort of thing is not going to be good for them, then worry about IP law, for now be content with the hope that some landmark ruling may overturn the DMCA.

But then, there's hardly any hope of that happening, so why even bother telling people to write to their congressman? *sigh* and I can't exactly talk as if I'm on high ground either; I live in the UK and no doubt we're the next in line to be bent over and rammed until we look like the goatse.cx guy =/

Re:Possibly Good?

[Danse]

Dig up all the records of who's funding who, and crosscheck it against what libery-violating statutes those people voted for.

Unfortunately, our Congress can pass such far reaching legislation as the DMCA without even going on the record with their votes. They passed the DMCA with a voice vote. If that isn't the most fucked up thing you've ever heard, then I'd love to hear what is. America, land of democracy. Funny, huh? How can you have democracy without accountability?

to free or not to free

[xtstrike]

I'd tend to agree on abolishing many of the copyrights, IP, etc... on the internet, but the fact still remains that someone somewhere must be paid for something to be developed or innovated and that particular person/company will want people to know and maybe even pay for something that has taken them so much time to develop. Think about the music industry, if someone said, OK you can copy the music as much as you like then the recording industry would simply stop releasing music, then there would be nothing to copy! maybe im on completely the wrong track here, but the way id understand this particular article is that everything should be free, I just dont know if that could be, as i said, someone somewhere has to foot the bill to pay someones wages to develop whatever is being trade marked.

Re:to free or not to free

[TheConfusedOne]

Copyright and IP are radically different things.

Copyright protects a produced product. IP protects an idea. As far as providing protection for an idea, I think we're headed in the wrong direction. The "One-Click Patent" is a prime example of this. The idea that it "protects" is "fast customer service", hardly an original idea.

A number of years ago there was a big movement in the US to "emulate" (pronounced copy) the Japanese industrial method. We were getting our butts trounced in the manufacturing world and decided on the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" solution. Imagine if a Japanese company had been able to patent an "employee motivational regime". Imagine if one of the first web startups had patented "stock option incentive plans". These are all simply ideas, not new inventions.

We need to get the USPTO to revisit the "non-obvious" part of the patent laws and look at the idea/motivation behind the idea being patented. If it's just a somewhat new way of doing an old idea then it doesn't deserve a patent. At best, Amazon should have gotten the normal first adopter's advantage for using "One-Click" and then have to improve it to keep up with the competition.

Hmmm, anyone want to work with me on the "One Mouse Hover and Wait 3 Seconds" shopping patent?

Mayyybe something good, mayyybe something bad..

[ackthpt]

I suspect that the possibility of any outcome between Justice and the FTC is going to be a blatant corporate lovefest

Total agreement here, even with the Enron fartcloud envolping Washington, after that "Axis of evil" comment by Bush, I'm convinced the cherry is off the "war on terrorism" victory and W. is back to halfwit status. Particularly with the extremely soft stance with regard to Microsoft and the DoJ and M$ wanting to get the whole thing wrapped up fast so they can get back into the bedroom and continue screwing people. The current administration is a bunch of coldwarriors, corporate whores and dingbats, Colin Powell the notable exception, but tainted by association, nonetheless. If anything comes out of this it's probably the FTC and DoJ looking for any wrangling room left over Intellectual Property that they can lock up in favor of the GOP's big campaign donors.

While you're writing to your reps, tell them to vote for the campaign finance reform act to bring an end to the charade of people you've never heard of having $70 million before a presidential campaign even gets started.

When Capitalism is taken too far.

[HanzoSan]

Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.

Kids and adults lacking intelligence due to patents on information which could enlighten the world.

Innovation controlled by big corperations using patents, and all for a profit, milk the old technology for 40 years or more until profits force you to change.

Government controlled by companies like Enron who take advantage of the flaws in the system.

Criminals and organized crime taking advantage of capitalism, people being killed for a buck, and wars being faught over money issues.

Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.

Imagine the innovation and the new technologies we'd have, if third world countries had access to all the information in the world, and any kid rich or poor could be the next einstien or bill gates, any living person, any of the 6 billion people could come out with an idea, which changes the world and shares the idea for free.

Money needs to be made people say, just because you share an idea doesnt mean you'll turn that idea into a product. The product is what people buy, the service is what people pay for, not the idea or the information.

My opinion is, more focus should be on sharing information, less focus on competiton, more focus on ways to earn money from hard work and not from information, ideas, or earning money from having money.

We also need to fix the problems in our government, the current administration is just a joke, they got into office in a suspicious manner, and now we here stuff about Eron, corruption within the government should be removed, it will be difficult but its possible.

Re:When Capitalism is taken too far.

[Bodrius]

I'll reply to this in reverse order, if you don't mind.

Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.

Care to explain how does an extremely competitive environment make innovation impossible?

After all, an extremely competitive environment implies cut-throat competition where any company can take over the market at any time with a new product. That tends to favor innovation.

I can think of restriction of innovation when some players in the market have an enormous power-base to strangle innovative competitors. But that, by definition, is not a competitive environment.

Criminals and organized crime taking advantage of capitalism, people being killed for a buck, and wars being faught over money issues.

Wars are fought over power issues. They have always been, they will always be, as long as each nation represents an interest opposed to the other one and sufficient power is at stake.

In capitalism money is power. In other systems, the exchange unit is something else. The principle of war is not worsened by capitalism. Rather, capitalism has discouraged war since its conception because trade favors peaceful countries, and capitalism promotes more efficient ways to obtain resources than robbing it from someone else.

War has been fought for territory, plantations, gold, slaves, or to eliminate a potential threat.

Have you read your history lately?

Government controlled by companies like Enron who take advantage of the flaws in the system.

The government was not controlled by Enron just because it had money (although it helped). It was controlled by Enron because it was closely tied to the presidential clique by personal connections.

We could say the same about socialism being taken too far, communism being taken too far, monarchy being taken too far, etc if you just replace Enron with "the Party", "the military", "X family", etc.

Such oligarchical concentrations of power are older than capitalism, and orthogonal to it. Corruption is more of a social disease than a monetary issue, power is just translated into money these days to facilitate exchange.

The consequences in a capitalistic society tend to be anti-capitalistic (if you take capitalism as "free market") in nature.

The influential corporation(s) dictates regulation and starts to play government, restricting competition, disguising its own lack of competitivity, and trying to manipulate the market. Just what monopolies and/or cartels do. But since it's OK for the government to regulate, it can be done.

Innovation controlled by big corperations using patents, and all for a profit, milk the old technology for 40 years or more until profits force you to change.

What are they supposed to do? Not milk the old technology? They will milk the old technology, and will research new technology quickly because they want to milk it more.

Do they only change when forced by potential profit? Sure. But potential profit has proven to be the best way to force quick development of applied technology. What other motivation would you have for technological development? Development by need is much, much, much slower, cannot predict emergent consequences, and will not waste resources on risky non-essential technologies.

That's why almost all successful technological development is made in/for consumer societies: Europe, Japan, US.

If you want to see a weakness in pure capitalism there, is that you need remarkable foresight as a corporation to sponsor pure theoretical research, which is needed to foster future applied tech research. But technology is certainly not capitalism's failure.

Kids and adults lacking intelligence due to patents on information which could enlighten the world.

Uh?!

I have problems understanding your point here. I don't think you got the concepts of "intelligence", "information", "enlighten" and quite possibly "patent" clear in here.

How could a patent on a method restrict information, how could said information enlighten the world, and enlighten on what respect, and how could said enlightenment increase human intelligence beyond its natural limit?

Are there some patents related to genetic engineering and/or neurochemistry I'm not aware of?

Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.

I'll give you this one. I don't think it's a matter of capitalism here, but of a clueless management of the IP system, and the rather stupid attitude of the parties involved.

The IP system is broken. No doubt about that. But the IP system is a case of compromising capitalism for the sake of innovation: don't forget that. It was created precisely because someone said "maybe too much capitalism is bad", and "maybe we should give an artificial monopoly to someone for the sake of information sharing".

My opinion is, more focus should be on sharing information, less focus on competiton, more focus on ways to earn money from hard work and not from information, ideas, or earning money from having money.

Earn money from hard work and not from information... sure.

Also, if we just put the means of production in the hands of the workers, progress will automatically follow.

Do you realize that by removing ways of achieving profit (be it in money, influence, government positions, or whatever is the currency in your system) by the use of the intellect and favoring "hard work", you make mechanical, unintellectual endeavors the only viable course for survival?

In other words, you condemn your innovators (scientists, artists, geeks) to earn their living doing things they're untalented for, and only using their talents at the whim of their benefactors. Innovators become beggars, pets; at best, starved romantic fools.

People of ideas need to be able to earn a comfortable living from their ideas, not be punished for their talents.

The argument that "the best innovators don't do it for the money, but for the love of their art" falls flat on itself when you study the situation in those admired golden ages before someone could earn their living with IP. Back when the most talented writers, painters, inventors, had to pander to pompous rich people to live off their crumbs (we don't even know the best artists of the Renaissance, we only know about the ones that painted the most portraits for powerful people).

Do you realize that by removing the ability of earning money from having money in capitalism (by loaning it with interest directly or through banks), you remove all incentive for investment of resources? Welcome back to merchantilism. Not only have you not actually removed the ability to stay rich if you're rich, you have indirectly destroyed most ways of becoming rich if you're poor.

Re:My voice

[ackthpt]

Oh, I think IP is a good thing, too, but not in perpetuity. The current extention on exclusive rights to intellectual property is hardly what the founding fathers had in mind. Inventors, artists and producers should be encouraged to invent, create and produce, rather than sit on their asses and collect royalties for the rest of their lives because they happened to catch the spirit of invention at the right moment and lock it up in an iron bound chest. Ideas need to be shared, people need to collaborate. Locking down intellectual property impoverishes, as it deprives many from the benefits if the sole holder deems it unnecessary to make it available in the form the public would prefer, i.e. iconoclastic.

Take a good look around what happens when you are a fan and make a fansite, the way IP attorneys gorge themselves encouraging the MPAA and RIAA in their folly of copy protection, or Rambus tried to destroy inexpensive fast memory with an excessive tariff on DDR SDRAM license and using it to get their own RDRAM more accepted.

I find it very interesting...

[Alex Belits]

...that IP rights are supposed to be balanced with "free market" (what I consider to be a political doctrine on the border of being a religious belief) and not consumer protection, freedom of expression, advance of technology, science and human thought, or other real things that are threatened by overbroad patents and other kinds IP abuse.

Re:I find it very interesting...

[Trekologer]

If the market really was free, then IP laws wouldn't exist. If you want to make money off of something, be it a tangible object or intellectual work, you have to assume the risks of any business, including having that object or work not used in the way you desire.

Case in point: the Netpliance I-Opener. The company sold the computer at a loss, expecting that everyone that bought one would be subscribing to their service and they eventually would make up the loss. When people started buying them and not subscribing to the service, their business began to fall apart.

Risks such as the one that Netpliance took is all part of a free market. If you take the risks and sell a worthwhile product, you are rewarded with profits. The "intellectual property market" in not a free market. It is very much regulated.

With the IP law fiasco, the government takes many if those risks away. At one time, there was a benefit to the government stepping in and protecting intellectual property. But now, as IP laws give publishers* more and more protection, they're chipping away at your rights as a consumer and the ideal of a free market that everyone points to.


* I say publishers because beneficiaries to the latest IP laws are not those who actually create the work but the publishers that releases those works.

Key quote from article

[CaptainAlbert]

James Rogan, director of the U.S. patent office:

> "The entry of patent law into these areas was
> greeted with predictions of disaster,"
> said "Yet the United States is the
> international leader in [software] and other
> technological areas."

The U.S. is the richest nation in the world. It was the international leader in software and other technological areas long before software patents reared their ugly head. But Mr. Rogan sounds surprised...

"How can this be? The U.S. has passed laws that allow us to arrest foreign programmers whose code we dislike and throw them in jail! We put export restrictions on encryption software! We grant patents on algorithms that are then included in ISO standards! We allow corporations to rip off huge quantities of code and call it "the Windows (R) network stack", and give them laws to allow the prosecution of anyone who makes unauthorised copies of it! How come we're the world leader?"

> "A return by competition regulators to viewing
> IP rights with a 1970s-era suspicion would risk
> interfering with these market-based incentives
> to innovate."

Market-based incentives to innovate are only incentives to the people involved in the marketing. You can't persuade an inventor to "invent more" by offering cash. You can only persuade firms to invest more in R&D, which isn't quite the same. Just as musical people would write and perform music whether or not they ever had a chance of becoming millionaires, so creative people would continue to create and invent. This is particularly true of software, where the cost of distribution is virtually nil. The deal is - money is (or should be) the means of exchange, not an end in itself.

The crunch comes with patents on drugs, where the initial investment is so large. There will never be (if you like to think in these terms) a medical-research Linus Torvalds to play the role of nemesis to the evil Glaxo-Smithkline, because you need more than a couple of PCs and some skill to cure cancer. I think this is a much more interesting and important area, and one that's a lot less easy to solve in the long run.

I dunno.

Scarcity, definition thereof

[MajroMax]

>"Intellectual "property" isn't scarce, so the same rules CANNOT apply exactly."

It is not scarce? So you're telling me that everyone thinks and creates on the same level of intelligence.

You're using the wrong definition of scarce. Each "new" IP created by someone is just that, a new property. This is much like a new model of car, a new type of CPU, or green orange-juice.

"Scarce," in economics terminology, means limited. If some X number of people have this, then the X+1'th person is going to get stiffed. This applies quite well to physical properties, because there are only so many, and that number is usually quite small compared to the number of people on the planet.

Oxygen, however, is not scarce. Nitrogen is not scarce. (Both if these come with caevats that it's breathable, but not pure.) Intellectual property is not scarce. I can breathe as much as I want and not affect the breating of anyone else on the planet. Likewise, I can copy the Linux Kernel (insert favorite rev. here) as many times as I want, and everybody else on the planet will still be able to get theirs.

Your argument (which seems to be that the market created/allowed by IP laws encourages the development of new IP) is possibly a valid one, but it is not based on the principle of scarcity. Don't get me wrong here -- I'm not an "abolish copyright/patents" type of guy: I think that you should be allowed to release your software on whatever terms you want, although any protections in excess of copyright law should be signed before purchase. I also happen to think that copyright is too long-term and the patent office is quickly becoming incompetent, but both of these are largely irrelevant to the fundamental discussion of Intellectual Property.

Software patents aren't a problem

[cperciva]

Stupid patent examiners are a problem.

There are certainly some ideas which are sufficiently new and non-obvious that they deserve patent protection. I think the Fast Fourier Transform would have been one of them. But right now there's a huge number of patents being issued for stuff which is neither new nor non-obvious... and that is where the problem lies.

Let's take an example... searching for patents which include the phrase "hash table" in their title reveals ten patents.

The first patent (Dec 2001) is on a hash table which uses key mod N as an index and stores key div N inside the hash bucket (instead of storing the complete key). Hello set-associative content addressable memory. Every major cpu manufacturer has prior art on this one.

I can't make any sense out of the second patent.

The third patent is on using a hash table inside a switch to speed up finding a MAC address/port combination. Obvious to anyone with a background in algorithms: If you want to find something quickly, stick it in a hash table.

The fourth patent is on using two hash tables, and placing records into the second if they encounter a collision in the first. Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.

I can't make any sense out of the fifth patent.

The sixth patent is on inserting data into a hash table by writing the data first and the key last, in order to maintain thread safeness. Obvious to anyone who has written multi-threaded code.

The seventh patent is on growing and shrinking a hash table when it gets too full (or empty). Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.

The eighth patent actually looks like something intelligent; the ninth patent seems to be a duplicate.

I can't make any sense out of the tenth patent.

Ok, so out of nine distinct patents, we have five which should clearly have never been granted based on prior art or obviousness; three which I can't understand; and one which looks to be worthy of patent protection.

Here's an idea: If the USPTO grants a patent, and someone later demonstrates prior art or obviousness, the person who invalidates the patent should get to claim all the fees paid by the patent filer. I have a feeling that if this happened, we'd see a very rapid deflation in the number of dumb patents on the books.

Re:If there was any doubt about this...

[BeBoxer]

I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Money is not speech. Paying money to politicians in exchange for privledged access is bribery. If you want to spend your money buying a newspaper ad in support of a politician, that's free speech. Handing him an envelope of money at a dinner so that he'll give you special treatment is bribery. Giving large sums of money to both parties, which is what a lot of the big doners do, is especially blatent bribery.

If your little sound bite money is speach were true, then income tax would be unconstitutional. After all, how can you tax a person's first amendment rights? Face it, the whole 'money is speech' is a load of crap that the crooks use to cover up their crimes. You want to support a politician? Buy an ad yourself. Volunteer some time. Make phone calls. Go door to door. Get the word out. That's free speech. Passing bribes is a crime, not speech. Until folks like you open your eyes to the blatent corruption going on, nothing is going to improve.

Spooky prediction

[Rogerborg]

The Great Rogerborgio will use his mysterious powers of prediction to determine what will happen in this debate:

• Much confusion between strictly limited copyright on specific content (good), unlimited time copyright (bad), the protection of ideas (very bad) or even the protection of markets (pronounced "corruption").
• Kindergarten comments about how you need to pay for content, or you won't get good content. Flick through your 100 cable channels. Find the one channel with quality original (first showing) content. Explain why you are paying for 100 channels at that moment, or why the good content should only get 1% of your money. You're not paying for content, you're paying for access to 100 channels running commercials intersperced with "content breaks" to keep your eyes on the screen. The model is already broken. Advertisers or marketing execs decide how much money we're going to give them, then the content producers churn out exactly enough content to convince us that we've got our money's worth.
• Much ranting about fair use by people who have never so much as read a brief overview of it, and who probably don't even know how copyright actually works.
• "Write your elected representatives" / "Don't write your elected representatives, they're all corporate whores, do XYZ instead" / "Stop writing this on here and go do something useful" / "No, you go do something useful" / "No, you go do something useful" (...)
• Much sound and fury about IP in general, none of which will translate into WIPOUT essays.

Flame away, but far better if you get over to WIPOUT and actually write it down where someone other than the /. regulars might read it.