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Fair IP Laws?
epsalon asks: "Most of us are against the current status of Copyright and Patent law, and
are outraged from stuff like the DMCA, SSSCA, et al. We know that this system is wrong, and must be changed. However, nullifying all IP laws is IMHO a bit too strong, because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of
goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux). Assuming you could rewrite the entire world IP law, and even create a new
social system, my question is: What laws can be written that will be fair both to content creators and to users, while cutting the middleman?" Here's your chance to do something other than complain about the current state things. How would you revise or restructure IP and copyright law to make both sides of the fence happy?
I would really like to see a period of public review prior to issuance
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
What was wrong with the laws we had 10 years ago? IP owners got protection, but didn't get to run your life. Sounds roughly fair to me.
Didn't the patent office used to more-or-less do their job correctly back then too?
"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
--Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part II, IV, ii
Yes, yes, I know the quote is out of context, but it's still damn insightful.
The best change that could be made to IP laws would be to speed up the time that it takes a work to enter the public domain. Maybe 10 years or so of protection would be good -- after that, no more protection.
Content providers would still have an incentive to create content -- lots of money could be made during that 10 year period. But overall, this would drastically reduce the bad consequences to the public from IP laws.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
It was originally designed to balance the rights of the copyright holder against those of the public, and the interests of creating an 'intellectual commons'. If we could just strip away all the BS the content industry has tacked onto copyright law over the years and go back to what we started with, that would be an improvement. Isn't the expiration of copyright now almost as long as it's been since Jefferson died?
*This page intentionally left pointless*
In the first place, it was created to protect individuals against corporations. Now it's used by corporations to take advantage of individuals. There are just too many advantages to having no restriction on the flow of information. As the poster put it 'leveraging other business' should be the only way people who make information, be it text, code, music, etc... make money. It's the way I and everyone I work with makes money.
It's also the way I spend a great deal of my free time.
Patents, copyrights, and 'intellectual property' has got to go. If not, then when we, as a society, manage to convert fully to a non-scarcity based economy, those who have the ownership rights to information will be kings and everyone else will be paupers.
I wrote an essay for my website about this subject some time back. You can find it here:
http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75
The one exception that I would make to getting rid of all IP laws is the use of Trademarks. These are less in the way of making a piece of information which *should* be able to be copied freely uncopiable, but is a lot more about an individual or a business uniquely identifying themselves.
Other than that, IP law has got to go. End of story.
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We'd be fine if we went back to the Patent and Copyright law as it existed before the recent (last 20 years) unwarranted expansion of both.
We'd go back to the 17 year copyright with 17 year renewal, and eliminate "soft" patents including "software" patents, business process patents, etc...
Going back to the basics on both fronts would eliminate most of our current problems.
Our founding fathers had it right in the constitution: "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;"
It's just way way overkill. Rather than promoting progress and the "useful Arts", the current system just extends a monopoly into the indefinite future and discourages anyone from building on your work constructively.
Really, if you can't get enough benefit out of writing a piece of software in 10 years, then it's someone else's turn. Note that you could make modifications in those 10 years and those could be copyrighted, but let the original software go back to the public domain in a reasonable time.
Ten years is just notional. I'm not sure where I'd set it, but I know 70 years is ridiculous and the 90 years granted to corporations (most Software copyrights on proprietary software is probably held by corporations) is even more out there.
Software is different than other IP. It's greatest benefit to society is in it's use and in it's flexibility. A sensible policy wrt to software copyrights would encourage more flexibility and more use.
Reset all IP laws to what they were prior to the release of "Snow White" in theaters. Then update them to cover current (and projected future) tech.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
This is a huge issue and I'm no lawyer, so I'm just going to give my opinion on once piece of this puzzle:
EULA's are out of control, and they shield software companies from lawsuits which would motivite them to produce better software. In an effort to stop this I would propose the following:
1) EULA's for commercial software must be agreed to BEFORE the software can be purchaced. If software companies do not provide a mechanism for this then they must allow users to return the software for a full refund.
2) Implied warranties like the warranty of merchantability and fittness for a particular purpose cannot we waived in a commerical software EULA. Free (as in beer) software can be distriubuted 'as is', but the second you exchange money for software, you take responsibility for it functioning correctly.
I realize that this will increase the cost of software in the short term, especially as companies scramble to get their software up to code before the changes go into effect. However the long term effect of ignoring faulty software cannot be overlooked, and the sooner we do something about it, the better.
I know thi might sound like communim or something. But it might be the only alternative:
Remove all ip-law what so ever. Then have the state research which tunes, software programs or poems are listened to, used or read by people (same thing as companies do today, and call "market-research"), and pay the creators of those works accordingly, with tax-money. Then we can copy as much as we like. Good artists will get paid, and bad ones (the ones no-one is litening to) won't get paid...
I think this is the only alternative to having ome middle-man RIA-workalike pirate the users/listeners.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
We know that this system is wrong, and must be changed. However, nullifying all IP laws is IMHO a bit too strong, because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux).
This is an assumption that is stated so often it has become arguably an axiom of intellectual property proponents.
But, the history of the human race, indeed of our own civilization, doesn't bear it out. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ulysees, Shakespear, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and other artists too numerous to mention had all the incentive they needed to create the greatest works our civilization has ever known, all without the existence of copyright or any other form of "intellectual property."
There are other ways to insure artists are compensated, without granting them (or, more likely, their publishers) an exclusive monopoly on their work, for any length of time.
It is unfortunate that our society never even discussed, much less considered, alternatives to copyright when the republic was founded, instead saddling us with an approach whose original conception was designed to facilitate censorship of the press, a design flaw which a little tweaking to help give something back to the artist is insufficient to alleviate.
We should be discussing alternatives to copyright which can be implimented to insure that artists get compensated for their work, without imposing artifical, government mandated monopolies upon our society, monopolies which are antithetical to free markets, to freedom of speech, and ultimately, to freedom itself.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified), with a single renewal for the same period of time
Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity
If a work has some form of access control, that access control must be disabled when the work enters public domain
Reverse engineering any sort of access control is legal
Patent
Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities
Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
(Corrolary) No patent shall be granted for algorithms or business processes
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
Naturally occuring results of processes may not be patented (ex: DNA)
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Naw, that's a stupid idea.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I would also be in favor of significantly shorter durations on software patents if we're going to have them (2 or 3 years max?). Of course, the best thing to do would be to eliminate them entirely, but I'm trying to be realistic (in this dream scenario ;-) ).
For patents in general, I would suggest that we find a way to shorten the amount of time it takes for for the USPTO to turn around patent applications. It's too slow. The length of time it takes to turn around a patent applicaiton often itself leads to several kinds of abuse. I'm sorry to say that I have no meaningful suggestion on this topic, other than throw more people at it.
I've also often thought about a Fair Use Amendment to the Constitution that would codify the basic thinking behind fair use, and would create a definition of what fair use is and why we need it as a society. Academic research, and fostering creativity need. I realize that this is controversial, and would be very difficult to properly write, let alone pass, but the existing lines in the Constitution get ignored so often because they don't come out and grant fair use.
If a constitutional amendment is outrageous, than at least some legislation that would make it clear that no law can ignore certain basic provisions.
Finally, I would ask that we legislate the rights of corporations by not defining them as people, and defining what rights they have. This is by far the single most onerous situation in our current legislative landscape. Corporations aren't people. They shouldn't have the same rights as you or I.
Sujal
politics, food, music, life: FatMixx
Unfortunately, it's not gonna happen. Why? Because the law moves slowly.
One of the first lessons I learned in law school (yes i admit, i was a law student before i started a real job in programming), is that the law is like a supertanker. Big, clumsy, awkward, and once you set a course, you'd better hope no icebergs get in the way, cause it's damned difficult to change course or stop.
Our common law system works kinda like a pecking order. The supreme courts are at the top of the order, and anything they say cannot be countermanded by lower courts. So the only way to even think about getting a law that's been given the stamp of approval by the highest court is to go through a lengthy and expensive round of appeals all the way up through the justice system. and that's only if they choose to hear the case in the end, and assuming they do hear it, that the majority changes their minds on their previous stance. They could just say 'we've already done this. we're not doing it again' and stop your appeal right there. Of course, by the time you get to this stage, most of the judges that heard the last case are probably dead of old age, and new ears are hearing it.
So, best case scenario you try and change a law that hasn't been brought to the supreme court yet. Unfortunately the ones backing laws like the DMCA are the big boys, with deep pockets, who can afford all the highly paid, specialized lawyers they want. Most of em just keep pushing knowing that the little guy doesn't have the time or money to keep up with them. They can appeal all the way up the ladder, and wait for you to run out of money and patience. When/if that happens, they automatically win.
Personally, I'm completely pessimistic about seeing any real changes coming our way anytime soon. It's in the best interests of the government (they do get paid to make laws like this after all), courts (who get paid to interpret the laws), and big business (who get to keep their stranglehold on everyone else) to keep things just as they are.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
The problem with your plan is that there would be no sharing of information. If you outlaw intellectual property, then there is very little incentive to share ideas with others. That would basically mean that companies and people would hide their ideas, and much time would be wasted by having multiple companies repeatedly inventing the same things.
The idea of intellectual property laws is to encourage sharing of ideas by granting exclusivity to the creator for a limited amount of time. I believe that idea has been corrupted by corporate interests, but I don't think we should throw out the baby with the bath water.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
Copyright time limits should be dramatically shortened (and copyright law should punish those who violate copyright, not those who engage in actions which may lead to other people engaging in other actions which may lead to copyright infringement - but I digress). How short? IMHO maybe 20 - 25 years, but that's not based on much real analysis.
Patent is a bit more complex - the core problem I see is that some fields (EG: computer science) are advancing so rapidly that even a 7 year patent seems astronomical. Meanwhile other fields (EG: heavy industry) are more established - patent worthy innovations are far more rare, require significantly more up-front investment, and take longer to build a market. This is problematic - 4 year patents would be insufficient for the automotive industry, but 15 year patents would strangle computer science.
It seems that the most efficient solution would have to have different patent expiration periods for different industries. The inevitable result would be increased corruption and reliance on lawyers.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
All laws and systems exist, in the end, to ensure the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.
Thus the goal should be to ensure sufficent renumeration for the creators to have an incentive to create while ensuring that the products of their creativity are made available as soon as possible to serve as the foundation of further creativity.
The question, of course, is quantification of the length of time; 3,5,7 or 99, years.
Secondary question: should all forms of IP have the same protection? Arguably, a patent should expire, but what about a Trademark?
IMHO the Constitution got it right with 7 years for a patent. I cannot see ANY justification whatsoever for Copyright to extend past the life of the author. Trademark *IS* important, if you buy a Plextor drive or drink Jolt you have a right to be sure that the product you get is the product you expect to get; otherwise it's fraud. But I do think that Trademark should be subject to Fair Use, especially in the realm of satire and product review.
"Our" core geek mantra is sound "Information Wants To Be Free". The greatest good for the greatest number is best served by erring on the side of too free a dissemination of information rather than too restricted, if err we must-and err we will!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Given the opportunity, the media middlemen will outlaw or surcharge for anything resembling fair use. They seem to think that encryption and legislation will let them turn every user's activity into a revenue stream. If this becomes a "pay-per-click" world, then I'll join the opposition.
Job #1 is to define precisely what fair use is, and to enact meaningful penalties for those companies who violate it. It might be as simple as legalizing piracy of those products that violate the "Fair Use Bill of Rights (FUBOR)". Want to market a non-standard/crippleware CD? Great, but you have no recourse against anyone when it's cracked and P2P'ed onto every PC between here and Jupiter. To me, the concepts of backup, time-shifting, space-shifting, and media-shifting are fundamental. Those distributors who play games with the fundamental principles of fair use should be left to suffer the wrath of the hacker community.
Make no mistake, the consideration of consumers' rights is key to the process. Currently, the DMCA and other related legislation makes it a clear-cut battle of all consumers against all media distributors, or "the pirates" vs. "the greedy sleazebags". The current one-sided approach to legislation is not going to achieve voluntary compliance. Anyone who chooses to crack, copy, and distribute their media will think of their actions as the modern-day equivalent of "The Boston Tea Party".
The media companies need to realize that their interests cannot be fully protected without consideration for their customers.
Your "no-labor, no-money" thesis sounds awfully flawed.
So you're telling me that if two people enter into a private agreement, where one person gives a thing or idea to another, and in return, the other agrees to pay that person money, in exchange for the use of that thing or idea, for the rest of his or her life - that the government should make a law making such agreements illegal? Such a law would surely be unconstitutional, as well as impractical (how would you enforce it?)
Also, I can think of one specific instance of a pretty good musician who would starve with your plan. Andy Partridge of XTC, writes pretty good music, and records some pretty good music, but he has an anxiety disorder which pretty much precludes public performances. How can somebody like that make a living? I guess he better get a job flipping burgers or something, society can do just fine without his Art, right?
You're trying to turn this into an ideological argument of black or white, right and wrong - placing the whole notion of copyright as wrong and evil. When clearly there's a middle ground that could be found which would be beneficial to all. The problem with the broken IP Law system as it stands today is that the original interests of "public domain" are not represented by the current American zeitgeist of "Capitalism above all else". Because Capitalism was our sword of vengence in the holy war against Communism. As it turns out, it's a double-edged sword, and it's been turned against us by greedy corporations who exploit the concept of "Freedom" for their own personal gain. The middle ground, the balance has been lost. We've fallen down the slippery slope on the side of the giant corporations who wield too much political influence.
The root of the problem is the influence. Remove that, and the voice of the people will be heard instead, and a balance will be restored. We should not tread down the other slippery slope of elimination of the concept of intellectual property, because things are different today - today's world, with today's population, and a technically advanced race of humans, NEEDS capitalism to survive. It NEEDS the concept of intellectual property. People need to profit from their ideas. We just need reasonable, balanced limits to be set. Quite departed from where we are now, and where you seem to want society to head.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Patents are most necessary in areas where it is EASY to copy inventions. If everyone needed a few million $ worth of hardware to make the invention, the patent doesn't add that much value against the masses of people who want to copy your invention, it only protects you against the few who have the actual resources to do so. Every other industry has dealt with patents for years. It is time for the software developers as a whole to do so as well.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Yes, I have no patents, copyrights, or trademarks. Let we who have nothing to lose make the rules!
You can bet that if I did have one of the above, one that was capable of making boatloads of money, I would be defending the current IP laws with the best lawyers and politicians I could buy. Until I could suck no more money from the people- then I'd let it pass into public domain.
Since I'm unlikely to be in that situation, I say down, down with the institution! Share the wealth! Down with current IP and patent laws!
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Once a patent application is published, anyone can send prior art to the relevant patent office. This is one of the reasons that patent applications are generally published.
However, you've got to provide the evidence.
it does not have to go. it just needs to be restricted to small amounts of time.
I think Software needs to be defined as one thing or the other. it is either an invention, hence the patent, or it is a peice od art, hence the copyright.
there than that, I think the patent laws need to be revised for the speed of our society na dshould be shortened to 10 years. also, I think copyright needs to only last 14 years with one renewable 14 year term. that keeps artists pumping out work on a regular basis, and also adds plenty of work to the public domain in a short amount of time.
a fair balence is what we need. not an off balence. abolishing IP is as bad for the creators as having the SSSCA is for the consumers. IP at the minimum guarantees that the creator is given the public credit for the work.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
On Copyright:
Copyright should last 25 years maximum.
Copyright should be non-transferable and non-extendable.
Copyright should always allow fair use and duplication by individuals.
Copyright should only prevent outright mass-distrubtion.
Copyright should only prevent this with law, not with technology (which means if someone's violating copyright, you notice them doing it and track them down and prosecute... you don't hopelessly try to manpiluate technology to prevent it in the first place)
On Patents:
Patents should last 10 years maximum, ever.
All patentable things must meet the following criteria:
1) Non-obvious - a technical person (or technical review board perhaps?) in the field in question wouldn't consider this a trivial and obvious solution.
2) No prior art - it has never been done before.
3) No inclusion of prior art - The work being patented must be the sole intellectual work of the patentee. It cannot contain intellectual work of others, even if those others didn't patent their work (example, patenting a peice of software that relies on algorithms you got from a programming magazine... you could still patent portions of your software, but not that portion, and no "portion" that contains those algorithms).
11*43+456^2
I propose a centralized copyright system (registry of deeds) whereby software is free as in libre, but not necessary as in gratis. To read the most succinct version I've come up with, go here. Unfortunately, my distributedcopyright.org isn't up.
If you outlaw intellectual property, then there is very little incentive to share ideas with others.
And this is different what what's happening right now, how?
The idea behind a patent is that anyone can license the information that a patent protects, right? Why then do pharmeceutical companies refuse to license drugs to third-world countries? (Don't tell me that its because those countries can't afford them. If you don't lower your price to the maximum limit a customer can afford, then you're losing a sale.)
Same way with the music industry. The current licensing schema with DRM and the recent webcasting descision is not designed to make the information in the form of music shareable and profitable. It is designed to keep the music firmly in the hands of the record industry so that they have unquestionable control over it.
That's what it boils down to really. Anyone who follows the current IP debates will readily agree. It's not about money, or making information available. It's about control and power, plain and simple.
The idea of intellectual property laws is to encourage sharing of ideas by granting exclusivity to the creator for a limited amount of time. I believe that idea has been corrupted by corporate interests, but I don't think we should throw out the baby with the bath water.
Information is power. I beleive very firmly that as long as any method exists for the rich and powerful to influence laws, that they will do their best to 'extend' laws that make information artificially scarce in order to increase their own powers.
This is not a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but amputating the baby's infected, cancerous limb in order to save its life.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I wrote an essay for my website about this subject some time back. You can find it here:
http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75 [furinkan.net]
Your analogies in this essay are either incorrect or irrelevant.
The prehistoric example is simple. A refugee from a war loses most of his tribe to the invading barbarians, but manages to escape to the next village. If he tells those people of the invasion and moves on, they will help themselves by preparing for the fight or evacuating, and probably taking the refugee with them out of thanks or desire for his experience. If he were to stop at the village, get food and water, and then leave without telling everyone of the approaching ruin, the survivors of the resulting carnage would probably not be so kindly disposed towards him.
This makes no sense whatsoever. It means nothing to IP law. In the above scenario, with or without IP laws, the scenario could be the same.
A more recent example would be the various gold rushes, both with real or imagined minerals. While there was very little real gold in California, the uninhibited spread of information about all the new business opportunities in the area in the late nineteenth century turned an otherwise undesirable region into the one of the hottest business centers on the planet.
Again, you're trying to say that somehow a lack of IP laws was responsible for the west coast's success. Wrong. The idea that gold might be out there helped, but your assertion that flow of information such as news events would not have been possible due to IP Laws is bogus.
The concept of public libraries, which originated around a century ago, is also a clear demonstration of this fact. I don't think that there is anyone who doesn't consider the nation's public libraries to be noble institutions. When they first starting being constructed, however, the publishing industry was in an uproar. People cold go to libraries and read for free rather than pay the publishers for books. It is almost a direct mirror of the current uproar the record industry is making about MP3's and file-trading services such as Napster and Gnutella.
Again, this is a flawed analogie. A library provides access to a single copy of a book for a single person at a single time. They paid the publisher money for that book. Napster provided access to anyone, anwhere, anytime unlimited copies of that item without ever buying that item.
In the library example, the library increased the efficiency of the book by letting any number of people use it over it's lifetime.
Also, the central part of your argument that infinite supply = 0 cost and that the only cost should be in delivery, is rediculous. Record companies spend money to crete music. Software companies spend money to create software. Authors and publishers spend money/time to create works.
You're advocating a communal system that would make any career mentioned above worthless. Your delivery pipes would have NOTHING to deliver since there is no incentive to create.
It is possible that the economic inefficiency involved in a certain amount of reverse-engineering would be less (indeed, much less) than the economic inefficiency inherent to the thought-monopoly regime. Yes, reverse engineering takes time and effort, but perhaps this time and effort would be less expensive and more rewarding, both to its direct beneficiaries and to society at large, than the various costs of thought-monopoly.
What you call "intellectual property", recall, is merely a form of governmentally enforced monopoly on the application of thought, hence my term thought-monopoly. Like any other monopoly, or any other use of government force, it creates economic inefficiencies. The "social contract" backing this monopoly -- as represented in the U.S. Constitution's copyright clause -- is predicated on the belief that the benefits of this monopoly outweigh its costs. This is not a necessarily true claim, and where and when it is not true, thought monopoly is demonstrably unjustifiable on economic grounds.
(I set aside the question of whether thought monopoly is justified, or even permitted, on moral or "natural rights" grounds. I happen to believe it isn't, but I think the economic argument, being a scientifically investigable one, is more likely to be convincing than the moral one.)
A non-scarcity based economy assumes that there are unlimited resources, a population limited by natural means to a fixed upper limit, or that people are willing to share what resources they have freely, none of which is true.
We don't have unlimited amounts of even the most basic necessary resources (ie., water). Our population continues to expand, usually in regions of the world that can ill afford it in the first place. We've pretty much proven that people are at the least somewhat greedy and will hog resources if they perceive a shortage.
And we have no natural predators.
The non-scarcity based economy will remain a fantasy for Star Trek watchers and pipe-dreamers for some centuries to come.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Speaking as a content creator (music, literary, and fine art):
1. Revert copyright lengths to a reasonable amount of time. A maximum of 17 years in which financial interest in the copyright could be assigned to another person and another 17 year period during which the copyright would mandatorily revert back to the original author(s). This would provide corporations an incentive to fund content creation, and still provide opportunity for the author to receive continued monetary advantage without corporate interference.
2. Examine the possibility of prohibiting a corporation from holding a copyright. As an earlier post mentioned, if corporations had to license the work, they might behave in a more civil manner.
3. Remove the possibility of creating a "Work for Hire." The author of a piece is the author of a piece. If an author is caught falsifying a copyright registration (e.g. he has a contract saying that someone else (like a corporation) is the author, the work immediately and irrevocably falls into the public domain.
4. (Here's one dream item...) Amend the Constitution to say that Congress shall not pass any law containing an amendment. This is how the majority of our pork and shady dealings come about, and it's time for it to stop. There's no reason to attach an amendment giving $500,000 to Topeka for studying the mating habits of the purple-nosed shrew to a law covering federal highway funds. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's often how bad copyright and patent laws get through - 11th hour additions to bills that have absolutely no relation.
5. In that same constitutional amendment, make it a law that Congress shall make available in multiple formats, for no less than 30 days prior to the vote, a common language "impact statement" for any law. If I have to file an Environmental Impact Statement for something I'm doing on my own property, then the government should damn well have to file an impact statement when passing laws that change the way I live my life.
Lawyers are human modems: you need one on each end of a bill/law figure out what the hell it actually means. I understand the need for legal language to eliminate ambiguity, but when it ceases to be understandable to a person of even above-average-intelligence, things have gotten out of hand.
Before I explained the DMCA's impact to many of my friends and family, they didn't see the big deal. And I have to rely on other people's interpretations of the law because it's a pain to wade through it: too long, too obscure, and uses phrases I'd need to be a 2nd year law student (at least) to understand. I shouldn't need a law degree to know whether a bunch of people (most of whom are not from my state) are about to tell me I can't do something anymore.
Whew. Sorry for the rant. I think that the current "Who Wants to Pay Off A Senator" method of buying legislation is largely responsible for these seeming nonsensical laws. Back to copyright...
6. Remove the "legal entity" status for corporations that Santa Clara County in California helped us bring into the world. Dissolve Santa Clara county and give it to Gilroy as punishment for inflicting a really stupid decision on the rest of the country. (tongue in cheek, folks... but with a grain of sincerity).
It's hard to come up with specifics because the system is so overwhelmingly broken. But I think that a combination of reexamining the ability for a corporation to own a copyright and significantly reducing copyright terms would be a great start.
If the government is truly interested in upholding the Constitution (and I get more and more skeptical of that every day), then they need to go back and read the damn thing. I seriously doubt that the copyright provision was put in place so that 5 multinational corporations could run amok.
Wow... I've really rambled on. Sorry for that. This is an issue with few easy answers, but it's definitely easy to identify that there's a problem.
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.
The main problem I have with the laws is who is held responcible for the copyright/patten infrengment.
These laws are try to stop poeople from pointing to websites that violate the law and have copywritten or pattened information. This is an unfair act because a site can contain more information then just Illegal information it can also obtain legal and fair use information as well. If you are going to sue someone for violating your copyrights then sue the person who is violating it and not the person who is pointing to it.
Citizans should be able to browse the web and Download what they want without feeling liabale for getting illegal information where they can be prosicuted. It is the responcibility of the content provider to very the legality of his information. This is also true on P2P networks such as music sharing systems. They do not actually hold the music it is just a bunch people saying "hay this is what I got and you can have it" The P2P networks have no means of checking to see if it legal or not and the responcibily falls on the person distributing the content.
Music fair use. I beleave it is fair use to distribute a song or track without a charge to a limited amount of people. I beleave that if you give away the hole CD or album is unfair use. You should pay for having all the music you want on the CD and not pay for the indivual songs. By giving away the hole set crosses the bounds because it takes away all the work the record company made. Its like listing to music on the radio you raily hear the hole CD you just hear a song and the next piece they pay is from an other CD.
And I dont think you should differieate from IP laws from ordany laws. There is no real difference.
Hacking or Cracking into a compuer is the same as breaking and entering and tresspassing (It dosent matter if the computer is unsecure or not). Piricy of software is simular to going into a store and taking the Software (which is the same if you give away the whole package or album of a music)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Okay, what are they? Please clarify. I'm not trolling; I want to discuss specifics to make sure that the alternatives you're proposing are fair.
First, I do not claim to have all the answers. I am merely stating that the discussion, to be at all fruitful, must consider alternatives to a system which is prone to abuse, and prone to worst vargaries of a command economy and government coercion by its very nature (and initial design requirements).
Second, this list is by no means exhaustive. It is off the top of my head, and others I'm sure could suggest more creative, perhaps more effective, approaches.
As for fairness, I can think of several things that would be at least as fair as the current, very unfair system of copyright (unfair to artists and consumers both), without the burden on our society of state enforced monopolies.
One, as others have mentioned, is patronage. It is, in one sense, how most programmers are paid today (most of us work on inhouse software, NOT retail software being sold under copyright. Some of us are fortunate enough to be working on free software or open source projects). It is also how most acters are paid, in another sense. Indeed, arguably it is how any artist or professional is paid who does a "work for hire" where the artist (or professional) in question never enjoys "ownership" of the copyright on the work they produce, or the patent on the work they invent.
Another possibility is derivative income. Example: you don't make money on the music, you make money on the performance of the music. Again, this won't change how most bands make money, for example, as they receive most of their revinues from concerts (while their publishers, the record companies, rake in millions via their control of the copyright itself, selling copies of the music on CDs, etc.).
Another possibility is "busking" or the electronic equivelent thereof via micropayments of one sort or another.
Another possibility is simply creating wealth and sharing it to ones advantage, much as free software has done for many of us. I make my living off of the deployment of free software, which I can, share, and modify freely despite having not written it myself. The developers in turn make good money, because they are well known and thus in demand. We all win (and though free software is copyrighted by definition, the license is designed to negate the restrictions of copyright). I give back a little in my own way, which further enriches others (perhaps in ways I don't even know about or expect).
None of these approaches are perfect, all of them have problems and challenges, but no more so than copyright itself, and assuming your goal is to insure the artist is compensated, and the society is enriched, they are all superior to the copyright regime we now have, or even in its much more benign form as initially implimented in the United States.
Now, if your goal is to protect and enrich publishers, as it was at the time the constitution was written to include provisions for copyright, then you might object to these approaches, but artists and society at large would likely benefit greatly from any of them over the current system, particularaly now that we have the internet to make publishing costs negligable.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is simple. An inventor/creator is given for a limited period of time a monopoly over his/her creation. The time limits are meant to be long enough for the person to recoup costs of creation and make a profit off of it thereby encouraging people to create. There're two problems now. The current time limit in the US for copyrights is bizarre. It discourages people from creating more than once, assuming they create something enjoyed on a mass scale the first time. The authors life + X years system also encourages an intellectual nobility in that the children and possibly grandchildren will continue to benefit from the invention of a parent thereby having no incentive to create. The most you could justify is something along the lines of authors life or 30 years, whichever is longer. That way you avoid a situation in which the primary wage earner dies unexpectedly and thereby leaves his/her family out in the cold. I'd be in favor of a flat 40 years, myself. Plenty of time to recoup costs and make a nice amount of money, not so much time that it stretches into the bizarre. However I'd temper that with the condition that a copyright held by a corporation lasts only 25 years. As for patents, 14 years is fine. The problem is the silly nature of some patents granted these days. The solution for this is for congress to begin properly funding the USPTO again. The USPTO is currently reliant on people filing for patents and trademarks for its funding. It's underfunded with a builtin incentive to grant patents to encourage people to continue filing. Patents only last 14 years and if they're too stupid they are challengeable, but the granting of somewhat silly patents can slow down scientific progress. Trademark law seems mostly fine with a few exceptions (the despair.com frownie comes to mind). But those are only valid if enforced anyway. If someone with a common speech/use trademark ever brought suit it'd get struck down (think kleenex).
-Mike
Being a former intellectual property attorney, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this very issue. I have to disagree with the notion expressed by epsalon in the original posting:
However, nullifying all IP laws is IMHO a bit too strong, because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux).
At the end of the day, all copyright and patent laws are an attempt to create some incentive for certain kinds of creation, at the expense of limiting the right of the public to use certain ideas. In essence, this is nothing more than a subsidy (the IP owner gains a limited monopoly right, the public loses freedom of action with regard to the subject of that monopoly). Just because the "price" of the subsidy paid by the public is not directly monetary doesn't mean that it is any less of a subsidy.
A lot of people who (in my opinion, correctly) reject the notion of government subsidies as unnecessary and, on balance, harmful to society still accept the notion of IP because they don't see it for what it is. The backers of IP laws would have you believe that a world without IP laws would be a bleak, gray unhappy place with no creativity. Of course, the world before IP laws looked nothing like that, and the world won't look like that when people finally undo these mistakes of history.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
Intellectual property is a corporate (or individual) asset used to obtain revenue, just like computers, desks, chairs, etc. As such, it is treated as a capital expense under Internal Revenue Code. The full cost of producing the IP must be amortized according to the Code, and amortizations are a time-limited period chosen when the property is first claimed for deduction.
So, why not just tie the protection of said IP to its amortizations? Once the IP has fully capitalized, it should no longer qualify for protection and then fall into the public domain.
This would make IP holders think *very carefully* about how long they want to take to amortize -- it would make them choose a balance between tax savings and IP protection.
This ignores (and/or perpetuates) one of the biggest practical problems with the current system -- it is not possible to determine if copyright on a work has expired simply by looking at the work in question.
It used to be the case that copyrights were granted for a fixed period of time, and that in order for a work to be copyrighted, it had to have the copyright notice affixed. Said notice had to contain the year the work was produced and the titular holder of the copyright. Thus, by looking at the notice and applying simple arithmetic, you could tell instantly whether a work was in the public domain: "Hmm, this was copyrighted in 1950, copyright lasts for 50 years, so now it's in the public domain and I can copy it at will." [note purely hypothetical number.]
Even with the varying lengths of fixed copyright that came into being as a result of the various early extensions passed by congress, it was still relatively easy for the lay researcher to figure out whether something was freely copyable; all one had to do was consult a table that matched year of publication with the then-extant term of copyright. In other words, if in 1918 copyright was 28 years, and in 1939 congress passed an act that extended subsisting and future copyrights by 10 years, then in 1941 a work that had been published in 1918 would still be under copyright, but a work from 1916 would have ascended into the public domain in 1938.
But with things based on the life of the author, it's an absolute mess -- our would-be researcher has to start investigating death records, just to figure out whether it's OK to slap an essay on the photocopier. Have you ever tried to get official records for the date of someone's death? Even for people who've died recently it can be a royal farking pain. For an author who died many years ago, good effing luck!
Copyright terms should be standard lengths, one-size-fits-all regardless of when anyone dies, is born, gets incorporated, or achieves spotted purple enlightenment with bells on.
Need a UNIX/Linux/network guru in the Boulde
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
This can easly be circumvented by an exclusive license, and many many other legal instruments.
Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified
Any boundary you make will be blurry. What is a movie that is generated by a computer program dynamically? This is inflexible and won't scale.
Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
Thereby making it impossible for me to use copyrighted material as an asset? Oh brother. Your solutions are worse than the problem.
Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity
See above. There are tons of legal ways to get around this... why? If I want to sell it I should be able to. It is a limited monopoly afterall, it has value, and thus I should be able to use it in the marketplace. Copyright law is silent on all of these issues for good reason.
If a work has some form of access control, that access control must be disabled when the work enters public domain
Good idea, hard to enforce. A better way is a registry; if you want to copyright binary source code, you must include the source code to the copyright office for escrow, as soon as the copyright expires, the source is released.
Reverse engineering any sort of access control is legal
Yes, withdrawing DMCA is a great idea. But I'm not certain if you can go any further. Tradesecret law is important...
Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities
They are held by individuals, they just happen to be assignable/licensed to companies.
Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
How do you make this distinction? A can-of-worms this is.
No patent shall be granted for algorithms or business processes
I'm not certain this is such a good idea, just about everything shoudl be patentable, IMHO, but only if it "advances the sciences and useful arts".
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
This is called "reduction to practice" and it is already a requirement.
Naturally occuring results of processes may not be patented (ex: DNA)
Once again, it's hard to make this distinction. Any guidelines? The patent process is by necessity a one-by-one kind of thingy.
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art
But they do already! They just hire idiots to do it who are impressed by anything technical sounding... the problem is more how they get funded. The funding of the PTO comes from patent applications. Thus, to get more funding, they need to increase applications. And what a better way to encourage the applications then by approving a big chunks of them.
Perhaps a better solution is to make them accoutnable so that the PTO can be sued a fixed fee for patents which should not have been issued. This, or some other accoutability mechanism is needed to provide a dis-insentive to approve applications without doing due dillegence.
Overall, nice ideas though. You need some serious thinking on this stuff...
The answer (at least to me) is pretty simple:
For copyright, set copyright dates in stone - fixed term (none of this "life of the author +X years.) Each work gets the same amount of protection, and there is no discrimination.
Second, return to a registration system. If you want copyright protection, you must register for it. You must register ALL incarnations of something to get copyright for any of them ie. you must register your source code AND runtime, if you want protection for the runtime. That way, once the work falls into the public domain, the public is guarateed access.
Third, registration would have to be renewed every so often (5 or 10 years.) This would prevent "IP hoarding", and eliminate the current problem with "abandonware."
For patents, I don't think the system is horribly flawed, it's just poorly implemented. Enforcement of the (original) rules needs to done. (ie. You can't patent something you can copyright, better checks for "originality", and for scientific merit.) If the idea is simple, but the implementation is difficult, no patent.
Trademarks? No opinion. Just don't start doing it like Germany ("Hi, I'm a lawyer, and you might be infringing on a trademark. You must now give me money for telling you this."), and we'll be OK.
Without big corps there would have been no, Unix, no C, no Linux. Nuff Said.
Later,
Phil
Really, if you can't get enough benefit out of writing a piece of software in 10 years, then it's someone else's turn
What happens if the software you wrote has a limited customer base, and you figure it will take 20 years to get a return on your investment?
I'd rather have the user be able to specify the limit of their copyright on the form and then have markets use this additional information (when the copyright expires) as an additional factor in their decision. They may choose to buy software that costs $500 now and becomes public domain two years later over software that is $100 now and doesn't become public domain for the next 50 years...
What if current copyright/patent law allowed lawyers to patent a particular defense if it worked well in court? Wouldn't that make it more difficult for you to do your job if you had to pay someone to use a particular tactic to defend one of your clients? Or even to prosecute a particular case of infringment?
That's what it's like for software - You make a comment about how Talented programers "don't want any impediments whatsoever", how is that special treatment? Do Carpenters need to pay for a license before they put up an A-Frame house? To do math, do you have to pay extra to use the square-root key?
Patented software takes away fundemental tools and solutions available to developers. It may be true that the solutions may not be discovered until a problem is encountered, but just because someone was the first to file a patent for a new problem should not give them the right to deny others use of it.
I'll admit that I have my doubts about some forms of software patents - certain video and sound compression algorthms especially. These take a lot of work and time, and can be truely inovative (and easilly copied once discovered), but I have never seen another "inovative" software patent.
A problem with this that there is an implicit third way of IP protection (the other two are copyrights and patents) and that is secrets. If IP laws are removed then companies will just shut up. It is for this reason that our current IP laws foster innovation and likely stimulate thinking.
With patents we have a public record of innovation, so that when companies get bored of researching something we all know about without them having to do anything.
-Sean
Here's your chance to do something other than complain about the current state things.
Yes, obviously, because this Slashdot discussion will no doubt lead to changes in the system.
What laws can be written that will be fair both to content creators and to users, while cutting the middleman?
But the commentary along with it asks:
How would you revise or restructure IP and copyright law to make both sides of the fence happy?
The problem is it's not two sides of the fence. The people making the biggest problem here are the people who are the fence! The fence has the most complete control of the exchange of money for IP properties, and that's the biggest problem.
There is definitely a role for distributors etc. because your typical creator is not necessarily good at the business aspects of distribution. But whatever changes are made, they need to minimize the distributor's opportunities to skim, restrict, and otherwise control the flow of money and IP to their own gain and the detriment of the parties on either side.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
(Don't tell me that its because those countries can't afford them. If you don't lower your price to the maximum limit a customer can afford, then you're losing a sale.)
The way I understand it, they don't want to sell the drugs cheaply to third world countries because they fear that if they do, it will create a much larger black market for the drugs where they are bought cheaply and then sold to places where the drugs normally sell for more, namely the US and EU.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
From here:
In an emerging market, where prior investment is negligible, consumers desire highly differentiated software offerings; our legal environment supports this need exquisitely. However, in established markets, where consumers have invested in and have become dependent upon a particular software, these same consumers no longer desire competition for new and different software offerings. Instead, if given a choice, they would prefer competition for the change in the software they currently use. Unfortunately, our current legal practices, focused on emerging markets and justified with natural-right copyright thinking, deny the marketplace this alternative style of competition.
I do think that a contractual system is possible to establish such a competitive market for software upgrades, could prove more effective than a breakup. This proposal necessitates the creation of a non-profit registry-of-deeds tasked with maintaining records of software produced by revisions from competing authors. Specifically, the registry would administer access to source code and would calculate royalties from the licensing of administered software. The proposal rests on the following principles:
1. Before offering software to the marketplace, a developer would deposit into the registry all source code, description of patents, and design materials necessary to understand and build the program offered.
2. As part of each deposit, the developer would also specify a per-end-user licensing fee for programs derived from the material deposited.
3. Anyone can then retrieve these deposits and build from the material contained provided that any derived or competing work which the reader is thereafter involved is registered according to this same method.
4. When a derivative program is licensed, the sale price is calculated with the licensing fees for the materials upon which the program is derived. A technique involving anonymous serial numbers can be employed so that a given deposit is only licensed and charged once per user.
5. The developer may at any time reduce the posted price for their deposits; but may not license use of the material separately for amounts less than the posted price.
6. When fees are collected, royalties are distributed to each developer according to the number of licenses issued for each of their deposits.
7. The license for each deposit does not extend to trademarks, intellectual property of other parties, or material that was deposited separately. Deposits which would overlap in material must be decomposed into smaller units; the original treated as a derived work.
While the above may seem complicated, it will administer software that is a composite of revisions from competing authors. I am positive that most of this process can be automated so that developers, customers, and distributors are shielded from the administrative burden.
I believe that this mechanism could bring about more professionalism within the industry. It would eliminate bait-and-upgrade schemes. It would also improve software reliability. Lacking serious competition for upgrades, established software vendors have little incentive to work on quality control issues. Furthermore, with source code and design documents publicly available, retired programmers could be independently contracted for the evaluation of commercial applications. I can even imagine professional review organizations emerging, helping the consumer sort through the hype to identify those products with good, solid engineering.
The purpose of copyright and patents is NOT to provide "incentive to create" - it is to provide "incentive to keep creating" and "INCENTIVE TO MAKE AVAILABLE" (which, in turn, is also intended to foster continued creation). The idea being that if there was no "protection" from metaphorical poaching of concepts and expressions of ideas, that people would tend to keep them secret. This being the case, we ONLY need "enough" protection - beyond that, there is no additional incentive to make things available, and in fact, as we can see, it PREVENTS things from being available. Patents seem to be routinely used not to "protect" a product or process, but to HINDER someone else from investigating anything similar.
Copyright and Patents are "bargains" made with the public, via the government. The basic "bargain" is "Okay, we'll let you have exclusive control, AND back you up with law enforcement, paid for by taxpayers, for a limited time, in return for which, after that "limited time", this work will become available for use, investigation, and modification by the public, which may then enter into this same bargain with the derivative works they then create."
"Progress of Science and the Useful arts" are NOT, in my opinion, "promoted" by the excessive power that the current extensions and additions to the body of "intellectual property" law provide. The concept, as *I* understood it, was a variant of the "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" - that is, "with enough people to examine ideas, any useful applications and variations will become obvious". This is obviously thwarted when nobody is allowed to legally attempt novel variations or applications until long after the "protected" work (invention or copyright-protected item) is obsolete or mostly-irrelevant...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Advantages to whom? Oh right, to people who want the fruits of other people's labour for free. So, being the kind of guy who demands the fruits of other people's labour for free, I guess you always walk out of restaurants without paying the bill too, huh?
Information is not equal to property.
I like giving information away. It's a fun hobby. I write almost every day. Rather than selling my writing, I write about things that I could never sell and give that writing to whomever comes to my website. Are you calling my readers criminals?
I'm sorry, but this is just f***ing nuts. Almost all musicians or writers worth their salt do nothing but make music or write. That's why they're so good, and that's why you want to listen to and read their stuff. So what other "business" do they have to leverage? Selling T-shirts? This might be funny if it weren't so stupid.
Unfortuneately, that's *exactly* the way most bands make their money. Sure you have the occasional artist who has great record sales and manages to come out on top after they're anally raped by their label, but the great majority of smaller performers make their money by a) selling merchandise such as t-shirts and b) selling concert tickets. Even then, they may not break even.
IP laws do not work in this day and age. They have to be scrapped, and anyone who tells you differently has already deceived themselve, buying into the flawed IP mythos created by media companies.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The song it self belongs to the writer(s).
The performance (or recording of it) belongs to the performer(s).
In this situation, if Band XYZ releases the original recording of a song writen by Q, and Band HIJ wants to perform (and/or record) the song, they would get permission from Q, not from XYZ.
However, if someone wanted to broadcast XYZs recording, they would have to ask XYZ for permision.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Trying to take Stephen King, and scale him to the average-popularity author, doesn't make for a good argument. Just because Stephen King can do it once doesn't mean that thousands of average authors can do it for a career.
I urge you to respond and defend your positions a bit closer.
... indeed, the only losers are the aforementioned middlemen: publishers, studios, and recording companies.
Since my position is that any discussion of improving the IP situation must include a discussion of alternatives to IP altogether that might achieve the same (purportedly) desired result, the only reason I can think that others would argue that such a discussion should exclude any consideration of alternatives to IP laws such as copyright would be because they have a vested interest in copyright as it now stands and don't want anyone to consider any alternatives whatsoever. Such a stance would hardly be a good starting point for an honest discussion of the issue.
That is one defense of my position, that we need to be discussing alternatives to copyright. Thus far, our society hasn't tried any alternatives of note, at least not until Richard Stalman's recent "social hack" known commonly as "copyleft". Now, as to some of your other points.
That is a flawed statement, because there was no way to easily copy these works when they were created (with the possible exception of Van Gogh who did suffer problems with copy cats and poorly made copies).
In a smaller world, it is easier to maintain control of one's intellectual property.
Your argument is flawed, in that you assume the artists had any need to "control" their works, or, even if they have the desire to control their works, that society should in any way grant that desire at the expense of everyone else's freedom.
Quite the contrary, often a musician such as Bach or Mozart would become more widely known, more in demand, and hence more successful, the more widely their works were copied and performed. They may not have liked it if their work was performed in a country with which their sponsor was at war (for example), but that doesn't mean they didn't benefit from it, nor does it mean that their desire should have been the paramount factor in whether or not to allow it.
Your entire assumption assumes a need and desire to control copying, a restriction inherent in copyright but not necessarilly inherent in the requirement that artists be compensated for their work, or even in their best interests. It is, almost without exception, in their publishers best interest, but the interest of an artist and their publisher are very often not the same at all.
I believe that copyright law is neessesary to protect intellectual property, though I do not support recent changes in the law. I believe that Walt Disney should enjoy some protection for his mouse (but not for enternity). I believe that I should have certain rights under law if I choose to express myself artistically to protect me from others unlawfully gaining profit from my song, painting, movie, computer program, etc...
This is a circular defintion. You are essentially saying "I believe copyright law is necessary to protect copyrighted works. I believe I should enjoy rights under a law making it illegal for people to copy my work without my permission, so that I'm protected against people violating the law that says they cannot copy my work."
Can you justify your stance without resorting to a circular definition?
This would be the argument of the non creative who seek to make money from other's achievements. If you produce a song, should others gain money from your achivements? What if you are not strong enough (politically or physically) to demand payments that are yours? If there is no copyright protection, who ensures that you will receive due payment?
Nonsense. This is the argument of creative people who are tired of having their work held hostage by publishers, record companies, and studios. It is the argument of creative people who want to be able to contribute to a creative commons without having their work then taken by a private firm and incorporated into a restricted work that diminishes that commons.
And if you are a creative person that feels that these laws are too restrivtive, then by all means, release your intelletual property to the public domain without demand or setoff.
I am such a creative person, and can easilly point out the fallacy of your argument. If I release my work into the public domain under current copyright laws, anyone from Hollywood studios to Time Warner records to Joes Publishing could take my work, restrict it from use by others by simply putting a wrapper around it and claiming copyright on the whole, and thereby make my own work less accessible for use by others by, in effect, surrounding it with copyright landmines.
Simply pouring stuff into the public domain doesn't work when someone, like Disney, can pilfer the public domain and excersize such tight copyright over the derivative works (e.g. Grimm Fairy Tales) that others are put off from doing similar work for fear of legal retaliation (justified or no). It doesn't work because copyright lets people take from the commons without giving back, in effect making the entire exchange a one way street.
As for alternatives, I have suggested several in this thread which are at least as workable as copyright from an artists and societies point of view
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If you require them to review comments from thousands of people after an application is published. the time needed for a patent to issue is likely to double. Imagine the inventor waiting 10 years for a patenbt to issue!
Good points, but if administered correctly, shouldn't submissions actually help the examiner? I mean, practically speaking, very few patents will actually be commented on, and when they are it should just point examiners in the direction of some prior art to aid in their searches. The submissions might become part of the file but it would be up to the examiner to use them.
If once in a while a patent does get thousands of submissions, well there's probably good reason for the all the interest and maybe the examiner should spend extra time on this one.
Subjecting patents to public scrutiny might also decrease the amount (or at least slow the increase) of frivolous patents and even end up decreasing the overall workload somewhat.
You'd probably require a minor fee per submission and limit the comments to a listing of suggested prior art, and possibly very short and basic rationale regarding obviousness etc. The first measure would stop them from getting too many crank submissions through e-mail, the second measure would limit the ability of big industry to abuse the process with persuasive lobby efforts as well as putting a cap on the amount of work required. At the end of the day, establishing the facts through prior art would still be the deciding factor.
You might also need to add an administrative layer to handle and sort the documentation, but this should be nothing wholly different or unworkable.
I don't see it as being unlike the open source process. Yes you do need to expend effort and resources to manage and administer the input of the volunteer base, but if you do it right it should get you better results with perhaps less direct effort than doing it all yourself.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
What's to stop everyone from choosing the 50 year term and still selling the software for a high price?
Nothing. However, if the time of the copyright becomes a factor in competition it is a way for one vendor to differ themselves from another. Right now we have two extremes: open source (aka free of charge) and proprietary (perpetual charge). Nothing saying that we can't make a derived model which is proprietary for N years and then public domain for years there after. In order to get a copyright on a binary, you'd have to submit to the copyright office the source code in escrow, which would be released upon the expiration date. You could then always update your copyright to make the expiration date shorter. Given another alternative, some vendors will choose it. In this model, open source is effectively "no copyright" (yes, I use the term lightly), and proprietary is "full copyright", a limited term copyright is a ballence; you are specifying when your code becomes public domain. This is a differentiation point... and could be used in software reviewes right next to cost.
For the holder of the copyright / patent:
For the first year, pay $1.
For the second, pay $2.
For the third, pay $4.
Then $8, $16, $32, etc....
After 10 years, you would have paid >$1,000.
After 20 years, you would have paid >$1,000,000.
For different industries, you can set
different starting points (so a $1 starting point could be good for books, maybe $1000 for software patents, etc).
So short term, anyone can benefit, and long term, more things will go back into the public domain.
That way, if it is still economically sound for you to hold your copyright/patent, you still can.
If not, it goes into the public domain.
The money collected could help fund basic research.
Oh, and this should be applied retroactively to all current copyrights/patents (take that Disney!).
Also, maybe allow copyrights be to held by coporations, but say every 5 years, it has to go back to the person/people who created it. Allow them the option of re-licensing it back to a company though.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
Before I rant, I just wanted to say you made a great point, that people need to address, and address with constructive criticism. One does get sick and tired of hearing of why software patents suck, without any ideas or comprimises to fix the problems.
SOFTWARE IS SPECIAL
Software is collection of works written in an advanced mathematical notation, which is why it enjoys the benefits copyright, and makes it more like writing a book or a song than creating a device.
It NO MORE a "functional element" to it as does a collection of mathmematical works does, or ANY OTHER notation. It IS being singled out because this is a very precise form of expressing ideas and can be automatically simulated on a computer, just as any other precice notation might enjoy.
Can Software be patented? No, No more than you can patent a riff or a literary element or a mathematical function. Even if the riff, or literary element, or mathematical formula can be simulated and execute on a computer.
Should Software be patentable? Personally, I would make a provision so one could enjoy a 5 years exclusive use of a non-obvious software implementations, just to give software researchers a little incentive.
SOFTWARE PATENT LAWYER QUESTION
Do you think you can forward me to a resource or a ruling which might shed some light on this question?
1. Can I get around a software patent by only publishing the source code?
2. Non-commercially?
3. Will releasing it into the public domain remove liability?
4. Can I host public domain source code which implements a software patent?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
14 years, only the creater(physical person) can hold exclusive rights, but he can not offer exclusive rights to anyone else.
That protects the creater from corporate abuse, and ensured that the works enter public domain in a reasonable time. Personally I think 7 years is enough, but 14 was the originall, so I'd settle for that.
Ideally, it would all be retroactive, but I'd give in on that point if it was the only way to get the 14 year limit in place.
rehashing the same crap over and over again does nothing for society. here that Disney?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One other thing that I'd REALLY like to see codified into law is that copyright isn't really about copying...
Realistically, the fair use doctrine and "first sale" and so on, IN NO WAY are intended to restrict copying - what they are intended to restrict is distribution .
"Fair Use" says if I legally purchase a book, I can take the photocopier that's in my study and make 20 copies if I want. I can make enlarged copies. I can transcribe it in medieval calligraphy with gold leaf and illumination. I can translate it into Spanish, Latin, Esperanto, and "Elvish" if I want.
Where the law is SUPPOSED to step in is if I attempt to give away or sell those copies without permission. That's distribution , not copying.
This even applies to things like rental videos, I believe - if I rent Orgazmo from the local video place, for example, I've basically (as I understand it) "temporarily purchased" the video. If my big-screen TV only has a DVD/VCD player hooked up to it, I believe I can legally (theoretically) make VCD's out of the VHS tape I've rented to watch on the DVD player FOR THE DURATION OF THE LEGAL RENTAL - after which I must destroy the VCD's (at a whopping $0.80 or so for the two CD-R's, it doesn't add much to the cost of the rental). If I don't, I've effectively " distributed illegally to myself ", as I no longer have "license" to use the material from the video tape (unless I purchase it).
I think a simple find-and-replace of "copy" with "distribution" in the laws would go a LONG way to fixing the mess that is "copyright"...I don't feel very "harmed" by not being allowed to sell or give away all the copies of "Steamboat Willy" I want, but I do feel harmed by the threat of going to jail if I transcode a legally purchased dvd of the cartoon to a DivX/Vorbis Ogg file to watch on my laptop computer. (That I am not allowed to create derivative works or make copies of "Steamboat Willy" after 80 years IS excessively restrictive still, but is less urgent to address, I think.)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Well, you have some fine ideas, but I think they require further thought. A book, a music score, a song -- these are all things that will have value after their protection is gone. By the time the copyright expires on software, it is, quite literally _worthless_. We need to reexamine the period of various kinds of works and inventions from this context. Since, auspiciously, the intellectual property system is built on the notion of offering incentives to benefit the common good, we should ask ourselves how likely it is that the common good will be served to the general public after the protection is gone.
It would seem to me that for software, the protection window should be substantially shortened. The exact numbers, I'm not sure of.
C//
The proposal is to add an "expiration" field to a copyright form, and letting someone filing the copyright specify a more limited time than what is allowable by law. This is a nice, backward compatible mechanism which could create competition based not only on price, but also on the expiration date.
No vendor would set a copyright at anything reasonable if it were for competitive advantage. Not many customers would take into account the expiration of the copyright in their purchasing decisions.
Americans _love_ numbers and stastics. The copyright expration date would play in nicely with this "scientific comparision" tendency... you just don't know. It could become a huge factor in purchase decisions. A company like Ford Motor may buy a HumanResourceSoftware for 2-3x the purchase price of an equivalent software if they _knew_ in 5 years it would become public domain and wouldn't be price-gouged on an endless upgrade cycle... I know someone who makes purchase decisions like this at Chrysler, and I've talked to him about this idea; he thinks it would make a difference.
So, its a small change and thus has a good chance of being feisable to implement (politicians could be accused of being non-capitalistic if they don't support it) and it may make a big difference... if it puts the expry date column on software reviews... imagine. Also, imagine the influx of open source software as companies up their price but lower their expiry date to 2-5 years and compete not only on price, but also on when the software becomes public...
thanks :)
Multiplying by a percentage of royalties received would require resources to track each copyright/patent, and that would potentially dwarf all revenues from this.
Also, we don't want to "punish" success -- we just want some simple economic force to push things into the Public Domain.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
I also believe that pre-DMCA copyright law, if vigorously pursued, would be capable of defending legitimate interests in content.
So here's my proposal. When a work is published, the author must make a choice:
In other words, you can try to fence off parts of the intellectual landscape -- but you don't get to use the full might of the US judicial system to do so.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
No, but then you already admitted that you could never sell your writing. Would you still give it away if you could sell it for a handsome sum of money?
/ index.html
I do sell writing. Rather, I'm paid for information I write for my company's website which is... get this... given away in order to encourage individuals to buy my company's services!
But is this the fault of the labels or the performer? Perhaps he's just not that good a performer. Or perhaps he's not that good at handling the business end of the job.
Hmm... You've got a lower slashdot ID than mine, so I don't *think* you're a music industry astroturfer.
If you don't buy what I'm saying, then, read the speech Courtney Love, arguably one of the 'big' names, gave to congress on this very matter:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love
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A) Religious leaders deciding disputes
or
B) Guns deciding disputes
As much as lawyers are a pain in the ass, I'd take a pompous lawyer in the room over a bullet in my chest any day. Besides, if the rest of us weren't so greedy, do you think there'd be so many lawyers in the US?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
But to generate tax revenue!
The IRS could be reworked for this purpose.
If the governement is providing IP protection
does it not deserve revenue from that protection?
IMO This would tend to be a more honest way to
generate revenue than from income tax on individuals. In addition it would push corps to ditch IP that is not profitable into the public domain.
;-)
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
1) Make patent term dependent upon how pioneering the invention is. If you are the first with the laser, long term. If you are the first with using a laser as a pointing device during presentations, short term. The PTO assigns a term as part of prosecution.
2) Require the PTO to accept and process comments about patents, and consider reexamination when a certain number of non-anonymous comments have accumulated. Thus, a reexaminatino of the Amazon patent could have been triggered by citizens. Have provisions to make sure companies don't have their employees swamp competitors patents. Congress needs to fund this function directly.
3) Access control isn't the problem, it is control over access control. Anyone who reverse engineers access control and or produces unlicensed access control can do so to the extent it is consistent with the law and the rights of the copyright holder. Thus, if open-source stuff is written to protect the copyright holder's legitimate rights, while better allowing access to expired copyrights for example, that is ok even if not approved by the copyright holder or the access system designer. (Please note: DeCSS still probably loses under this standard.)
Well, that's what I have off the top of my head...
The "IP is not property" argument is an old one now, and it's fatal flaw is this:
It doesn't matter if IP law is formulated based on property law or not. Anti Intellectual Property advocates want you to believe that formulating IP as property would lead to perpetual IP rights resulting in ridiculous measures such as being sued for using 2+2 because somebody patented that.
The truth of the matter is that such abuses can occur regardless of the basis on which the law is formulated. In fact, IP law was never formulated based on the idea that IP is real property, and the AIP movement is already proving my point here by complaining about the existing IP laws!
In fact, formulating IP as real property could actually sanitize things a great deal. That's because it could then be taxed, and if necessary, taxed 100% in some cases. When something is passed into the public domain, from the point of view of the person who produced it, it's like paying a 100% tax on their IP.
Of course, behind the AIP movement's desire to abolish the concept of IP is their desire to levy a 100% tax on IP--socialism in its purest form. They like to raise issues regarding the formulation of the law because it conceals their true motives and brings the issue into an academic realm where they can obfuscate the issue. It plays in their favor. Formulate IP as property--like real estate, and it can be taxed like real estate. Fail to pay your IP tax, and get "foreclosed". If it brings nothing at auction, it passes to the PD. The tax would only be levied against people who actually sold IP products. Give something away for free, and you pay no IP tax.
For example, I write a book, and it sells 50,000 copies. The value of that IP is "assessed" and taxed like a house. You can appeal the assessment, just like with real esate. The tax would be used, in part, to fund a database that would assess demand for the product. So, if I was no longer printing the book, but 20,000 people registered demand for a new copy (obligating themselves to pay their stated price if a copy were available), and the $20,000 IP tax was too much for me to pay, I could auction the IP. The buyer would have to agree to print the work to receive the registered demand money.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm not sure that there're actually any software patents out there that have prior art that would've disqualified them.
Oh, there are plenty. The patent on correct-order spreadsheet calculation, based on the prior art of the topological sort. The patent on using exclusive OR for cursors, which is both prior art and totally obvious. The patent on networked games, which is based on prior art and is totally obvious.
In the "European" concept of software, software is a specification or a design; it is information that can be used to control a machine, i.e., a computer to perform in a particular way.
In the "American" concept of software, the software itself is a machine, even when it's just written on a paper (or a CD) and can't actually do anything without a computer.
Now, the purpose of patents is same in both European and American systems: you can patent a method of doing something, i.e., a design or specification of a machine.
However, the patent laws only apply to producers, i.e., commercial entities that manufacture machines for consumers. They don't apply to consumers who build a machine just for themselves. Patents also do not restrict the distribution of the specification of the patented method.
Now, when you combine the European concept of software with the purpose of patents, you get a situation where a typical software product is never a machine, i.e., an implementation, by the definition of patent laws. The software producer only provides a "specification" of a patented method, which can be distributed freely (even for profit), and the consumer can combine the specification with a generic machine to produce a specific machine that implements the patented method.
This leads into many funny things; also the registered patent description is a specification of the method. Usually, if you want to implement it in a program, you need to make it much more detailed and make the implementation in a particular language. But if the patent specification is detailed enough, you could, in principle, translate it automatically to run it in a computer. Therefore, merely publishing the patented method means implementing the "software product". However, this interpretation leaves room for one case where patents do apply to software: when the software is integrated with the hardware by a producer. Hence, most embedded software stuff falls under patent laws, if the software is integrated in the produced machine. For example, PDAs and cell phones.
You might also think that this applies also to software bundled with a computer. I don't think it does, because *bundled* software is not an *integral* part of the computer and can be replaced by the consumer. Of course, this argument applies to much of the embedded software too, if it can be replaced by the consumer.
I think this is why you can patent software related methods in Europe, but also why they are not really useful except in the embedded market.
The "software is a machine" interpretation may, to some degree, be sensible with closed source proprietary software, as there the software is no longer a human-readable form, and can no longer be seen as merely a specification of the patented method. With this metaphor, closed software is a "virtual" machine (obs - not in the normal sense of "VMs").
Interestingly, from this viewpoint, there is exactly one licencing model under which the software can not be interpreted as as a "machine". It's GNU General Public License (and LGPL too). Only in this license, the source code of the software must always be made available. Hence, with GPL'ed software, the specification of the patented method is always human readable, and is merely just that, a specification.
It's very interesting to arrive at GPL as a solution in the topic of software patents, instead of the normal arguments of software freedom. With this approach, GPL might one day even be written in laws!
Nevertheless, I believe the "American" concept of software is contradictory. I can imagine that you could, in principle, crush American software patents (or more exactly their applicability) merely by argumenting with this conceptual framework. Even laws can be proved contradictory in court, I guess.
The problem, of course, is that if you can patent, in United States, a method of swinging in a children's swing, a method of excercising your cat with a laser pointer, or "business methods", the patent laws must already be so absurdly arbitrary that no rational arguments can ever defeat them.
Literary works, music and other purely creative works should at least receive protection for the life of the creator or 50 years, whichever comes last.
Why should you be able to make money on a work that you created more than 10 years ago? What is the benefit to society (which is the primary purpose of copyright) in allowing you to be the sole benefactor of creating a work for such a long period of time?
Remember, the constitution doesn't require the existence of copyright.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
You've gotten many good arguments so far. I hope you read them, too. Especially the points that software is mathematics and software is not a machine or a process for physical transformation.
Is it because the USPTO has so few good examiners in the area that there is a sense that the quality of software patents is poor?
That's a factor. Most extant software patents are entirely bogus, due to prior art or obviousness.
Or is it simply that because there are so many talented programmers out there who can write code that does the same thing as the patented code that they don't want any impediments whatsoever?
Actually, that is precisely the opposite of what is the case. Many talented programmers spend much of their time writing software around patents. From a pure greed standpoint, they should logically be in favor of patents. So, programmers who object to patents are doing so in spite of any greed, not because of it.
As for the former, I agree it is a concern, but one the USPTO is trying to address by hiring more (and more talented) examiners.
Will these more talented examiners eliminate existing patents that are obviously bogus due to obviousness or prior art? My understanding is that they won't, that the only way to get rid of one is to litigate at a cost of more than what most people make in their lives. It is therefore hardly reassuring.
If everyone needed a few million $ worth of hardware to make the invention, the patent doesn't add that much value against the masses of people who want to copy your invention, it only protects you against the few who have the actual resources to do so.
Everyone, effectively, needs a few million dollars worth of money to be able to write software and be secure against bogus patents.
Every other industry has dealt with patents for years.
Not your industry, which you probably call a profession. None of the documents that you have ever produced as an attorney are patentable.
Furthermore, software development is not an industry. Hardware development and sales are an industry, and their products should be patentable. Software is purely mathematical.
It is time for the software developers as a whole to do so as well.
Why am I not surprised that you are not interested in constructive criticism at all and have already made up your mind?
None of this would eliminate stupid patents or bad laws (like the DMCA) - but it would make it significantly harder to use these abusively.
[Insert pithy quote here]
If I write a book that contains original content, or I record an album, you might still loosely call it information, but it is something created by me, and therefore it is mine to dispose of as I see fit.
Ok, if you are going to call it property, let's treat is exactly the same as any other peoperty. The moment you sell it or give it to someone else, it is no longer your property. That's right. Just as when Ford sells me a car, they can no longer tell me what to do with it, when you sell me some music, it is no longer yours. Once an idea has left your head, you are no more in control of it than you are the wind.
Just the same as if you built a log cabin in the woods. You would want to feel entitled to live there, and to defend it against anyone who wanted to steal it from you.
I wouldn't mind one bit if someone came and made an exact copy of my cabin. What have I lost in the transaction? That is what we are talking about - copying. Not stealing.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
My career spans the period when what I do was and wasn't patentable. We wrote software in a frenzy back in the 80's because we'd come up with a neat idea and we wanted to market it before it became a common idea. We didn't need patent protection - copyright was sufficient protection. By the time someone realized what we had done, we'd be working on the next great idea. It's the nature of the business - to create.
Along came Bruce Lehman, et. al. with his uspto dog and pony act. Programmer after programmer testified "Don't do this! We do not need patents." At one point, a programmer testified "The only people in this room who have testified in favor of software patents have been corporate attorneys." Lehman acknowledged the truth of that testimony and ignored us. So now we have software patents - to benefit those attorneys.
The upshot is my software productivity has declined because now I have to worry about writing some piece of code that someone else owns - even though I've never even seen the other coder's implementation. That very obstacle strikes at the core of what we do - to create. We didn't need patents before they became available and we need them even less now that their intrinsic worthlessnes has become apparent. The USPTO will never be able to field examiners who understand what is obvious in the field because to be a patent examiner means they're not coders. What is obvious to a comptent coder is magic to others.
Implement reasonable copyright protection and that's enough.
Stallman's copyleft hack relies upon the existence of copyright to work.
... the alternative was to be unable to insure others the 4 basic freedoms he holds so dear ... indeed he was in the same quandary an artists would be in if they followed the suggestion to just dump their material into the public domain, which copyright then allows others to pilfer without giving back.
... meaning that my work has thus become less accessible to those who would like to build upon it as a result.
... it protects and documents their right to continue using their own work, even if Microsoft takes part of it *cough* ip stack *cough* and incorporates it into their proprietary systems.
Only because the goals he wished to achieve, namely the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation stands for, are denied everyone by default because of copyright. He had no other choice but to use copyright to subvert itself
Ok, can we keep this discussion contemporary?
In other words, any part of our history (the vast majority of it) when copyrights did not exist, but artists were nevertheless able to make a reasonable living, are off limits because you have no reasonable counter argument to offer? Interesting. Ignore the vast portion of human experience which runs counter to the assumptions and arguments you wish to promote.
I find it fascinating that I am being shouted down for having the audacity to suggest we might include in our discussion the possibility that there might be other regimes that would work better than government mandated monopolies for compensating artists. It is even more interesting now that, when I point to historical examples that exemplify this, you are saying we shouldn't think about those examples.
Perhaps the entire notion of copyright isn't as easy to defend as you first thought?
How so? If you release your work into the public domain, nobody can take that away from the public. Your work will always be there. What you are talking about is value-add. Yes, you are right... Time Warner could take your work and use it in a movie without asking you.
No, what I'm saying is more subtle than that. I am saying that, if Time-Warner takes my work and incorporates it into their work, aspects of my work become inaccessible to others because of the TW copyright on their extentions. An example: TW makes a space opera based on my work, using my characters, etc. Now, if someone else wants to make a space opera based on my work and characters, they are confronted with a series of legal landmines they must avoid, lest the infringe on TW's copyrights. As there are only so many ways one can take a particular work and change it around, the danger of stumbling onto one of these landmines, even by accident, is sufficiently great that anyone with any sense would avoid the possiblity altogether
But now you are apparently saying this is wrong, which is an admission that you approve of our copyright laws. "Strange that is" says Yoda.
Good Lord, doesn't anyone study logic anymore?
Strange are the conclusions you draw indeed. I am saying that the public domain, in a context where people can take without giving (and that taking in turn acts to make the original material less accessible for others to use because of the legal liabilities with which it then surrounds that material), make the public domain an unworkable solution because of copyright law.
Without copyright law everything would be in the public domain, and anyone could use my material without risk, whether or not Disney or Time-Warner used the material. With copyright law, the moment they build upon my material is the moment others must step carefully when using that same materail, lest they run afoul of the law. Can you see the difference yet?
It is the same reason RMS had to write the GPL, though he really would have preferred to be able to simply put his stuff into the public domain. Indeed, in some respects it is why the BSD folks release their stuff under the BSD license, rather than simply put it in the public domain
In other words, it isn't an admission of approval of copyright laws, it is a repudiation of copyright law at its most fundamental level.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This can even bring about a new problem... IP cartels. Say IBM, Sun, Apple, MS and AOL qualify tons of reviewers and team up against ... well ... everyone.
Strategic partners get approval votes, everyone else gets rejection votes. They get their IP protection as patents and everyone else's (potential) IP protection for free.
Voting is ripe for abuse. Better yet would be hiring consultants from professional/academic fields by a system similar to jury duty? Have qualified applicants in a pool and select X number of them randomly. That would prevent burn out, allow a rotation of reviewers, and if made compulsory, save the Guv'ment some bucks ($5/day for patent review duty, whee!)
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Yes, the server space and bandwidth are mine. These are finite items, requiring either physical parts or service to maintain. Those are property. The information... the text, images, and everything else are available to anyone else who comes there.
Would you like to download any of the images I've created? I put a copyright notice on them so that people will not try to use them for for-profit works without first contacting me, but you're welcome to download the image, use it in almost any way you see fit and spread it to all your friends? Feel free!
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Tell the mother fuckers to use hexadecimal instead of base 10. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to use if you're doing anything related with the ip other than using it to access something. Its a bitch to translate decimal into binary while hex is easy as shizzy. If I had my way I'd rewrite human nature and switch everything over to base 16. I wouldn't, however, use A,B,C,D,E, and F, I'd use new symbols.
Q: So you're locked in a room with Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and a lawyer. You have a gun, but only two bullets. What do you do?
A: Shoot the lawyer twice.
No software patents.
No business model patents.
No patents on "doing the same thing with a computer that used to be done by hand".
Copyright term reduced back to 17 + 17 years.
Law changes extending copyright do not apply to works already published when the extension is passed.
Copyright covers software CODE but not appearance, behavior, or functionality.
Copying interface definitions (i.e. ".h files") to interoperate with copyrighted software is explicitly "fair use".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
For almost any software problem, there are a thousand ways to solve it. A good programmer will pick one very quickly. Another equally good programmer will pick a completely different one, in about the same amount of time. Arguably, each of the thousand ways is non-obvious, even though any skilled programmer will pick one, because even if you take ten programmers and ask them to solve the problem, there's only about a one in a hundred chance than any of them will pick the one you're testing for obviousness.
By the standards of any other field, most full-time programmers come up with a dozen or more patentable ideas every day. Unlike in other fields, where an idea takes an expensive cooperative idea to develop, the programmer also implements them about as fast as he invents them, and it costs almost nothing to distribute the development. The main barrier to patenting software is not finding ideas worth developing, but the cost of the patent process itself.
Patents don't really promote invention. They promote factory-building. Manufacturers don't want to take a chance on a novel product when another manufacturer can just come along, see how they did it, and do it for a quarter of the investment. This consideration obviously doesn't apply to software.
Patents make some degree of sense when there's a large enough investment in developing a product that the additional trouble of doing a patent search is a small part of the total expense, because the cost of design is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing. When there's nothing but design, and the cost of patent searches threaten to be the main cost, then patents are utterly counterproductive.
Try and sell this idea to the software vendors if it's so great. I think you'll see few takers.
Remember if even one patch, security enhancement or minor improvement is made after initial purchase, the vendors will probably try to extend the Copyright by the date of the change. That would certainly be the what would happen if it were part of the Copyright law. Sure, the initial package's Copyright expired in 5 years, but the enhancements you wanted, those expire in 20 years.
This seems overly complicated and fraught with loopholes. Just make the Copyrights expire in a fixed amount of time and be done with it.
Remember, that IP law isn't about letting the Markets decide, or making inventors/authors rich, it's about promoting progress. A simple system, applied consistently is the best way to do this, I think.
The rational: creators should be granted a limited right to exclusivity of the use of their works automatically. However, in order to keep the copyright for longer than 15 years, the author (or owner) must proactively maintain and renew that copyright. This will allow large corporations (such as Disney) with an intellectual property portfolio they wish to keep to continue keeping that portfolio as long as they wish, but which allows the other 98% of works which are no longer really cared for to fall into the public domain after a reasonable period of time.
Patents Patents must be for material products or for items which cause a material change. In particular, patents cannot be extended to business techniques, mathematical formulas, or computer software. Further, patents live for 7 years, and can be extended once, by the legitimate patent holder, for an additional 7 year period, only if that patent holder can demonstrate he is actually using the patent.
Further, filing a patent with intent to deceive (by, for example, claiming a business technique patent by claiming the business technique when applied to a material product is a "material object") should be a fealony. Any person or corporation which is convicted of such fealony may lose the right to either file deceptive patents in the future, or may forfit their current patent portfolio into the public domain.
Same with copyrights: filing an "improper" copyright intentiionally with intent to deceive should be a fealony, and can cause someone who abuses this system to lose the right to renew their copyright portfolio.
Further, I would extend the right to "crack the corporate veil" to this, meaning that, in the event someone violates the law and loses the right to renew a copyright also means he does not have the right to circumvent this by incorporation.
If the RIAA or the MPAA intend to put teeth into the proposed punishments for violating "piracy", then we should also put teeth into proposed punishments for abusing the IP laws by corporations as well.
The question is not whether programming promotes the progress of science and useful arts, but whether giving the first guy to publish a technique a MONOPOLY on it for YEARS promotes, or retards, progress.
How is a programmer not an "author and inventor"? How is novel, useful and nonobvious software not a "writing and discovery"?
Of course they are. That's not the issue
and, why should software programmers be treated differently and not be entitled to "exclusife rights"?
Because the limited-time exclusive rights of patent are granted (and enforced on the rest of us by people with guns) in order to encourage inventors to publish their techniques, rather than keeping them a secret.
Intellectual property "rights" are not RIGHTS. They are PRIVILEGES. They are created and doled out by governments in order to obtain something of value for their citizens and their economies.
In the absense of patent protection an inventor of, say, a new manufacturing process might chose to keep it a trade secret rather than enabling his competition by publishing it. So the public gets only that one artisan's output, and the secret may become lost when he dies. Giving him a limited-time lock on the use of the process lets him license it to others for a fee, making him richer, getting more, cheaper goods into the hands of the consumer, and making the technique free and public once the patent expires.
This situation does NOT apply to software.
Once commercial software has been sold the easily-backed-up code is available for archiving and the technique it embodies is susceptable to reverse-engineering. So the invention won't be lost with the inventor's death.
Even if a software developer keeps the software itself secret and just sells its services, the fact that the service CAN be done (and is profitable) will likely cause its re-invention, by someone else who will not hold the algorithm so closely. (Remember: Patent is granted to the first to DISCLOSE, not the first to INVENT.) And if no one else reinvents the technique, the death of the software AUTHOR doesn't mean the loss of the SERVICE.
Software development lead times (including reverse-engineered cloning) are long enough and payoff times are short enough that there is no need to provide long-term protection to encourage authors to publish their products. You DO need protection against verbatim copies ("piracy"). But a short-term software COPYRIGHT is adequate for that purpose.
There was a robust software industry before software patents, and while even software copyrights were in doubt. This provides a proof-of-concept. Both patent and stretched-into-super-patent copyright are much more likely to RETARD, rather than PROMOTE, advance in the software-based "useful arts". So the Constitution does not autorize the granting of such such Intellectual Property privileges to software authors. ORDINARY copyright on the source code is adequate protection to "encourage" software development by providing a tool to discourage outright piracy. Nothing further is needed, desirable, or Constitutional.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It might be a good time to read at -1.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Hm ... you live in an capitalistic country.
... property?
... and you won't change anything. Current APPLICATION of the IP idea is bad, so try to change the APPLICATION not the idea.
So why do you want IP laws "to go away"?
You got moderated up, but you make no argument.
The intent when IP laws got introduced where the following:
If I buy some threads and weave them to fabrice, who owns the fabrice?
If I MAKE me some threads from raw cotton, who owns tehm?
If I now weave it to fanbice who owns it?
If I fid a diamond at the beach, a raw one, not one a girl making love ther lsot the night before, who owns it?
IF I THINK ALL DAY ABOUT A STORY AND WRITE IT, who owns it?
Before IP laws got invented EVERYBODY owned the storry. At least everybody with a printing machine being fast enough to print it and sell the copies got rich, the writer starved.
The problem is the US copyright law -- how it evolved -- and the actual tendency to spread it or leak it into european minds.
With lack of IP laws our world would IMHO stand still tomorrow.
I simply can not get why you consider stealing a car a crime(manufactoring a car gets cheaper and cheaper each day) while you "taking away" of mental work do consider "right so!", wheras mental work gets more and more expensive.
Our whole economy is shifting away from MATERIAL to KNOWLEDGE/INFORMATION/SERVICE.
The actual running evolution process of the societies is towards: science and knowledge and how to apply it to the material world. Knowledge is NOT reproduceable, digitalized information is, of course.
Its a majour flaw to draw the conclusion because of easy reproduction of bits and bytes (it is not even a rePRODUCTION) there would be now cost in the first step of generating them.
Where did the jobs be 50 years ago? In factories.
Where are the jobs now? In service businesses.
Where will the jobs be tomorrow? In knowledge engineering!!
Software engineering is just the start of related sciences. Knowledge engineering will be the next. Probably in conjunction with more indepth knowledge about biology and medical science, the next step is mental engineering.
All goods people in the future are working with and peopel will create by their work will be: knowledge, intellectual
Just like a old gold digger only digged out gold and he could not eat it, our generation will dig out knowledge and somehow will need to be able to EAT it.
With an attitude like yours you only showed you did not think far
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The length of time for the patent might be fine as it is. But only if the following rules are applied:
So: you'd better be damned sure that your patent is solid gold if you want to sue someone for patent infringement.
My thoughts on how copyrights should be:
End result: there will be a strong separation between creators of works and publishers of works, and creators will be able to reap the full benefits of creation, as long as they're not assholes about allowing derivative works.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
That's not quite accurate. I don't really care if someone on the other side of the country can make a living or not. The world's smallest violin played for the buggy whip industry, remember.
No, the only way that copyright makes sense is if it benefits readers; you know, the people who are actually effected by copyright, and who are expected to abide by it?
Thus, measure the happiness of readers related to the production of, and usability and cost of creative works. Set a baseline where there is no copyright at all. Then add all the copyright you like, as long as it results in a net increase in reader happiness.
For example, I don't mind not being able to make my own copies of a book for one year, if it results in ten times as many new and different books being published. The minor loss of happiness for that one year is more than offset by the gain I'll recieve when I have ten times as many books to do with as I like.
But hell -- I _AM_ an artist, and the whole 'I'm entitled to the fruits of my labor' argument is totally bogus. Firstly, because we don't live in a vacuum, and what I create relies on what someone before me created, ad infinitum. Secondly, because it doesn't establish any incentive for third parties to respect that, no matter how much I might want it personally. Thirdly, because my labor is the act of creation; not of duplication. Copyright is telling people that they cannot do things that they can trivially do. Simply because I write a book that by no means should be taken as indicating that only I can copy that book -- any idiot can. Why shouldn't they? What's in it for them?
-- 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.
Basicly its simple. :-)
.. not credits, revenue).
... however it is well known that HE contributed 25 machine instructions to a 2.5M machine instructions big executebale. Such an embedded device with a RT linux core manufactored for $1 probably has 2c material costs and 98c IP costs for the software and chip designs. ;-) as this was his contribution to the core.
... as long as it is not allowed to wire tap me it is a crime anyway.
But a lot won't like it
o An author has full control over his work.
o He has a right to prohibit(with a veto) reworking(creating derived work) if he does not find it tastefull(e.g. using his work on pornographic works).
The basic thing an author currently can do is to allow someone else to publish and/or redistribute his work.
My wish system would be the opposite: everybody can redistribute original or modified work as long as he gives credit and revenue to the original author.(and he does not veto)
How to accomplish that?
As far as non digital work is considered an author would need means to proove he is the author. Usualy he can do that without special work, but a "conspiracy" could be easyly put up to "proofe in court" he is not. So a registration bureau would be adequat, but not generaly needed.
For digital work its absolutely easy:
o sign/watermark the work
o consumer devices realize who has the rights on the reproduced audio/video/text/code and create a monthly bill, unsigned work is not reproduced
o mixing of other authors work requires you to keep their signature/watermark or to replace it with your own one
-- replacing/deleting it is copyright violation
-- keeping it makes clear how much of THAT work is indeed YOUR own work, signed by you, and how much is USED work, signed by the original author.
o network providers only transport signed/watermarked material
o probing the digital content for violations is only needed for NEW content or for suddenly upcomming high traffic to NEW sites. E.G. to prevent the release of Episode III DVD ripped copies via the internet before it is official released.
This schema should be extended to any digital form of information, even compiled program code. A CPU should only be able to execute signed code. The result would be that a car electronics system run by an RT linux core would exactly know how many developers get credits for running the fuel pumb and ignition of the gazoline(erm
Of course, an author still can refuse to get payed
If it is sold for $2 10 million times it yields 20 million dollar, 10 million are covered costs. So $200,000 are used for materials and $9.8M for IP. Said author of the 25 lines of code would get 0.00001 * $9.8M, only $98
The hughe benefit of a system like that would be: a start up company simply can TAKE everywhere what it needs to fullfill its services or to craft its product without even asking the original authors. No investment into hard and software is needed. No investment into patent licenses is needed. All revenue generated with such a derived work is split up acording to the amount of TAKEN stuff versus the amount of CREATED stuff. Age of the incorporated material determines the split factor as well.
So using OLD code to craft a compeeting product is much cheaper than taking brand new code from the competitor to craft new stuff.
The system would encaurage EVERY creator to publish(sign and watermark and register if needed) its work. Because its FAR more likely that someone else can spread it to the masses and start revenues then it is to try to exploit it solitair or in a smal company.
Bottom line: consumer electronics knows whom to send revenues. Or the network service provider knows whom to bill and whom to grant the revenues. For embedded electronics a clearng is likely needed. Well, would a manufactor realy risk to violate copyright to sell a device cheaper? I doubt it.
Revenue to creators would just be collected at the cashier like sales tax, e.g. in case of an CD or DVD or for the IP inside of an CD player.
As far as I know privacy issues are solveable via tokens(Zero Knowledge Protocolls), however I'm not an expert. Well, I personaly would not care if it is possible to figure what my favorite TV show is
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
(I'm mostly just interested in copyright here)
I would say that copyrights should have to be applied for by the author. They should not automatically be granted, with two exceptions.
First are works that are still being created, or which are awaiting imminent publication may receive a temporary 'common law copyright' intended to prevent the pirating of manuscripts. This is not intended to extend copyright protection to trivial works, such as Slashdot posts, however.
Second are works for which a foreign copyright holder has obtained a foreign copyright. Provided that the requirements for obtaining the copyright already obtained are judged by the government to be at least as stringent as those in the U.S., a grant may be made, possibly conditional on a few minor requirements being met in the U.S.
Copies of any work for which a copyright is applied for must be deposited in such form as required, in the Library of Congress. For example, in the case of books, a copy of the text and illustrations on archival paper. In the case of music, a copy of the lyrics, music and sound recording in an appropriate format such as CDDA. In the case of computer software, a copy of the binaries and sufficiently commented source code. Application for copyright, and depositing of works does not guarantee that the work will be copyrighted.
Copyrights are to be denied for works which do not promote the progress of the arts as determined by the government.
Copyright terms are limited to 20 years (except for computer software, which is limited to 5 years), or the death of the author, whichever comes first.
However, the term may be extended one time only (by holding a copyright, a copyright holder forswears accepting any term extension later granted) by 20 years (or 5 years in the case of computer software), if an extension fee of 5% of the total gross income from sales, rentals, licensing, performances or displays of the work, or $5,000, whichever is greater, is paid. Any money recieved from such extensions is used to fund the creation of various types of public domain works which are archived in the Library of Congress.
Publication consists of making the work generally available to the public, by displaying, performing, selling, renting or licensing it. The courts shall make determinations in borderline cases; mere claims by author or audience as to non-publication is not determinative.
Penalties for copyright infringement will be civil only, in the form of fines and/or injunctions. Fines are limited to an equitable amount, typically the amount that would have had to be paid for a published copy of the work, but no more than $250,000.
There will be no criminal penalties.
Access controls to copyrighted (therefore published) works are permissible. However, any such control must not prevent any access/use/copying, etc. of a work that is legal at any time, regardless of legality at the time that the control was put in place. Furthermore, the control must not impede anything whatsoever once the work is no longer copyrighted. Any published work so protected is not copyrighted.
I'm fairly happy with Fair Use as it stands, and the courts can change that as needed. Likewise with statutory exceptions to copyright for making use of software or backing it up, which already exist. And content licensing for cable tv, radio, et al is too much of a headache to delve into right now.
Am I missing anything else in particular?
-- 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 we could start with a tabula rasa regarding intellectual property - which covers patents, copyright, and trade secrets - we'd best first off decide what we're trying to achieve.
- Attribution. If A invents B, then we want the world to know that B is A's invention. This is for psychological gratification as much as anything. Many
/. readers are coders, and know the "warm fuzzies" you get when you create something that you can be proud of. Singers, Songwriters, Artists in general get the same buzz. Some things money can't buy.
- Improvement. If A invents B, then C should be able to look at B and figure out that B' would be a significant improvement on it. It's this that has spurred the "Open Source" movement, which exposes the internals of Software so that peer-reviewers can spot blemishes.
- Incentive. The original UK and later US model for patents was intended to give encouragement for people to invent new and useful methods and devices, basically to spur the improvement of what we now call technology, arts and sciences. Rather than reward mere copy-cats and publishers, a time-limited monopoly was granted, during which time only the creator had the right to publish or implement his or her work, or licence this publication. This incentive was entirely Financial - probably the best way in the 18th century, but may not be the best way of doing things in the 21st.
- Facilitation. Any IP legislation must actually facilitate the widespread distribution and adoption of new and improved methods, artworks and devices. So a creator who wishes the protection of the law has certain obligations not to withold it's adoption for general use. Alternately, they should be free to keep it entirely to themselves, in which case the law should not protect anything other than the attribution, if that. Similarly, something that's already in general use should not be suddenly monopolised by an "inventor", be it a generic name such as Aspirin or ROT-13 or similar Caesar Cypher encoding. Once in the Public Domain, always in the Public Domain.
- Inalienability. Some moral rights should be inalienable - the owner of the Intellectual Property has some rights and obligations that may never be destroyed or transferred. Should an artist who's painted a Masterwork have the right to burn it and all copies? No, for that would diminish the world's stock of intellectual property. Naturally if the creator doesn't have this right, neither does anyone else. A creator hasn't got the right to allow someone else's name to appear on their work. Exclusive rights of publishing should not be legally enforceable - once the creator has set a certain price for copying, then anyone at all should be allowed to make a copy, for that price. This will stop books and other works going "Out Of Print", as (possibly inferior) copies could be made from an existing edition, via photocopy or MP3. In law, if you make a copy of something - be it a backup, to give to a friend, to put on your MP3 player, or to publish on a million CDs - you should pay the creator during the period of his monopoly for each copy. And so should anyone else, the same amount.
Are all of these requirements feasible to implement in any legal structure? Certainly. Are they feasible to enforce? That's more difficult. Getting someone to pay 0.01c to the production crew who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer every time you use your VCR to record this week's episode requires both the goodwill of the VCR owner, and some non-trivial technology to make it trivially easy. Otherwise people won't bother.Rather than have a single /. post propose the magic solution to all IP issues, I'll restrict this one to just canvassing what the issues are. Any I've forgotten? Any that you think shouldn't be on the list, or should be modified?
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
What if I make a NEW product every year, then I only pay $1.
So what if my new product is mostly the old public domain stuff?
Just because it is public domain doesn't mean I have to release the source code.
Loopholes would be found
I think the problem is that the current evaluation system does not fairly determine if the patent is non obvious.
So many things that seem obvious are pateneted, and it is annoying.
However what is the difference between being obvious , and being the next logical step along a research path.
The GPL would be unnecessary without copyright laws. If some company took your code and distributed it as their own, you could just as easily take whatever they packaged up and do the exact same thing.
Without copyright, all code is open. Nobody can keep you from using it in any way you like.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
In fact, formulating IP as real property could actually sanitize things a great deal.
Personally, I would love being able to legally copy a cd as many times as I'd like and distribute to my friends if 'IP' were the exact same as regular property. After all, if I've bought it, it would become my property just as any other tangible item would.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
IP law was developed to encourage innovation.
And do you think that is what it is currently doing? How innovative can you be when the basis for any new creative works are tied up in copyright for up to 150 years?
They tried the "non-scarcity based economy" in Eastern Europe for a while.
And what makes you think the 'artificial-scarcity based economy' would fare any better?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Given that the explicit purpose of copyright is to promote the public good, and not to protect authors, and given that this has been frequently reaffirmed by the courts, I don't think your analogy is particularly on point.
Copyright law is quite different from most other law. (although actually, real property law is also set up along similar utilitarian lines)
-- 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.
And this is the law of the wild,
As old and as true as the sky.
And the wolf who keeps it will prosper,
But the wolf who breaks it will die!
Like the wind that circles the tree trunk,
this law runneth forward and back.
The strength of the pack is the wolf,
and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
(Rudyard Kipling)
--| THE FUNDAMENTAL SOCIAL LAW |----
Briefly as the subject must be dealt with, there will always be some people
whose feeling will lead them to recognize the truth of what it is impossible
to discuss in all its fullness here. There is a fundamental social law which
spiritual science teaches, and which is as follows:
'The well-being of a community of people working together
will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself
the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he
makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are
satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by
others'.
Every arrangement in a community that is contrary to this law will
inevitably engender somewhere after a while distress and want. It is a
fundamental law, which holds good for all social life with the same
absoluteness and necessity as any law of nature within a particular field of
natural causation. It must not be supposed, however, that it is sufficient
to acknowledge this law as one for general moral conduct, or to try to
interpret it into the sentiment that everyone should work in the service of
his fellow men. No, this law only lives in reality as it should when a
community of people succeeds in creating arrangements such that no one can
ever claim the fruits of his own labour for himself, but that these go
wholely to the benefit of the community. And he must himself be supported in
return by the labours of his fellow men. The important point is, therefore,
that working for one's fellow men and obtaining so much income must be kept
apart, as two separate things.
Self-styled 'practical people' will of course have nothing but a smile for
such 'outrageous idealism'. And yet this law is more practical than any that
was ever devised or enacted by the 'practicians'. Anyone who really examines
practical life will find that every community that exists or has ever
existed anywhere has two sorts of arrangements, of which the one is in
accordance with this law and the other contrary to it. It is bound to be so
everywhere, whether men will it or not. Every community would indeed fall to
pieces at once, if the work of the individual did not pass over into the
totality. But human egoism has from of old run counter to this law, and
sought to extract as much as possible for the individual out of his own
work. And what has come about from of old in this way due to egoism has
alone brought want, poverty and distress in its wake. This simply means that
the part of human arrangements brought about by 'practicians' who calculated
on the basis of either their own egotism or that of others must always prove
impractical.
Now naturally it is not simply a matter of recognizing a law of this kind,
but the real practical part begins with the question: How is one to
translate this law into actual fact? Obviously this law says nothing less
than this: man's welfare is the greater, in proportion as egoism is less. So
for its translation into reality one must have people who can find their way
out of egoism. In practice, however, this is quite impossible if the
individual's share of weal and woe is measured according to his labour. He
who labours for himself *must* gradually fall a victim to egoism. Only one
who labours solely for the rest can gradually grow to be a worker without
egoism.
But there is one thing needed to begin with. If any man works for another,
he must find in this other man the reason for his work; and if anyone is to
work for the community, he must perceive and feel the value, the nature and
importance, of this community. He can only do this when the community is
something quite different from a more or less indefinite summation of
individual men. It must be informed by an actual spirit, in which each
single one has his part. It must be such that each one says: 'It is as it
should be, and I *will* that it be so'. The community must have a spiritual
mission, and each individual must have the will to contribute towards the
fulfilling of this mission. All the vague abstract ideals of which people
usually talk cannot present such a mission. If there be nothing but these,
then one individual here or one group there will be working without any
clear overview of what use there is in their work, except it being to the
advantage of their families, or of those particular interests to which they
happen to be attached. In every single member, down to the most solitary,
this spirit of the community must be alive...
No one need try to discover a solution of the social question that shall
hold good for all time, but simply to find the right form for his social
thoughts and actions in the light of the immediate need of the time in which
he lives. Indeed there is today no theoretical scheme which could be devised
or carried into effect by any one person which in itself could solve the
social question. For this he would need to possess the power to force a
number of people into the conditions which he had created. But in the
present day any such compulsion is out of the question. The possibility must
be found of each person doing of his own free will that which he is called
upon to do according to his strength and abilities. For this reason there
can be no possible question of ever trying to work on people theoretically,
by merely indoctrinating them with a view as to how economic conditions
might best be arranged. A bald economic theory can never act as a force to
counteract the powers of egoism. for a while such an economic theory may
sweep the masses along with a kind of impetus that *appears* to resemble
idealism; but in the long run it helps nobody. Anyone who implants such a
theory into a mass of people without giving them some real spiritual
substance along with it is sinning against the real meaning of human
evolution. The only thing which can help is a spiritual world-conception
which of itself, through what it has to offer, can live in the thoughts, in
the feelings, in the will -- in short, in a man's whole soul...
The recognition of these principles means, it is true, the loss of many an
illusion for various people whose ambition it is to be popular benefactors.
It makes working for the welfare of society a really difficult matter-one of
which the results, too, may in certain circumstances comprise only quite
tiny part-results. Most of what is given out today by whole parties as
panaceas for social life loses its value, and is seen to be a mere bubble
and hollow phrase, lacking in due knowledge of human life. No parliament, no
democracy, no popular agitation can have any meaning for a person who looks
at all deeper, if they violate the law stated above; whereas everything of
this kind may work for good if it works on the lines of this law. It is a
mischievous delusion to believe that particular persons sent up to some
parliament as delegates from the people can do anything for the good of
mankind, unless their activity is in conformity with the fundamental social
law.
Wherever this law finds outer expression, wherever anyone is at work on its
lines-so far as is possible in that position in which he is placed within
the community-good results will be attained, though it be but in the single
case and in never so small a measure. And it is only a number of individual
results attained in this way that will together combine to the healthy
collective progress of society.
The healthy social life is found
When in the mirror of each human soul
The whole community is shaped,
And when in the community
Lives the strength of each human soul.
==| Capital and Credit in Threefolding |===
Where 'supply and demand' are the determining factors, there the egoistic
type of value is the only one that can come into reckoning. The 'market'
relationship must be superseded by associations regulating the exchange and
production of goods by an intelligent observation of human needs. Such
associations can replace mere supply and demand by contracts and
negotiations between groups of producers and consumers, and between
different groups of producers...
Work done in confidence of the return achievements of others constitutes the
giving of *credit* in social life. As there was once a transition from
barter to the money system, so there has recently been a progressive
transformation to a basis of credit. Life makes it necessary today for one
man to work with means entrusted to him by another, or by a community,
having confidence in his power to achieve a result. But under the
capitalistic method the credit system involves a complete loss of the real
and satisfying human relationship of a man to the conditions of his life and
work. Credit is given when there is prospect of an increase of capital that
seems to justify it; and work is always done subject to the view that the
confidence or credit received will have to appear justified in the
capitalistic sense. And what is the result? Human beings are subjected to
the power of dealings in capital which take place in a sphere of finance
remote from life. And the moment they become fully conscious of this fact,
they feel it to be unworthy of their humanity...
A healthy system of giving credit presupposes a social structure which
enables economic values to be estimated by their relation to the
satisfaction of men's bodily and spiritual needs. Men's economic dealings
will take their form from this. Production will be considered from the point
of view of needs, no longer by an abstract scale of capital and wages.
Economic life in a threefold society is built up by the cooperation of
*associations* arising out of the needs of producers and the interests of
consumers. In their mutual dealings, impulses from the spiritual sphere and
sphere of rights will play a decisive part. These associations will not be
bound to a purely capitalistic standpoint, for one association will be in
direct mutual dealings with another, and thus the one-sided interests of one
branch of production will be regulated and balanced by those of the other.
The responsibility for the giving and taking of credit will thus devolve to
the associations. This will not impair the scope and activity of individuals
with special faculties; on the contrary, only this method will give
individual faculties full scope: the individual is responsible to his
association for achieving the best possible results. The association is
responsible to other associations for using these individual achievements to
good purpose. The individual's desire for gain will no longer be imposing
production on the life of the community; production will be regulated by the
needs of the community...
All kinds of dealings are possible between the new associations and old
forms of business--there is no question of the old having to be destroyed
and replaced by the new. The new simply takes its place and will have to
justify itself and prove its inherent power, while the old will dwindle
away... The essential thing is that the threefold idea will stimulate a real
social intelligence in the men and women of the community. The individual
will in a very definite sense be contributing to the achievements of the
whole community... The individual faculties of men, working in harmony with
the human relationships founded in the sphere of rights, and with the
production, circulation and consumption that are regulated by the economic
associations, will result in the greatest possible efficiency. Increase of
capital, and a proper adjustment of work and return for work, will appear as
a final consequence...
--
(Rudolf Steiner, Architect, Playwright, Philosopher, Human)
Social Threefolding
---
It's a fair thought (revision-termed copyrights), but not really tractable. What do you want, the Congressional Committe to Determine Proper Version Numbers? No, way, Jose. :) Seriously, however, there are intellectual properties which only have short term utility to society. With a blanket alteration to law, one can simply set software to 15 year terms and patents to 7. One might distinguish between _individuals_ making intellectual property claims and corporations, giving individuals the advantage.
I'm dead set against screwing over an author, (of books, etc) however. These guys aren't so creative when they get older, and really need to be able to generate the income. Whether or not such income really needs to pass to _heirs_ (as it does now) is certainly an open question.
C//
1. Eliminate software and business method patents.
2. Strictly limit the timespan of copyrights. Holywood has a habit of getting the expiration of copyrights pushed out whenever they come close to their expiration date. That sort of nonsense has got to stop. Copyrights should be granted for 50 years to the original creater, his estate or assignee. Period. That's all. Finito.
3. A media consumer's bill of rights that formally states that a consumer may do *ANYTHING* with a copyrighted work for which they have purchased a copy, *except* for distributing additional copies of same. Too often the debate has centered around what rights should be granted to copy owners (as opposed to copyRIGHT owners). BS. They should have *all* rights *except* for a short list.
4. Note that case number 3 talks about the simple sale of a copy. It does not preclude a seller from including restrictions in the purchasing contract on the use by the recipient. But such restrictions *must* be part of the contract agreed to by *both* parties *before* performance of the contract. Click-through or shrink-wrap licenses or other shenanigans that are tacked on *after* both parties have performed the simple exchange of money for a copy *explicitely* should not be allowed to be binding.
The way I understand it, they don't want to sell the drugs cheaply to third world countries because they fear that if they do, it will create a much larger black market for the drugs where they are bought cheaply and then sold to places where the drugs normally sell for more, namely the US and EU.
This is absolutely true, but I think it illustrates the original poster's point: The drug companies profit desire outweighs the right of the third-world countries to modern medications. While I'm not willing to go so far as to get rid of IP laws (Shorter terms are a much better solution), he does have a point here. While I can't offer a specific solution to the problem, it is an excellent example of the flaws in IP laws.
With a blanket alteration to law, one can simply set software to 15 year terms and patents to 7.
I think these terms are way off. I would like to see binary software have a copyright based on how long it's publisher supports it. 1 year after MS stops supporting Windows 98, its copyright expires. This accomplishes one of two goals: either companies will continue to provide support for software for longer, or they will be fforced to see them in the public domain. Either way, the end user wins. Source code is trickier, but I think a 10 year term is probably reasonable. Perhaps one 5 year renewal on top of that if the software is still marketed. There are few programs written more then 10 years ago that are still sold as-is.
I'm dead set against screwing over an author, (of books, etc) however. These guys aren't so creative when they get older, and really need to be able to generate the income.
I think a number of "Old Guys" would disagree with you on this. Either way, 90+ year copyrights don't help anyone except corporations and people with dead meal-tickets, err, relatives. Again, I would like to see copyright tied to publication. As long as a book, record, etc. remains in print, it should be copywritten for 20 years. If it goes out of print, its copyright should expire within 5 years. This gives companies an incentive to make older, more controversial, and less commercial works available. In print can include offering works in electronic form as long as the work is accessible, and offered at a reasonable price (say something like no more the 150% of the original price adjusted for inflation). Obviously these ideas are just off the cuff & probably have holes...
An excellent reply :) I feel it necessary to add my 2c though ...
In both scenarios (refugee/goldrush) Copyright does not enter the picture. Copyright is not about restricting the free flow of information; it is about restricting the free copying of a particular incarnation of that information.
Fact #1: You can't copyright a fact. You can copyright the exact sequence of words you use to express a fact, but that doesn't prevent someone from reading that fact and telling someone else or writing it down in his/her own words.
Copyright as applied to facts encourages authors/publishers to put facts into words because they can receive remuneration for a collection of facts (a work). Without copyright on works of fact there would be no incentive to record facts, and we would rely on the facts recorded by a small number of altruists.
Fact #2: You can copyright a fiction. If you have made something up, it is not information. It is a fabrication. Here copyright is not restricting the free flow of information, but the reproduction of a creation.
Without copyright in this scenario, authors have no incentive to create, because their creation can be duplicated without them receiving anything (fame OR fortune).
--end of 2c--
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
In the first place, it was created to protect individuals against corporations.
Not even remotly right. Copyright went through several iterations before it was even intended to acknowlage authors. The idea of corporations having the staus of "legal people" came even later...
In theory most modern copyright laws empower the author. In practice the vast majority of copyrights are held by publishers. The simplist kind of fix would be to only allow copyrights to be licenced rather than assigned.
You clearly don't know the difference between a trademark, copyright, and patent. A trade mark is a word, short phrase, or image used to identify a company. Some examples of trademarks are "IBM", "We Make it Your Way", and the Apple Logo. Trademark protection does not prevent others from using your mark against your will. It only prevents people from using your mark fraudulently. I can compare my cola in my ads to Coca-Cola, but trying to sell it as Coco-Cola would probably get me sued.
If you want to use your 40-line method as your company trademark, feel free. Not only will it be the worst comapny name in history, it will give all of your competitors easy access top your "secrets", and there would be absolutely nothing you could do to stop them.
A book, a music score, a song -- these are all things that will have value after their protection is gone.
At least in theory it would. It isn't unknown for recently published books to go out of print soon after publication. With copyright the length it is right now it's quite possible for the last copy of a book to have ceased to exist decades before copyright expires.
By the time the copyright expires on software, it is, quite literally _worthless_.
There are two types of "worthless" first would be of no value what so ever, second type would be something which is worthless whilst still copyright, but of some possible value in the public domain.
Creative works are typically built up on previous works.
I'm dead set against screwing over an author, (of books, etc) however. These guys aren't so creative when they get older, and really need to be able to generate the income.
Why should authors be any kind of special case? What stops them paying into a pension fund, like everyone else? Rather than trying to fiddle copyright to act as a pension.
It's rather ageist to assume that an 80 year old is less capable of being creative than a 20 year old too...
Again, I would like to see copyright tied to publication. As long as a book, record, etc. remains in print, it should be copywritten for 20 years. If it goes out of print, its copyright should expire within 5 years.
Probably with the criteria that if it goes out of print then the clock is reset to 5 years. Which if more than 5 years has elapsed since publication immediatly places it in the public domain.
And how about electronic books. They never go out of print.
It can quite easily. If it's on a physical media and that is no longer produced then it is "out of print". If it's available for download and then ceases to be then it is "out of print".
No, what is needed are manadory license fees, so that you first get 20 years of copyrigth. But then you need to prolong it every 5 years and have to pay a small fee. This continues until until the maximum time 70 years have expored.
Altertativly you have a fee which rises expontially for each renewel. No need for a sex maximum here too, simply how much the work is actually worth, this may enable the likes of blockbuster movies to stay in copyright 10-20 years longer...
That way many items will fall into public domain after 20 years.
For some kind of works a 5-10 year initial term might well make more sense.
Imagine what could happen if aliens contacted the earth and these aliens were so advanced and old, that they had invented everything we could dream of, and more. Would these "prior art" invalidate every patent on earth? Perhaps this would not happen, but what about the new technology? What if this aliens would share their knowledge with us. Would this knowledge be patented? By whom? By the aliens? What would happen if they demanded ridiculous fees for their patents? Remember, they have invented everything! And if this aliens were not allowed to patent their technology, who would do this for them? Their (human) lawyers? A straw firm? The aliens could wreak havoc on human development just by using their patent rights.
I must admit, I find this thoughts quite funny.
The concept of publication of applications for public comment before issuance is great. In reality, however, it is not practicable. The Patent Office is exteemely backlogged. In certain fields (e.g., software, TV, telecommunications), applications do not get an innitial examination until 4 years after they are filed. From that point forward, if everything goes well, an application will probably take about 1 year to issue. Becuase of the backlog, examiners only get to spend between 8-16 hours per application, soup-to-nuts. If you require them to review comments from thousands of people after an application is published. the time needed for a patent to issue is likely to double.
Is this actually a problem? If there are lots of submissions on a certain application then maybe it should be rejected. The purpose of a patent office isn't simply to rubber stamp applications...
There is also the problem that currently a patent could pass as being "innovative" simply because the examiner dosn't understand it. Even that the whole thing is actually a piece of fiction, so nothing gets found in a prior art search, but anyone "skilled in the art" wouldn't even bother to look.
I disagree. And I think a seasoned examiner (if you can find one, that is) would too. If we had a pre-grant publication for comment, people who do not want a patent to issue for specious reasons will abuse the system to bog down the application.
Can this be worst than a system bogged down with patent applications for questionable reasons? No doubt there are plenty of specious reasons for people wanting a patent issued.
The default most certainly should be no patent issued...
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art
These are already done by the patent office. an examiner my request a model of the invention. There is a guy know in the tire art that has a bunch of tyres in his office. When segways were being patented they had a bunch of them running around the halls of the office.
The patent office has to preform a search. you don't just use the references that the applicant provides. Lawyers respect the searches that patent exainers do because they are generally better than what they provide themselves. The applicat has to disclose all the prior art they kow of,butusually will use it to mislead you, or if they are really smart they will claim around the existing prior art.
You may not understandthis but software patents aren't granted. the claims usually say: a computer readable medium on which XXXXXX. if you can't patent instructions then you arent going to see any new electronic devices as there must beoperating code for many devices to operate. There are no patents for algorithms or anything naturally occuring.
Patents are owned by individuals, but then they assign them to a corporation or someone else. the inventors section doesn't say: GE or AT&T or anyone else, it says bob roberts or phil johnson.
I'm a patent examiner, i don't speak for the USPTO. If you want more info go look up the mpep on the web thats the manual of patent examining procedure, im sure someone put ac opy of it up.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Our whole economy is shifting away from MATERIAL to KNOWLEDGE/INFORMATION/SERVICE.
Ding, ding, ding.
The issue is that our current IP system is not designed to handle this... or, rather, I think 50 years ago it would've done ok, but recent changes in legislative, judicial, and administrative policies have skewed it deeply to the wrong end of the spectrum. If we don't fix these problems then we'll wind up with a legal system that is so overburdoned that another area of the world will wind up preeminant.
This is much the same as what happened in Europe with the industrial revolution -- various European countries were the world leaders from 1600-1900. As the industrial revolution progressed various laws were passed to protect workers' rights, and while many of them were badly needed (child labor laws for instance), some were over the top. What happened? The industrial revolution continued in full swing. Elsewhere. Namely the US, where the labor laws weren't quite as burdonsome (and now the labor is moving elsewhere again).
Right now it's looking like SE Asia is going to be the powerhouse for the information age, if they can keep the Islamic fundamentalists out. They have very loose IP laws (too loose, but that will change), and large areas which are ready to move into the 21st century, instead of trying to protect the industries that sprouted in the 20th.
If not them, I'm sure South America would be happy to take it's spot in the limelight for a hundred years or so. But either way, current law makers, corporations, and even individuals are paving the way to obsolecense.
Because the assumption is that if I write a book, I'm using that money to support myself and family if I have one. If I should die prematurely, that work can still support my family.
So can a life insurance policy. Also such a policy isn't restricted just to people who write books, etc.
Copyright terms should be standard lengths, one-size-fits-all regardless of when anyone dies, is born, gets incorporated, or achieves spotted purple enlightenment with bells on.
It would also make sense for any copyright notice to be printed something like "Copyright XYZ until 22nd May 2002".
This does still allow for different terms for different types of works.
How would you revise or restructure IP and copyright law to make both sides of the fence happy?
No way Jose. Some people will only be happy when everybody in the world owns them aleph-infinite dollars.
I don't see how it harms society for, say, Paul McCartney to retain the rights to his work for his life span.
Because he can VETO derivative works. The VETO power over derivative works is the biggest problem with copyright.
is negligible because more than likely they'll pay almost the same price for a Wings album royalties or no
"Well, I'll give a little. You can do what you want with this work, but only for a million dollars per copy."
So it offends common sense to say that they should be able to profit from his work, but he cannot.
Once copyright expires, he can profit off it. His label may still own the trademark on WINGS. Besides, nothing in the United States Constitution gives authors and inventors a right to their creations.
Sometimes an author or musician creates one really popular work and they're never commercially popular again - but it doesn't mean that they don't continue to produce valuable work.
Sometimes an author or musician never creates that popular work. Why should an author or musician be rewarded perpetually for creating only one popular work?
Sometimes an author writes a book that gathers dust for years and then suddenly becomes popular.
Sometimes killing the VETO power over derivative works is more in the public interest.
Many, many books aren't made into movies until after they've been out for ten years.
Many, many books aren't made into movies ever because the author's estate, even sixty years after the author has died, refuses to negotiate a licence.
I can easily see studios just sitting on a book until 10 years have passed and then making the movie, just to avoid paying for the rights to the movie
This will happen with any copyright term. The Walt Disney Company often sits on a book and releases its derivative work within six months after the copyright has expired worldwide. Examples include Pinocchio and The Jungle Book.
I think that the original artist should have the say-so how that character is used as long as they live. No one should have to see their creation abused by someone else if they do not wish it. Gene Roddenberry should be able to deny another party the right to use Star Trek characters as long as he lives.
If so, the right to veto should expire before the right to royalty expires. Even then, it's not even necessary because trademarks on the characters' names can achieve the same effect.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, you're mistaken because those who take the code are not required to release the source.
So what? You could still take the binary and hack it in any way you please, or even give a copy to everyone you know.
The GPL is not necessary at all with no copyright.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
If it goes out of print, its copyright should expire within 5 years.
Again, enforcement of this would be problematic. It would be the utmost in trivialities for an author to keep up a webpage that offers for sale through his own shell publishing company his book, keeping some small token number of copies around, indefinitely extending the print period. This is why some finite number of years is better. It's an absolute. "X years from file date". End of story.
C//
And yes, the government indeed collects a levy on blank media. However, this is because of lobbying by copyright holders who claim that pirating is happening in spite of the laws! Believe me, copying a friend's audio CD is just as illegal in Canada as it is in the States, there is no exception for not doing it on a commercial or large scale.
I was under the impression that copying a friend's audio CD was legal in Quebec, but not in the rest of Canada.
If I drive across the border, can I do it there?
-a
How to rationalize theft.
It's rather ageist to assume that an 80 year old is less capable of being creative than a 20 year old too...
Now you're just being silly. Age-related mental decline is a well-understood phenomenon. Whether or not a specific _individual_ suffers from that decline is a matter of prejudice, but the generalization is inarguably true.
C//
Exactly, that was basicaly what I was trying to get at.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
What's the 28 years in reference to? Copyrights are currently for life, and then some.
C//
In my opinion the solution is the creation of alternative economies in which the big boys don't get a chance to play because the copyright is held in common.
While I disagree with much of your post, and your assumptions, I won't belabor the issue further as I suspect we're the only two reading this thread at this point, and we are going to have to agree to disagree I think.
But I did want to compliment you on this final thought. You are, I believe, the only person in this entire thread who responded to my call for suggestions as to alternatives and ideas to address these issues in a creative context that doesn't necessarilly include copyright, and given the current framework we have to work with (copyright laws as they now stand) your suggestion is quite brilliant.
While not an alternative system to copyright per se, the idea of creating an alternative economy where copyright is held in common is fascinating. Indeed, it is a very interesting alternative to copyright as it is currently being exploited (and in some ways analogous to the GPL, which for certain philosophical reasons I like), and until a better regime can be put into place (if that ever becomes possible) it is a very cool idea for creating something of a public commons in the interim.
It won't end the social costs and criminalization of common human patterns like sharing that copyright has come to entail in the digital age, but it may at least allow the creation of an island of sanity amidst the madness, and that is certainly a good start.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Again, enforcement of this would be problematic. It would be the utmost in trivialities for an author to keep up a webpage that offers for sale through his own shell publishing company his book, keeping some small token number of copies around, indefinitely extending the print period. This is why some finite number of years is better. It's an absolute. "X years from file date". End of story.
This is exactly what I said. 20 years -or- 5 years after going out of print, whichever comes sooner.
Actually then the book will never go out of print.
But you're ignoring the first part of my statement. Copyrights should apply for 20 years -or- 5 years after going out of print. I would not be opposed to one 20 year renewal -by the original author-, and only on works that are in print, but more then 40 years is nonsense. I have a problem with someone writing one book when they are 20 & living off it for the next 70 years.
If I hand you a draft of my screenplay, copyright is the only thing to prevent you from putting your name on it and selling it before I do.
Unless the disclosure of the screenplay is preceded by a non-disclosure agreement. In fact, a lot of what we currently call "copyright law" could be re-implemented in terms of non-disclosure agreements.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is exactly what I said.
And I said out-of-printedness is a fudgeable metric. Laws or segments of laws that are effectively non-judiciable probably shouldn't go on to the books at all.
C//
No, I definately think that there should be copyright law -- provided that it does indeed result in a greater public benefit than would exist in a state without any copyright law.
And although I've changed careers as of late, in the past I've supported myself for years as an artist. But I am too well aware of the inherently derivative nature of art, the potential benefits of especially derivative art, and my own status as both artist AND member of the public. Unlimited copyright would be extraordinarily bad for artists as artists, and worse still for artists in their capacities as ordinary people. Only an idiot would not look at the big picture, and be distracted by their immediate gratification.
I too call for reform. Check out my recent posts to that effect, if you don't believe me.
-- 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.
DigitalConsumer's Consumer Technology Bill of Rights is an interesting start, but it is not strongly worded enough (it only grants rights, rather than guaranteeing them). I'd amend it to something like this (minus parenthetical comments, and including similar wording for other rights as needed):
1) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work at any time. (time-shifting)
2) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work at any place. (space-shifting)
3) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from creating copies of that work strictly for archival purposes. (backup)
4) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from perusing that work via any medium, nor on any computing platform. (interoperability)
5) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from transforming that work into another form, though they may be prohibited from modifying that work in any way other than those necessary for such transformation. (compatibility)
6) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work may have other rights not enumerated in this document, to be determined by the courts. When such a right is determined, then legitimate users must thenceforth not be prohibited from exercising that right. This document should then be amended to enumerate that right. (This is the most important thing: the rights must not be limited by any law passed).
7) Legitimate users of a copyrighted work must not be prohibited from taking technological steps to secure any of the rights enumerated in this document, nor any others which may be enumerated in the future. (circumvention for fair use, as in reverse-engineering)
Yes, they do -- or the home builder pays for the plans. These plans are protected by copyright - sometimes for over 100 years, not the 20 a patent gives.
To do math, do you have to pay extra to use the square-root key?
Again, yes you do (or did) -- advanced calculator functions were an active patent area -- it was built into the price of the calculator itself.
just because someone was the first to file a patent for a new problem should not give them the right to deny others use of it.
Ummm.. yes it does. New solutions to problems have always been patentable in other areas - software should be no different.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.