Slashdot Mirror
Copyrights/Patents are Public Domain?
x3 sent us a link to an article running on InfoWorld that talks intelligently about intellectual property and the public domain. Its an extremely well written piece summing up what many readers of this site probably feel about the subject.
That editorial should be mailed/e-mailed to each congressman and senator as well as to every U.S. citizen.
...lack of copyright protection for authors stifles work and leaves them poor. The same probably holds true for the musicians in a record contract. While the following article is about British authors in America who held no copyright, the result would be the same for any author in any country. (Dickens's 1842 Reading Tour: Launching the Copyright Question in Tempestuous Seas) Greatly limiting the "brief [few years] economic advantage" for authors and inventors would destroy the ability for someone to live off their work, sending brilliant, independant minds back to the doldrums of corporate America.
I will take this opportunity to ask a burning question:
If a work is created in the United States and the copyright is valid for the 75 magic years, what happens in another country where the copyright is only 10 years after the work is created?
Can it be used in that other country?
What happens if a work is created in that other country - can the US Copyright Padlock be used for the full 75 magic years (in the US) or is the originating country authoritative on the length?
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
The whole idea behind patents, copyright, etc. was to empower individual inventors, scholars, and other creative people for the public good. Instead, current IP law empowers corporate non-persons (who are only people on paper) for private advantage, totally turning the original concept on its head.
The real question now is, "Can IP as a concept be salvaged to protect powerless innovators, or has it been twisted and exploited to the point where we must get rid of it entirely?"
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell? The 'public' had no telephone until Bell invented it. It cannot lease him those thoughts, or that creativity. He earned it on his own.
While I have problems with the current system, collectivist nonsense like this is not the answer. When 'the public' thinks it has a right to the product of my effort, then they can try and pry it out of my mind. I'd rather keep it secret than give it to someone who demands it's his.
It's just as bad when RMS complains he has a right to my source, whether or not I want to give it away. This talk does not enhance freedom.
What if the 'little guy' writes a cool song. Everybody already knows who metallica is; without protection the original author might end up competing with a powerful name who can just remake your song & pass it off as their idea, knowing the buttheads in metallica, likely trying to make you look like the faker.
I'm not concerned that metallica might make 100x more, because 1/100x is probably still reasonable compensation. But who wants to be known as the guy that copied metallica?
Of course if the laws weren't like they were metallica/brittany spears might not be quite so popular, but somebody would.
I think individuals ought to have some protection, but I don't see why this same protection is extended to 500lb. gorillas.
Let them fend for themselves, and let's see a hefty advertising (information pollution) tax. of like 90%.
IANAExpert, but I think IP as a concept can be salvaged with two simple steps: make it ownable only by individuals and non-transferable.
First, this will keep (say) Disney from directly owning their movies. Instead, they will have all employees sign "exclusivity" contracts: the employees still own their IP, but only the contracted company can use it (or assign further users). This may sound wierd and exploitable (or to the uninitiated like a transfer of IP) but it leads directly into phase 2.
You may not transfer your IP to anybody at any time, not even as part of an estate. When you die, so does your IP. Things with multiple authors (most patents, movies, & music, collaborative books, etc) will of course stay within copyright / patent until the last author dies (or the natural term ends) because all of the authors have IP in the work. However, once all of the authors kick the bucket, the artwork instantly hits the Public Domain no matter how long the natural term is.
This method is of course the most simple as it would have put most of the items at issue in Eldred v. Ashcroft into the PD, while still allowing Disney, RIAA et. al to lobby Congress for longer & longer terms without destroying the whole precarious structure.
Do you like Japanese imports?
1. He doesn't say _why_ IP "belongs to the public and is in essence leased to authors and inventors." As a content creator, I'd like some explanation there.
./ we seem to like the laws against them. Here's a clue for you technologists and wannabes: technology doesn't affect law. Technology can affect culture, which then affects prevailing laws.
2. To say that "Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less" is just rubbish. A clue to the statement's status as rubbish lies in continuing demand. It's more likely he has noticed only the falloff of big-business marketing - kinda ironic.
3. He seems to argue against any new criminalizations at all. I don't think non-governmental monopolies were at the forefronts of the framers' mind, but at
etc., etc.
I liked the quotation "Advancing technology... " too. And I wouldn't disagree that the current IP scheme benefits big-business, ot that it's an unconscionable twisting of the original intents.
But I think this article and thread will show that the Slashdot/technical publics thinking on this issue is just as empty of reason/convolutedly self-serving as anything else.
That was the quote that stuck out most to me, too. However, I am not entirely sure I agree with it.
... while this may be indeed be the case, it is somewhat subjective.
First of all, it implies some absolute sense of right and wrong
I would then argue that there are laws which were appropriate for the time they were created, but have since been outdated. It seems that technology could certainly be a (if not the) major factor in the process of laws becoming outdated.
I'd like to think others can come up with some good examples of this, but for starters, consider child labor laws. This link explains why these laws were "good" in the 1930s and then proceeds to discuss the implications for today.
-- jetlag --
Further: "Intellectual property is owned by the public and in essence leased to authors and inventors. A temporary economic advantage for authors and inventors is created because a hopefully more valuable benefit will accrue to the public, and ultimately the lease expires and all rights return to the general public..."
Further: "Economic advantage is not in and of itself a valid purpose or justification for copyright or patent laws..."
The above quotes seem to encapsulate the author's view point. I have spent the last year trying to come to some understanding of the roots of the arguments the author is speaking out against. While I'm far from any conclusions the arguments in favour of the draconian measures criminalizing the consumer have ancient roots. Morally, the 19th c. German philosopher F. Nietzsche suggested the Christian morallity that is given to underlie the founding of America and Canada and much of Western Civilization is a slave mentality. Without looking at his arguments in detail it might serve to balance his view against the ideas of John Stuart Mill whose views on property rights were so extreme that the rights of citizenship were inextricably tied to ownership of property. Mill is the architect of modern democracy. Over and above views like those of Nietzsche and Mill there is a more pervasive and difficult argument derived, for me, from Russell's 'Theory of Types'. A Class cannot be a member of itself, but neither can a member of a class represent the class. What I'm busy trying to ferret out is whether there's a cogent argument to be drawn from the Theory of Types to intellectual property rights properly belonging to the community as the author of the article pointed out. I can't see that any argument can ultimately suggest any one individual can possibly invent in any other guise than as a member of the set represented by the community. Having said this I suspect the drive to overthrow the rights of the community comes not so much from the 'captains of industry' but rather from the lawyers who serve the legal enitity that is the modern corporation. While I'm far from ready to set out a detailed argument I think that when we gave the legal rights of individuals to legal fictions like corporations we undertook an experiment repugnant to nature akin to that of Dr. Frankenstein.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
How is this a good article? It looks to me like a very poorly thought out editorial to me, indeed.
For example the author cites the idea that most commercial value of IP is realized during the first three years. Maybe for a pop tune, or a movie, but certainly that is not the case for the vast majority of patents. New drugs take several years to pass FDA certification; the average time to market for an industrial invention in most industries is 7 years. A shorter term for patent coverage is not appropriate in most cases.
Perhaps the current period of copyrights is over-long, but how does that translate to the concept that such laws don't serve a useful purpose? It's a complete non-sequetuer.
The fact is that the history of the industrial revolution, and in particular the great lengths that were taken by companies to conceal the technologies they were using prior to the development of the patent system clearly show the value of a contract between govenrment and the inventor where public disclosure is exchanged for an exclusive right to practice the invention.
The alternative is to go back to the practices of the time where technological instrumentailities were kept as secret as possible by their inventors, to the great detriment of technological progress, and indeed society as a whole.
Generally speaking, copyrights only cover the territory where granted. If you only have a country-A copyright, people are free to copy or otherwise use the work in country-B. If you have a country-B copyright that expires after 10 years, that's it.
All of this is nearly completely irrelevant, though, since the law of granting copyrights (as distinguished from the law of the rights of copyright holders) is now virtually identical everywhere, and copyrights automatically exist wherever you need them, due to the magic of copyright treaties. The exception is the few countries that do not have "copyright relations" with, e.g., the U.S. Taliban-held Afghanistan was such a place; it is possible Iraq is today. In any such country (if there are any), people are free to violate U.S. copyrights, and Americans are free to copy works created in those places (and not published elsewhere).
IAALBNAIPL (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer), so I will defer to others' expertise, but this really is a moot point given the modern treaties.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
I do not today expect to earn residuals because my grandfather was a civil engineer who did good work. Why should the grandchildren of authors expect otherwise?
As the saying goes, What have you done for me lately? Most of the money that you will ever make from a copyrighted work is earned in the first few years. Most of the cost of enforcing copyright is over the long tail end. Somewhere it stops making any sense to maintain the legal fiction of "intellectual property".
What do those costs look like? Well in one of the supporting briefs for Eldred vs Ashcroft a group of historians testified that they averaged a dozen man-hours per document to track down who owned the copyright on documents from the 1920's. And they only tackled that in cases that they considered relatively easy!
What do the returns look like? Well imagine that you are writing a book. How much are you currently motivated by the prospect of the possibility of returns 50 years from now? Don't forget to discount expected returns by the interest rate. That is, a hundred dollars 50 years from now is only worth what you would need to invest now to have 100 dollars in 50 years. Assuming an average 8% rate of return on investments, that is about $2. If, of course, you earn anything from the book in 50 years - which you probably won't because your book won't be in print any more.
I take issue with the letter's statement that intellectual property belongs to the public and is, in effect, leased back to the author or inventor.
That seems to imply that, at the moment of authorship or invention, the created work or invention belongs to everyone, not just to the author or inventor. This is fundamentally untrue and unsound. Untrue because the creation would not exist absent the labor of the creator, where ownership consequently resides until it is transferred elsewhere. Unsound because the financial rewards for authoring and inventing would shrink significantly, if not disappear, prompting a parallel reduction in the creation of new works and inventions.
I don't agree with the RIAA's efforts to distort copyright into enabling the members of their industry to continue to maintain a virtual oligolopy on distribution, nor do I support the large-scale transfer of ownership of copywritten commercial music under the paper-thin guise of "sharing" with a global audience. But this letter (which asserts, rather than proves, its basic premise) makes no sense when it attempts to make the case for communal ownership of private creation.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How about a patent copyright system based upon an intrensic value for the work.
The creation of a new musical composition is worth 1 million dollars a minute.
If you chose to sell the cd for it at $20 your copyright will expire faster than if you chose to sell it at $6.
Drug patents would benefit most, if a drug company prices a perscription prohibitly it will make it into public domain sooner,
if they sell it at a reasonable profit over production costs then they can keep their patent longer.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
Information should be free, and only the service to get the information in format or speed you want the information in should be charged for. The problem comes in what we call information and what we call the process. These two things are one in the same. One holds information and the other has instructions on how to manipulate the information. For all you coders out there, (myself included), the use of reflection makes this boundry hard to clarify, and therefore points that there should not be a boundry in between the two. I guess you could say we are headed toward a time, when people prosper on actually doing the work, instead of just inventing the work. Instead of just creating and inventing, and then holding onto that invention for 100, 25 or even 1, you will have develope the service behind the invention. The problem lies here that Big Business can easily swoop down and clober and stake any invention from anyone with the current laws we have in place.
What we are seeing now is only the beginning of a huge problem to come. We simply cannot protect information the way we have protected inventions in the past. Centralized protection just is not worth the advantages it shoots for. We need to have laws that says that anyone can use the invention, but the royalty for the invention is based on formula or set cost.
This is a hard subject to dive into, mostly because it is monsterous, but I think we must start, and start now to act before we get ourselves trapped in something that we cannot get out of in our generation.
That my feelings on the subject...not so sure yet what to do with them, but they are growing!
New drugs take several years to pass FDA certification
USA patent law already grants a term extension in such cases. The current term of a U.S. patent is filing date + 20 years + whatever time is necessary to secure a required federal safety certification for a patented product.
Perhaps the current period of copyrights is over-long, but how does that translate to the concept that such laws don't serve a useful purpose? It's a complete non-sequetuer.
What useful purpose does keeping "Happy Birthday to You" or "Rhapsody in Blue" or "Steamboat Willie" still locked up serve?
Will I retire or break 10K?
.nosig
In case of published works there is no ownership. There is only authorship. If no monopoly (copyright) were granted, anyone would be free to copy the works.
While some, very few, works are sought after long since their initial publishing, most works really sell for one printing and that's it. Only big-name authors sell for a long time, and very few of them even become classics sought after fifty years.
In case of "continuing demand", ie. demand for more copies of the work after the initial demand (a few years, nowadays more like "the first christmas"), the author has already generated revenue from initial demand, and should be economically well off. Most works don't have continuing demand, unless You think selling a hundred copies in the first year, ten copies a year for the next three, and total of ten in the next thirty constitutes "continuing demand"..
Until the government legally takes it away from you by abusing eminent domain & the 4th amendment.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Bullshit. First of all, an automobile is a physical thing that you can be deprived of the use of by someone taking it from you. You can't deprive someone of the use of an idea, song, book or newspaper by copying it.
Bullshit, an automobile is NOT a physical thing.
An automobile is not more physical then a music CD.
90% of the money you pay for an automobile is:
o Savtybelts, invented by Saab. Patented. Granted to the public without fee for use without licens fee.
o Airbag, invented by ???
o Electronic stability system, invented and patented by Bosch.
o Anti blocking brakes, invented and patented ??? Bosch, I asume.
o Electronic ignition and electronic injection
o Robotic manufactoring lanes, manufactoring technology and know how,
o modern material like plastics -- hard inflamable, carbon fibres and aluminium alloys
o engines made from magnesium and aluminium alloys
o Steel mixtures, steel plants for production
o aluminium frames
o unbrakable glasses, sunlight blocking, anti heating
o tiers by Bridgestone, lasting 50k miles
I do just stop here. You can continue the reign of topics which are nearly non physical and cover only KNOWLEDGE, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY and similar stuff nearly endless.
I repeat: 90% of the costs of a car. 90% of the price you pay for a car, you do not pay for that few kilograms metal and plastics. Neither do you pay it for the look or the name of the brand. You pay it for the astronomic high number of working hours spend by scientists and engineers in labs to figure minimal improvements showing up each year in a new product line of a car maufactor.
90% of our economy is based on "making knowledge to money". Without intellectual property, 90% of YOU all would be out of job. The only working jobs currently needed are: farmers, medical, truck drivers, house builders, craftmen. Just count the number of farmers needed to feed 1,000,000 people. In all industries you probably know about, the amount of workers is astonishing low. It decresesd to 1% of the amount it had around 1900.
We are no longer a workers society, in fact we are not a workers society since the end of world war II. We are a society of people offering service to other people, like booking a journey and booking a flight or dishing a meal in a restaurant.
And how do we come to be able to offer such a service? Bu having the knowledge how to do it! By having the knowledge to build up "machines" taking over a hughe amount of "work".
However a lot of services are dying right now. The get replaced by pure knowledge. The knowledge of a business man knowing how booking should work and the knowledge of a programmer who knows how a monkey can book a flight via the internet.
Second, the whole idea of copyright was to promote the publication of ideas to further science and the arts, not to create an artifical market for economic gain.
In our days the whole idea, and the soule necessity of IP laws is: to create an artificial market. Indeed. Without that market we had riots in the streets, as only a few of us had a job, a income and money to spend for food.
You only see that your "god given right" to take a DVD movie is covered by IP laws. You only see: "I like to have a movie for $5
You hate comunism
As long as you only see the tip of the ice berg
Its intersting that so many people are concerned about that stuff. So easy to circumvent: don't by music from RIAA corporations anymore. Don't buy DVDs of Time Warner or who ever you dislike. Don't go into the movie theatres.
Just buy private sold music and private made movies. And then? No money for the big business
Its easy to stand up and to go for change. But no: you want the stuff those guys make. You only do not want it for the price they charge.
Alternative: stop using your internet connection
Stop using electric current. The plants producing the current are 30 years old, surely payed off. The lines bringing the current are old, either. The oil is incredible cheap
For what do you pay electric current, then? For nothing of course. According to your logic at least.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
P.S. a better IP law surely is needed, but abolishing IP laws is not the way to go
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
2. To say that "Creative works incur over 90 percent of their economic reward within almost a few years of their release, often less" is just rubbish. A clue to the statement's status as rubbish lies in continuing demand. It's more likely he has noticed only the falloff of big-business marketing - kinda ironic.
No, this is an accurate statement and can be empirically proven using various studies and even independently proven using basic math. As any basic economics or statistics course will teach you, the value of a dollar today is worth considerably more than a dollar tommorrow according to the relationship PV=FV/(1+i)^P (where PV is the present value, FV is the future value, i is the discount rate, and P is the number of periods).
Even if you expect a work to continue earning thousands of dollars a year 100 years out (highly unlikely), the future value (using a low discount rate equivalent to a low risk investment) will amount to only a few dollars. This basically tells you that if you'd like to support your grandchildren, you would be better to put a few dollars in a low term government bond today than to depend on your copyright to support them years down the road. Fifty years out, the equivalent investment might need to be a couple of hundred dollars and twenty years out a couple of thousand.
This simple analysis was performed in the amicus brief signed by all the famous economists but should be apparent to any business, stats, math, or economics undergrad. It was used to cleary demonstrate that recent copyright extensions add no further economic incentive to authors at the time of creation, even for the most valuable and timeless works. Only copyrights up to about 50 years or so have any reasonable value unless they are applied retroactively. And a work that has no value until many years down the road or until after an author's death has essentially no value today - the author would probably be better to put a few dollars in savings account if the motivation was truly economic. Regardless of their eventual decision, the court seemed to understand these facts very well.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
It assumes that someone who wants to write will write... They just won't make the book available to the general public. There were plenty of painters and writers before copyright was invented, but the general public got to see their work very rarely.
Remember, one of the most artistically revolutionary periods in our history, the European Renaissance, happened centuries before copyright was invented!
The purpose of the US constitution is to protect the rights of individuals. There is no bs about public good in there. These types of philosophies are inherent in communist (individuals second to society) and fascist (indiviuals second to the nation) systems. People's inventions should be protected because it is a form of individual property. This property should be protected from theft in the same way material creations are protected from theft. Otherwise there is no incentive to invest in research/development since the risk is high and without IP protection, there is no reward. Without IP drug research and development would cease in the public sector. Software development for profit would also be severely diminished since tools like p2p would make it necessary for only a few people to buy software and share it. EDA tools currently are licensed for millions a year now because of the small market. If your favorite game makers need to charge this much per copy because they can only sell 5 copies, your favorite game makers are going to go bankrupt. Ayn Rand considers greed an admirable quality. Greed inspires people to become productive individuals. They start companies and employ millions of people. The average person owes his livelyhood to these greedy, and supposedly evil individuals. So I'd think twice about trampling all over these peoples rights.
Vote for Pedro