Robin Gross and IP Justice

ethereal writes "According to this news.com article, former EFF attorney Robin Gross is starting up a new group called IP Justice in order to 'promote balance in global intellectual property law.' Her greatest fear? 'That we're too late.'"

Comments

Related Project

[Anonymous Coward]

Save your culture: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/16/191018/961
Save the Public Domain - Renaissance Now:
http://lists.infoanarchy.org/mailman/listinf o.cgi/ action

Please take the time to visit and sign up for this effort. 100+ on the mailling list so far, but we need as many as we can get. It is afterall a very ambitious project, needing extraordinary efforts to succeed.

Re:It's never too late

[halftrack]

Maybe not the best comparsion as the third reich lost those laws when they lost a war and were put under control of foreigners.

I can't think of any other, more valid, example so I actually disagree. When passed, laws are hard to remove. When was the last time you heard more regular laws being changed without there being a clear change in government? (Going from an oppressive to a democratic, non oppressive.)

Too many questions left unanswered

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

I understand what Robin Gross' group is trying to do. I'm not quite clear on how or what. Are they lobbyists, politicians. A consortium of business men and women?

And how well funded are the. Will they be able to compete with the schrill voice of the RIAA? Will they be able to do anything in D.C.?

Voice of the little people

[Anonymous Coward]

What about cases where IP theft has occured, in these instances, how will they be rectified, I would love to give the small people with ideas enough clout to topple those monoliths of doom.

No E-Patents.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a IP lock-in!

Once patent law covers a specific area there are business interests against a change. There is no way back.

Meanwhile lawyers try to promote a European directive on computer-implemented inventions. It was written by BSA. Computer professionals ecc. try to defeat. So we need your help, do it the Amnesty International Way. Please write to EU Parliamentarians. EU patent law also affects the United States and other countries.

Sign our http://www.noepatents.org
petition or get more infomation by FFII swpat AG
http://swpat.ffii.org

We shall start before it is too late.

The rest of the world.

[frp001]

I think there are groups in Germany and France that are working hard
So she claims! I happen to live in this part of "Old Europe", and I cannot say these groups are very vocal. If they show up I might get involved. If something like EFF exists in France, it certainly lacks publicity.

Re:The rest of the world.

[sql*kitten]

To come back on the main toppic according to EFF and Robin Gross it seems that US is at present the most restricting country when it comes to IP and Digital expression (please consult the yro section for further details) as Digital expression is bound to develop in the coming years that's where the focus on free speech should go, be it in the US, the EU or the rest of the world.

On the other hand, the US is the country with the environment which most encourages the development of new intellectual property. The thing most people fail to understand is that just because information can cheaply be reproduced, it does not follow that it was cheap to create. Whether you're talking a few million dollars to write a piece of software, or a few hundreds of millions to develop a new drug, it's the same: in the US, people can spend money to create knowledge, because the US will protect their opportunity to earn a return on their investment.

Re:The rest of the world.

[Vegetable Soup]

The thing most people fail to understand is that just because information can cheaply be reproduced, it does not follow that it was cheap to create. Whether you're talking a few million dollars to write a piece of software, or a few hundreds of millions to develop a new drug, it's the same: in the US, people can spend money to create knowledge, because the US will protect their opportunity to earn a return on their investment.

There are two sides to this argument: one is that the US needs strong protection to insure investment, and the other side is that the protection cannot be so strong as to allow frivolous or otherwise unethical patents. These need to be balanced, and right now, the US seems to be leaning towards protection, without paying as much attention to protecting rights of people who are not investing. Groups like EFF and IP Justice will work to swing the scale the other way, but the result (if they are successful) is that legislation will be more balanced toward protecting the rights of all sides.

Re:It's never too late

[ajs]

A fear of being too late is well placed in this case. When it comes to issues like legislation, it's often too late. Time and again throughout history different nations have had very progressive laws, often stictly conforming to public opinion. And each time in the end they have been changed or made null and void. Or do you see the laws of the ancient Greeks still in power in Greece? Laws as liberal as the bill of rights simply cannot last, arguments like "we hope there is too much profit, and they are too late" only serve the purpose of drawing more attention to the feeding frenzy and stifling change more completely, which is good in this case.

Obviously, the above doesn't scan so well, as I was trying to keep strictly to your wording. However, I think it does do a good job of illustrating your main logical failure. "Look upon their works, ye mighty and rejoice" isn't as on the money as you might think, especially if the pattern holds and change for the better only comes through pain and suffering and ulitmately leads to corruption anyway (e.g. the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, etc).

The problem is lack of compromise

[Twylite]

There seem to be three sides to the IP debate: big corporations representing huge IP interests, vocal activists representing themselves in the name of the common good, and the man in the street who doesn't really care.

Corporate interest, unfortunately, is focused on complete control. The activists tend to focus on maintaining the status quo as it was a decade ago, or on the abolition of IP rights. And the man in the street still doesn't care, because he still wants the content, and doesn't care about the public domain as it will exist after he is dead.

And everyone is missing the point. Protecting a work for 14 years, 50 years, 70 years or 100 years doesn't damage the public domain much, if at all. This is also within range of the time during which the creator can benefit from the work. Placing arbitrary time limits on the rights a creator enjoys will always be a difficult subject: some works will never do well, others are popular for many decades, and yet others are "ahead of their time" and may only realise their value decades after they are created.

What damages the public domain is the growth of Copyright to cover derivative works, and the right to withhold licensing after first publication. Preventing derivatives is the most destructive, preventing creators from building on the work of others. Withholding licensing means that a work can be published initially, then withdrawn (usually because it is not profitable) and never seen for the next 70+ years.

If we adjust Copyright law to allow the creation of derivative works after a short time (say 5 years), and force a use-it-or-lose-it scenario (where creators are forced to license published works no longer under publication to third parties on reasonable terms), we can claim back a lot of the benefit that Copyright offers to the public domain, without completely trampling over the rights of creators to the specific content that they created.