Slashdot Mirror
The Case Against Intellectual Property
dhilvert writes "David Levine and Michele Boldrin argue that current IP laws encourage an inefficient rent model and stifle the potential for innovation without intellectual monopoly. Levine teaches at UCLA and maintains an Economic and Game Theory page."
Seems there is a thin line between protecting people and stifiling creativity. Personally I think IP laws go a little too far as it is.
A question one must ask one's self is when does a research result or algorithim or something stop being a matematical or scientific process, that should be shared with everyone and when does it become intelectual property?
I mean, the 'breast cancer gene' has been patented, the harvard mouse too; not to mention all of the computer algorithims that are patented. Whatever happened to the notion that mathematics and science should be shared with everyone? The scientific community has functioned on the 'open source' model for hundreds of years, but it seems that thanks to the concept of 'intelectual property' this is all changeing.
Really, I mean some of these patent claims are analogous to Newton/Leibnits attempting to patent calculus or Feynmann trying to patent his discoveries in quantum electrodynamics.The point is when does intelectual property become a rediculous concept, or is it a rediculous concept from the very begining?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Hey, That idea is my intellectual property. Time to get out the ol' IP Army again...
... and I must not wonder what you don't share with the "public" ...
Now, the wolves are guarding the hen house. In the early 90's, when Bruce Lehmann hosted the USPTO's sham hearings on whether to institutionalize s/w patents, his panel was comprised entirely of lawyers.
IOW, lawyers chose to instititionalize s/w patents in spite of strong protests from individuals throughout the software industry.
From that point on, it has been accepted that lawyers have the right to reap profits and taxes off of so-called innovation in software. It's a huge inefficiency, impossible to enforce, and impossible for anyone to prove virtually any software is unencumbered by patent conflicts. It's ridiculous.
The USPTO loves it though. They just increased their staff to handle their backlog which will forever increase since software patents are prolific and easily twisted into patent submissions.
Better yet, lawyers are having a heyday. The more lawsuits, the better. They get wealthy while the software industry grinds to a halt. It's obscene and a severe conflict of interest that they should have instituted s/w patents over all reason from the s/w industry itself.
I'm not even sure it's legal. I wonder what authority the USPTO head, Bruce Lehmann, really had. Was he appointed, and by whom? He certainly wasn't a member of Congress where laws should be created.
S/w patents should be abolished.
Protecting businesses with regulation returns the least effort with the most campaign contributions. Politicians are great advocates of the 'for rent' model.
What is it IP laws go far to protect? a forcing of people into one model?
Where to protect your rights and inventions you must sue people and protect them under a situation of IP laws that are too old now
Whatever happened to the idea of 'a good name'. A company could live off of its good name and good will by being well known and respected because of it their actions. If they truly have good IP then they will be respected for inventing it and earn more in other areas
that to me and mindshare is worth more than copywriting their invebntions and just making forceful noises about people paying them for it.
note:the slashdot user 'danamania' is a transexual. beware of him
Disclaimer: I work at an IP firm as a programmer, but not as a professional in the IP field.
:)
Before people post "Burn down the IP laws!", make sure you have a valid alternative that comes some way toward protecting the rights of creative people.
As a model for handling commercial rights, which not too many creative people seem to mind having, intellectual property laws are not a perfect construction. Especially now we are trying to stretch paper rights around a digital wordl. But to the distant cousins of anarchists would like to see the whole system trashed (because destroying things feels good):
Go and read Animal Farm and construct a good alternative before you go starting a revolution.
Cheers, and good luck
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Everyone seems to be saying the same thing, but no major party seems to notice. You could just say they're in bed with business, or you could say that people aren't vocal enough about this issue.
Because if you did, you would see that there are several solutions, all far better than our current model.
Everyone knows everything belongs to the corporations now. There's no such thing as individuality anymore. It's only a matter of time before this open source thing is snuffed out by one megacorp or another for violating IP regulations put in by some special interest group trying to monopolize the market in their favor and protect their own asses in search of the almighty dollar.
Just watch. Intellectual property will be the first to go. Then personal property, then private property. All land and all items will be owned by an oligarchy of megacorps, and most if not all personal freedoms will not even be a memory, as revisionist history will be rewritten to make the times we have now seem like the dark ages. Dissidents will be jailed and executed. Freedom will be a thing of the past. The country will OWN you, and you will be a slave to your corporate government.
Does this really protect the individual who actually *invented* something or protect the ones who say they have the rights to it and have the resources to protect it.
The post before mine recognizing Newton/Leibnitz and the possiblilty of "patenting" calculus drives the point home.
This seems to me just to be another excuse not to work. My whole country seems to be doing this. It seems everyone is out not to produce anything per se, but to tie up anybody trying to do anything and exact a fee. Somehow this system passes as "free enterprise".
Now, if the patent protection lasted for seven years or so, I would consider it much more appropriate. That way one could profit during the market window, but not tie the works up in perpetuity.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Hmm wouldn't there be lots of prior art on the cancer gene already over the last few thousand years how can you patent a natuarly occuring gene.
I had a pet once
The United States has developed a litigation culture in many aspects of everyday life.
Read this:
PBS, Who invented Radio?Its about how Tesla filed for patent on the radio in 1897, Marconi applied for his patent in 1900.
Marconi's patents were thrown out at first. Marconi became rich and powerful, then Tesla's patents were thrown out in place of Marconi's.
So you end up with a market in which the patent owner isn't the inventor and the whole purpose of patents - to reward the inventor, is turned on its head.
You can see the same pattern happening in software patents and the constant requests on Slashdot for prior art.
Anything to draw attention to the IP problem.
/first/, your worl is that much harder, since the corrupt people can change the rules of the game while your solving some far off symptom.
But it would be more efficient to go after corruption. It's the root cause of failure for systems other than the IP system. Also, if you don't go after general corruption
You remove the top of a wart, and its roots will bring forth another wart. Over and over again. Eventually, you have to go through some trouble and dig out the roots before the area can finally heal properly.
The whole difficulty of corruption in government is they write the rules of the game. And as you follow the rules of the game to eliminate corruption, you might find some difficulty.
I'm still counting on the Enron anamolies to bring about some change. Sooner or later people will have to realize this is not currently a society where everyone plays by the same set of rules.
Seems a weakened effort for people to run around trying correct various symptoms of the disease when they might make a more powerful and unified stance against the root cause of many of the problems. The corruption. Shouldn't be to hard to find a govt sector to begin with here in the US. Just pick..anywhere.
From The Relevance of Adam Smith by Robert L. Hetzel.
With added commentary by yours truly...
Everyone realises and acknowledges that Microsoft is a business, there to make a profit to share with it's marjor stakeholders, from it's shareholders to it's employees. However
For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer containscurrently 20 unpatched vulnerabilities , a disproportionately high number in comparison to all the other browers on the market today. Also, because of a general disregard for security in the past, many of those same vulnerabilities are exploitable though other Microsoft applications.
And there is many a CIO discovering that the new Microsoft enterprise licensing agreement is far more expensive than before.
The next section is very IMPORTANT.
In fact, the term "intellectual property" is a misnomer, a more correct term would be intellectual monopoly. Patents, Copyrights and even Trademarks are a government granted monopoly, they do not occur naturally. That does not mean that they are a bad thing per-say, but their use should be dictated by the benefit to socitety in general, with approprate limits so their use cannot be abused.
These statutes give the power that the ol' Mercantile laws gave to those monopolies. There is no true effective choice in the market. Compainies like Microsoft are sustaining it's dominate position in the markerplace by using a state-constructed and granted monopoly, which gives Microsoft the monopoly over it's protocols , effectively just as restrictive as the East India Trading Company trading zone monopoly of the Orient.
Each country would reward advances in science and technology. The catch? No idea hogging (no patents). Just simple and honest work to improve our world.
Of course, law suits would spring up as to who should receive the credit and the money, therefore, the only conclusion is to remove patenting. Lawyers would suffer (which is why they should be identified as the corrupt link).
One thing is for certain, patents have nothing to do in the computer world. The younger generation knows this, and it is waiting for the current generation to wither and die.
Why do "we" have to wait until the year 2525 to grasp this?
It's tough to take anything they say too seriously when they seem not to have bothered to do the most BASIC research and/or fact checking. They cite incorrect durations for both patents and copyrights. A rather impressive feat.
Design patents have a term of 14 years. Utility patents have a term of 20 years from filing. They had it reverse. Also, the current term for copyright is the life of the author plus 70 years, not 50 years--this was changed several years ago (is the piece that old?)--and I believe one of the reasons Disney and others had an excuse to request extensions of copyright law (yea right to "harmonize" the old and new law/copyright term).
That's in the first 4 pages of chapter 1. Perhaps they are typos and not indications of the intellectual rigor that went into the book.
The solution I'd like to see, instead, would be the government taking a proactive stand. Instead of granting patents and waiting for the mess to sort itself out, I want the government to go out and bust patents. Presidents like to portray themselves as trustbusters; well, "patent cartels" are one large trust that's never been busted. If some technology covered by a patent becomes truly umbiquitous - that is, so widely used that the inventor has ALREADY recouped his R&D investment - I'd like to see the government force the patent into the public domain. Example: CD-ROMs... Philips hold the patent, and has been very generous with it. But the technology protected by that patent is SO widespread that any abuse of the CD-ROM patent would ruin the technology sector. Think of how much some companies (or the RIAA, to supress non-DRM formats) would pay to control that patent - the value is inconceivable.
At this point, CD-ROM technology ceases to be a useful patent and starts to become something that the general public has a vital interest in... and here's the point where the government should "seize" the patent and turn the IP over to the public BEFORE the patent expires of its own accord. A widely used piece of IP (or any of the "obvious" patents we regularly complain about here on Slashdot) has passed the point where the inventors NEED a monopoly to protect their idea and has reached the point where the only purpose of that patent is profit at the expense of the public.
Monopolies are useful, but powerful monopolies are not; patents are useful, but exploitable patents are not. The government has an active role in regulating all other monopolies; it needs to take an active role in regulating IP monopolies as well.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
is where do we draw the line?
Amazon's one click nonsense, how was this even patentable? In essense that idea was click a virtual button, and it does something, does that sound innovative? No step in that process was innovative, Amazon, like a million other companies keeps a cookie in your browser, and you're shipping/billing info in their file/database, what was new with that? And yet here we are, patenting these simpleton ideas a retarded chimpanzee could have come up with.
Software techniques should not be patentable on the simple basis that the staff on the USPTO simply seem incompetent, due to no fault of their own, to designate what truly deserves a patent and what is merely an old idea in a new dress. The system is set up by lawyers for lawyers, in the end tilted toward corporations with cash and IP agreements with each other, so the small software development houses can't get in.
Really, Software should not be patentable, at the most, copyrightable in certain aspects, the name, logos, and protected in regards that nobody should be able to legally take the binary and resell it as their own.
But that is about it.... otherwise all you are asking in the future with this so-called 'ip property' is a constant headache with unscrupulous people who are smart enough to patent an idea that has been around for ages and ask enough so you pay them, but don't ask so much that you fight them in court.
Instead copyright lasting life of author plus 70 years (or whatever it is); make it 5 years. Instead of patents lasting 20 years; make them 3 years.
A patent is not a right one person gets when he patents something, it is a right everyone else loses. If Amazon had not patented the obvious one-click order, everyone could do it. I think that taking away the right of every person (save one) in the entire world to do some action is a very serious thing to do.
Therefore, patent granting should be very restrictive - not like today, when you can patent obvious bits of code, obvious business processes, DNA sequences, the wheel, swings, whatever.
When the patent is obvious, patenting is theft - taking from all and giving to one.
I realize that some people want to make money off the work and time put into certain ideas, but to say that patenting IP stifles some growth of areas and whatnot, well, that's just obvious.
I feel like I should be moderating myself down, but that just could not be less of news.
Kickstart
Chapter 1: The idea of "intellectual property" is broken down into two components.
1. Right of sale. If someone has an idea, that person can sell a copy of it to someone else. If someone makes a copy of it and the originator hasn't agreed to sell it, legal action can be taken. Example: An aspiring screenwriter sends a copy of his latest script to a famous director. The director likes it so much that he makes a movie out of it -- without having first acquired the right to use the script's contents. The script's author could sue the director in this case.
2. Intellectual monopoly. The originator of information can decide what others can do with that information once sold. Shrinkwrap software licenses/EULAs are a great example of this.
They argue that right of sale is a good thing because it gives creative people an incentive to produce and some amount of legal protection. They also argue that while intellectual monopoly gives them even more incentive to produce, controlling what people do with information after they have bought it (including making copies for other people) cannot be done without terrible social consequences:
Take the case of slavery. Why should people not be allowed to sign private contracts binding them to slavery? In fact, economists have consistently argued against slavery -- during the 19th century David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill engaged in a heater public debate with literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens -- with the enconomists opposing slavery, and the literary giants arguing in favor. The fact is that our labor cannot be separated from ourselves. For someone else to own our labor requires them to engage in intrusive and costly supervision. Such transaction costs are socially damaging as they imply violation of privacy and essential civil liberties. Hence they are commonly rejected on economic, not just moral, grounds. Moreover, there is no economic reason to allow slavery. With well functioning markets, renting labor is a good substitute for owning it. And so we allow the rental of labor, but not the permanant sale.
For intellectual property we are proposing the reverse: allowing the permanent sale, but not rental. For with intellectual property, posession belongs to the buyer and not to the seller. If you sell me an idea, I now have that idea embodied either in me or an object I own. For you to control the idea requires intrusive and costly supervision. Similarly if you sell me a book, a CD or a computer file. In each case, I have physical control of the item, and you can control its use only through intrusive measures.
I haven't read all of chapter 2 yet, but I'm trying to compromise between providing a decent summary of what's obviously a very insightful text in the hope that people will read it, and not getting buried on the second page where nobody will see the post.
From what I've read so far, this is really good stuff.
The title of this story completely misconstrues the author's position. The paper is titled "The Case Against Intellectual Monopoly " Not property .
See also: http://www.researchoninnovation.org.
Software patents should be abolished. If you have discovered a cool algorithm that enables your programs to run 100x faster than a competitors, keep it secret and benefit from it alone (Closed Source). Most companies do that already. What really gets to me is the fact that they try to prevent others from making use of an independently developed but similar technique. Just because you thought of it first does not give you the right to reduce the dimensions of everyone else's thought.
The only benefit you get should be the time-advantage you have in thinking about it first. Publishing it (Open Source) means you accept to forego the advantage, for common good.
Most people who believe in software patents, do so because of a complex. They can't stand the fact that most people are as intelligent or more so than they are. Since they know that someone else will have that idea, they try to prevent that by patenting it. They preach how patents are required for innovation -- bullsh*t!
That is what destroys inovation IMHO.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
I Am Not An Economist, so the second chapter was challenging for me, I must confess. However, I think I get the gist of the paper's argument. And, if I do, I admit I am (pleasantly) shocked by its "innovative" argument, which opened my eyes somewhat. Of particular interest to the slashdot audience, I believe, is probably the section titled, "The First-Mover Advantage" on pages 24-28 of the second chapter. These first-mover advantages, which the current patent law intends to secure through the granting of temporary monopoly to innovators, all apply in the absence of the IP law.
In other words, absent the present incentive model of temporary monopoly to an innovation, innovators will continue to innovate, given that they can recoup the "sunken cost" of initial research. Am I convinced that the above conditions exist for innovators as "first-movers"? Yes. And, as the paper points out, there might be other ingenious ways to take advantage of new ideas in the absence of the IP law.
However, I do see the abolition of the current IP law having a radical impact on the way the society functions. First off, product-placement in "copyright" works will increase dramatically, until indeed another innovative method of extracting the initial investment cost is found. Imagine each and every single song you hear on the radio having some kind of reference to Pepsi or Marlboro. What a trade-off! Secondly, related to the first point, the advertising industry will come to exert an even greater control over musicians, software programmers, writers than they do now. In other words, if you want to make money off your work, you better do what the advertisers say. Ugh, Gator comes to mind here...
I was going to go on about the fantasy list of impacts the abolition of the IP law would have on our world, but I just remembered a question that I had and the paper didn't answer. So I will just finish this post by posing that question and, hopefully, engage some of you in a debate of sort about it as well. My question is this: in the entertainment industry (publishing, music, film, etc.) wouldn't the initial impulse to control the distribution/reproduction channel be too great to ignore? This is happening to some extent already (AOL Time, invasive P2P software) and, were the proposal of the paper to be adopted, we may see the privatization/regulation of the Internet along the line of what China is doing or the cable TV industry. This, to me, would be equally bad as (if not even worse than) the ridiculuous extension of copyright to Disney.
Man, I haven't been this excited about the IP law in a while. I didn't really think of a way to get around the economic incentive argument for the IP law before tonight...
The web is a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit.
As far as I'm concerned, the current IP and surrounding laws fall just short of being downright evil.
Yes, their is certainly a need for IP and copyright.
BUT
There needs to be a LOT of mechanisms in place which amount to totally re-writing the laws...
*Practical demonstration
You shouldn't be able to copyright something unless you have at least a working model. Equally, companies which exist soley to whack other companies over IP should be illegal
*Use it or lose it
If it's sitting arround for years, it ammounts to stiffling competition. If you don't USE it for over a year, it should pass into the public domain
*An easy way of allowing non-commercial use
Currently things such as mods for games and fanfiction for authors is an UTTER legal minefield. Even "authorised" ones can make you lose rights, which means many companies clamp down. There should be an easy way to declare non-commercial use of the IP for specified uses legal.
I could go on and on, they're just the three top points which come to mind.
> After reading the article on Watt and his steam engine, I am even more convinced that most of this patenting process is mostly contrived to feed lawyers.
Interesting view. John Grisham wrote a novel "The King of Torts" and it's just published. In that he briefly describes how the hell the litigation industry has gotten so big and powerful (by writing a story of once a good lawyer trying to do good for people but going after serious money in the end). This IP issue might just become another big boost for the litigation industry.
It is WAY too easy to secure credit. How many companies go Chapter 11/13 after going on a buying binge? And how many markets did the decimate in the process? How many companies only clue to stop borrowing is when bamks won't give them any more money?
We need to get ourselves, as a culture, to view debt as a vulgar, distateful way of life and doing business.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Radio was invented 5 years before the war, but before all the companies that held seperate patents were commanded by the government to give them so the war could be fought... Basically technology was at a standstill.
This is why I like Linux, without free code sharing, I'd be unable to create a 3d MMORPG to compete with the big dogs. Crystalspace has got me up and running on a 3d engine, all I need to do is add new networking code, some animations, balance, some levels, and a story.
God spoke to me
we get doofey assed shit like "pi is three." ( Ok, so they're not exactly high school graduates either).
There's a certain sense in lawyers serving in the body that creates law. Lawyers understand law, the philosophy, the coherence, the limitations, etc..
Of course, they're also a closed trade guild.
Not every theory is perfect.
KFG
And won. At least in America.
As such it isn't necessary to construct a good alternative. One of the great legal and socio-political minds of the ages has done that for us already.
His name? Thomas Jefferson. The founding father of American intellectual property.
"Intellectual Property" does not exist. You can't find it, or make it, or put it in a safe and guard it with a pointy stick like you can "real" property.
It's an abstract concept *created* by the laws of man. Created *specifically* so that it didn't simply rot and die in its creator's jealous little head. Created, primarily, for the good of *society.*
Jefferson did a damned fine job of creating it, and we've been pissing in the pool for generations now.
No, we don't need a revolution. We merely need to step back to that time just after the revolution had been won.
If it takes a revolution to do that, well, I guess that second ammendment thingy makes sense after all.
KFG
Seldon was a lawyer who patented the automobile. He didn't build one, he never even so much as understood them, but he understood that sooner or later someone was going invent the thing, and if *he* already held the patent the actual inventor would either owe him a mint or simply be forced out of business.
So he filed a patent on the *idea,* and got it.
The fight between him and Henry Ford is one of the great sagas of intellectual property dispute in any nation. The patent was eventually broken, but not until after many, many years of courtroom fighting had passed, and millions of dollars such fighting takes to wage had passed from the hands of innovators into the hands of lawyers.
The Wright Bros. invented flight. Then they made sure that America became the absolute *last* in aero technology through patent fights. By the time we entered WWI, hardly more than a decade after that first flight at Kitty Hawk, America had to license aero technology from Europe in order to be competitive in the military aeronautics.
The Europeans either outright ignored the Wright Bros. patents, or found work arounds they could claim didn't violate them.
KFG
yeah, but that's assuming that the only reason authors create works is for the $$$. it aint so. if the author was a true artist then he/she'd publish purely for the sake of art. if the novel was held to be a work of art, poeple would go out of their way to buy it within ONE year.
copyright's reason for existence is to encourage creativity. if copyright was lost, do you really think no-one would be creative? of course not. look at all the work licensed under the GPL. do the authors of those works do it for the $$$? no. and if you think software is different to novels; it isn't in the eyes of copyright.
in a world without copyright, we might lose mega-music-marketing-multinationals and proprietary software companies but people will still publish stuff (and do, eg on the web) simply for art's sake. who cares if the record labels disappear, we can get our music from the web now (legitimately i mean). artists won't disappear. creativity will not diminish as much as the making of a buck on creativity.
anyway, the question is where to strike the balance. the balance has swung too far against the public interest in favour of the RIAA/MPAA.
why have laws that reward the RIAA/MPAA???
Maybe if you cared what they wanted, they might start to care what you want. Whad do you want anyways?
Software patents should be eliminated because they are just plain unnnecessary for promoting innovation. There isn't any software out there that would not have been developed if software patents didn't exist. Most software produced in the world today isn't protected by patents (although they may unknowingly infringe on somebody else's patent). Of those that are patented, either the original developers would have created it anyway, or somebody else would have independently created an equivalent. The vast majority of software patents already have been accidentally implemented by others, who created their equivalent implementations without the incentive of owning a patent or the knowledge of somebody else's existing one.
The same thing applies to patenting business processes - just plain unnecessary. A business won't decide to abstain from an innovative business model because of the lack of an ability to use patents to prevent competitors from using it. Quite the opposite - once having conceived the idea, they will be in a haste to implement it precisely because they fear their competitors may also do it and they don't want to get left behind. A business model or process that would be unprofitable without patent protection isn't a truly innovative one. Only bad ones and obvious ones have a need for patent protection to make them profitable, and the truly innovative ones would be implemented anyway.
The purpose of patents is to encourage or accelerate the innovation that would not have occurred if patents didn't exist. Software and business patents don't fit that mold because whatever the patents implement would have been done anyway, either by the original creator or soon afterwards by someone else.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Copyright is literally the right to copy and it applies to anything that an author writes. It also applies to signators of the Berne copyright convention.
There is no need for a working model. How could a peom for instance be shown to be working? The only issue here is who wrote it and if it was published. Laws in the USA include the idea of registration. In Canada to contrast - there is no requirement of registration.
The idea of a working model applies to patent law. This is the exclusive right granted to an inventor to manufacture something. Patent law rights are meant to be granted only to novel inventions. Clearly the idea of novel is sort of fucked up in the US PTO! Hense - there is a huge abuse taking place right now in the good old USA.
It may interest you that the DMCA transfers the right to copy from the author to the distributor for anything posted on the internet.
Additionally it may interest you that the Candian copyright act removes the right to copy from the authors and performers of any music. I believe this is section 83 but I'll have to look it up.
In Canada anyone can rip off any music recordings and copy it to any media normally used for recording music (Like your hard drive I suppose).
I don't know the legal interpretation of the word "normal" mind you. Perhaps 27 million people will do this and a judge will rule that it isn't "normal".
IMHO the real issue here is that there is a lot of value in IP and the laws are being "adjusted" to benefit the distributors and not the creators.
When it comes to computer software - the ideas of Richard Stallman are the ones I adhere to. Everyone wants to have an advantage and a really good programmer does have an advantage. If said programmer can control what he creates then he can provide for himself and his family and so forth.
The problem is that computer software is very complex and it is usually impossible for a programmer to do it all by himself. So programmers end up working for employers and when programmers quit they end up leaving their work behind and sort of have to start over.
Nobody like to re-invent the wheel for the 3rd time. Stallman realised this and invented the idea of open source. By putting it in the public domain at least you get to use it.
What a perverse idea. A programmer must give his work to the world in order to slavage the right to use what he creates! Meanwhile in Canada musicians can be legally ripped off at will and in the USA anything posted on the net can be ripped off too.
IP laws have been perverted to the point where the creators of intellectual property are considered irrelavant and it is only the interests of the distributors that count.
Just my 2 cents here...
Many of our founders felt that lawyers shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress or as the President because it'd be a conflict of interest. Afterall, if a lawyer can vote on the law, they can essentially vote themselves into a lucrative occupation at everyone else's expense.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Reason magazine is the official publication of the Reason Foundation, essentially a Libertarian think tank. The article isn't online yet, but it will be sometime within the next month.
FWIW, even as a Libertarian who is distressed by the way copyrights and patents are abused, I don't buy their conclusions for (say) the pharmaceutical industry, in which the indivisibility of research cost, the practically zero marginal cost of production, and the commoditized nature of cures for a particular illness make a stronger argument for patents and artificial monopoly as incentive for innovation than, say, copyright does as incentive for the next Britney Spears album.
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However, if you tried to sell your database software you would have to do an exhaustive search to find out if any of the subroutines employed were previously patented.
What made the authors of patent law believe that this would be practical?
Will I retire or break 10K?
How do the IP laws in place in Western economies constitute shooting oneself in the foot?
One problem is the problem of doing an exhaustive check of copyrights and patents. Though trademark checks are easy (use Google search), copyrights and patents are much harder to check in an automatic fashion. Given only the source code of a program, it's nearly impossible to determine whether or not that program infringes any of the more than two million subsisting U.S. patents. Given only the notes and rhythms of a melody, it's nearly impossible to determine whether or not that melody infringes any of the millions of subsisting U.S. copyrights on published musical works. Though copyright law requires access to the original work in addition to similarity, if the original work has hit the pop charts, the burden of proof seems to fall on the alleged infringer to disprove access (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).
The terms are too long. Why did Congress feel the need to grant 20 years of exclusive monopoly protection over something as simple as sending the user's identifying information along with the request to purchase something (the Amazon one-click shopping patent)? And why did Congress see fit to grant upwards of 120 years of monopoly on a melody?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.
http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302
From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.
This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.
For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:g e&NodeID=650
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypa
and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)i l03.html
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/
You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.
Here is a paper by an intellectual property lawyer against the current system: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarHere are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Do I think IP is over-litigated? Yes ... Do I think it will last forever? Nope.
Then how do you explain the decision of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft?
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look at all the work licensed under the GPL.
And look at how almost all the copyrighted works licensed under a share-and-share-alike license are computer programs. When do we get Free novels? Free still cartoons? Free animated cartoons? Free musical works? Free recordings of those musical works?
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Disney's head is in cryogenic storage.
Walter Elias Disney was not frozen. Quite the opposite; he was burned.
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REDMOND, WA -- In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."
"Because all integers and natural numbers derive from one and zero, Microsoft may, by extension, lay claim to ownership of all mathematics and logic systems, including Euclidean geometry, pulleys and levers, gravity, and the basic Newtonian principles of motion, as well as the concepts of existence and nonexistence," Yale University theoretical mathematics professor J. Edmund Lattimore said. "In other words, pretty much everything."
and I believe one of the reasons Disney and others had an excuse to request extensions of copyright law (yea right to "harmonize" the old and new law/copyright term).
The Bono Act was designed to harmonize USA copyright law with EU copyright law, which had been harmonized with German copyright law.
But why in the world did the U.S. Congress see fit to let the German Bundestag dictate American copyright policy? Imagine what would have happened had Congress listened to Germany sixty years ago.
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The Europeans either outright ignored the Wright Bros. patents, or found work arounds they could claim didn't violate them
No shit. However if the latter is true, then one must question why no American aviation company was able to work around said patents.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
The government by law cannot own IP. Anything produced by the US government is in the public domain.
The American companies had to work in American courts. Claims and injunctions were a daily ritual.
European companies got to test the validity of their work arounds in *European* courts, which is also where the Wright Bros. would have to file.
Makes a big difference, especially in a time when war was a nearly a foregone conclusion, let alone after the war started, at which time all bets were off and all courts and civil law were entirely irrelevant.
KFG
Second, the manufacturers or publishers who would be able to undercut everyone elses price in the drive toward marginal pricing would the ones with the most efficient manufacturing and distribution system. This would tend to be the largest processing plants in better connected areas and with a highly educated but cheap workforce available. Consolidation would occur similar to how small hardware stores folded when a Home Depot is built nearby and the area affected by the consolidation would be determined by that manufacturers distribution network.
From the second chapter: If, in fact, demand is elastic, then price falling to zero implies (because so many units are sold) revenue increasing to infinity. So in this case, improved reproduction technology would increase rather than decrease the rents accruing to the innovator.
Excuse me, Levine and Boldrin, I haven't gone over all your math but I think maybe you need to bone up on L'Hopitals Rule. Additionally, that last statement there brings up an interesting point. They even stated that, 'conventional wisdom would be right in ignoring economic value of being first if technological advances were such that the time one had to wait to purchase the good at a near zero price became negligible.' So take a look at recent advancements in nano-technology and consider the possibility that a few decades from now replicating an object might be as easy and commonplace as copying an mp3 file today. Should we change our IP laws just in time for the new paradigm to be useless?
Exactly right. Enron did its damage using dizzying complexity, using the incomprehensable federal tax code (how many of you fellow Americans blindly punch your numbers into TurboTax and hope for the best?) to their advantage. Give the tax code a radical lawyerectomy and you'll wipe out a huge chunk of corporate and political corruption (corporations "contribute" to politicians to write advantageous lines into the current code). Corporations can't buy favors that Congress isn't selling.
Ending the double-tax on dividends will have a positive (though lesser) effect too: dividend payouts force discipline (can't fake cold hard cash). Plus it'll make it easier to raise capital with equity instead of debt, which will be a big help to manufacturers, which will be a big help to my home state of Michigan. One very smart thing: the double-tax is only dropped on income that was taxed to begin with. Play Enron games and tax shelter your income and ending the double-tax does you no good at all.
Fix the above two and IP laws become a much more exposed target for change. Technically the order they're tackled in doesn't matter, but I think changing IP laws will be the hardest (hardly anyone deals with IP laws directly but everyone deals with the tax code), so from a practical perspective we should deal with the tax code induced corruption first.
I don't buy their conclusions for (say) the pharmaceutical industry, in which the indivisibility of research cost, the practically zero marginal cost of production, and the commoditized nature of cures for a particular illness make a stronger argument for patents and artificial monopoly as incentive for innovation
Pharmaceutical patnets are the worst. The most evil example I could think of was when corporate executives wrote an article to the newspaper that effectively said they had no incentive to innovate unless they had the right to lock out millions of people dying of AIDS in Africa. Other examples include the antibotic - Cipiro where a generic was being made in India for I think 10 cents a pill - and was offered to the USA during the worst of the Anthrax chrises, but was rebuffed for patent reasons. Not to consider all the research and development of natural, alternative, or other cures that involved the use of medicines with expired patents that was outright blackballed by industry giants in favor of more dangerous drugs that could be patented. And don't forget the millions of old people who are litterally "reamed" over medicines that they can't afford, but if they try to order generic's or non-generics that are sold at a cheaper price outside the country they could end up with a fine I think of $250,000. The real question, is how many people are we willing to let suffer and die in the name pharmaceutical patents? For all the people that are needlessly suffering and dying I would expect amazing and overwhelming justifications, but have rather gotten nothing but crap.
The disadvantages inherent in denying lots of people a treatment or cure for 12 years (the typical amount of time a medical patent lasts after the treatment is available) is justified by the fact that, without these monopoly protections, no one would bother spending money to research or develop the cures in the first case.
Let's say 5,000 people/year die from a particular disease. Under the current system, once a cure is developed, 5,000 * 12 = 60,000 people die before the price drops. Without patents, 5,000 * forever = infinite people die before the cure is even found. (This is a bit simplistic in assuming that no one will ever find the cure. But I don't think it's unrealistic to replace 12 by, say, 100 or 200, and still end up with orders of magnitude more deaths.)
Yes, there are universities and other not-for-profit research centers, but (as is typical with free markets) the commercial pharmaceutical industry is much more efficient at finding those things that people really want.
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An excellent book on the topic:
Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
ISBN 0814788068
No, I do get it. As a libertarian I am very well aware that just because the government calls somthing a right does not mean that it is. It wasn't true in the 1850's with slavery as a property right, and it's not true with patents or copyrights today. As a libertarian I understand that property rights exist as a means to deal with the fact that not everybody can use something at the same time, implying markets, and implying that people organize in the form of government to secure those rights. With patents and copyrights, this philosophy becomes bogus.
What you are saying is that without patnets nobody would have an incentive to put the money and effort into say, a cure for AIDS. That is outrageous. There is plenty of incentive for people to organize economically to stop diesase and the like without an artifical government monopoly. In fact, from newspapers I've gleamed - patents are actually intefering with a cure for AIDS as companies fight bitterly over conflicting patents, and researchers are forbidden to share critical information with other researchers, for fear of giving competitors the lead on a patnet claim.
There's plenty of them on the web - look at the explosion of webcomics.
I said "share-and-share-alike license", not "no-derivatives license".
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Some people just like to blame lawyers for their problems. Not that the profession doesn't have its share of embarassments, but this is not the best argument for the position you assert. Neither lawyers nor the USPTO "lobbied" to "institutionalize" software patents. You simply have it wrong.
Indeed, the USPTO for years opposed software patents, and regularly rejected blatant claims to algorithms as a matter of course. It was the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Diehr, reversing a USPTO ruling, and then later the Federal Circuit, reversing USPTO decisions in cases like In re Alapatt, and then later in State Street Bank and the AT&T cases, that determined the present state of software patents.
Some people will just blame the lawyers as a matter of ideological course -- and nothing will stop that. But here the "blame" (or praise) is not due to lawyers or the PTO -- blame this one entirely on the Congress and the courts.
Sure, lawyers make a living by lawyering. Guilty as charged, but to suggest that they affirmatively promote or provoke patent litigation is ludicrous. While there are certainly a share of contingency fee lawyers out there, and perhaps some of them may well be provoking litigation that would not otherwise hold, the vast majority of lawyers sue for a fee.
Blame --at least in part-- the clients who decide that the upside of the litigation (or its favorable resolution) outweighs those fees, and the lawmakers who decided that the bases for that litigation do serve the policy interests of our nation, notwisthanding the minority opinion of these economists.
You are simply unaware that Jefferson was, as Secretary of State and head of the patent board, the primary author of America's first patent laws, and America's first patent officer.
1 3/ 200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/patent.html
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc3
KFG
Patents should also be shorter than the original 14 years. In the 18th and early 19th centuries technology was not obsolete for far more than 14 years after its invention. Now technology is often obsolete within 14 years.
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
Intellectual Property can be expanded to include *anything*, and gain the protections of IP. However this needs to be balanced against education...I dont want my math teacher suing my for use of knowledge I gleaned from extra class activities.
Do you need a website upgrade?
Not everyone reloads slashdot every few seconds to start reading stories when they're first posted. Also, I tend to enjoy sleeping for at least part of each night. ;)
Publicly pointing out someone else's spelling and grammer mistakes in a forum is all about trying to make yourself look good to an audience. If someone really just wanted to help, they would correct the poor speller in private.
;-)
For me, it's enough just to chortle smugly to myself, secure in the knowledge of my own superiority to the spelling and grammer impaired. But then, I realize that pointing things like that out in public makes me look more like a pedantic asshat than an intellectual.
Now, publicly pointing out what pedantic asshats grammer nazis are, THAT makes me look good.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
are not a new problem at the US Patent Office. Just one example is that there were many patents issued for nearly non-existent modifications to the basic ceramic tube insulator that was used in structural wiring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, they were issued for the addition of trivial details like tiny, paired projections that "locked" the tube in place. More than one patent was issued for very slightly different variations on this idea.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
We live in a faster world, patent and copyright terms *should* be getting shorter instead of longer. But, When I argue against the Rodent Protection Act, I often end up in a stalemate with a person who cannot conceive of a non-Disney-Mickey.
They feel that it's ok to extend copyright terms in order to protect "Disney" despite the fact that the man stopped breathing decades ago. They can never say just how long they think the term should be, just that "Mickey Mouse should always be exclusively Disney". Arguments about Cinderella, the wheel, fire, etc. just bounce off.
It seems that many intelligent people just haven't thought this all the way through. Mickey mouse in the public domain is dissonant to them so they accept the alternative without considering the side effects.
IP = copyright of some form is good, abolishing that would lead to a lot of problems. IP patents = IM = Intellectual Monopoly, like software patents on the other hand, are very dubious. Particularly when the patent covers the only "reasonable" set of instructions to get from A to B (sometimes by being so broad there's no other way). Sometimes they just assume that the way exists, and sue anyone that try to implement the patent idea...
Kjella
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