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Intellectual Property Laws bad for business
mshiltonj writes "The NYTimes has a story called "Report Raises Questions About Fighting Online Piracy" that talks about how the stringent enforcement of current Intellectual Property laws (see: RIAA) may acutally be bad for business. It's the not EFF or FSF saying this, it's professors at Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School. The professors say, "The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support, It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace." and "Bits are not the same as atoms. We need to reframe the legal discussion to treat the differences of bits and atoms in a more thoughtful way.""
Yes, stringent enforcement is bad, but so is blatant infringement. Companies should allow some latitude with infringing properties of their works, and some basic trading between friends. However, I also believe, both as a creator and a reseller of intellectual property, that placing your 300 CD Collection on Kazaa is going way too far as well.
Copyright should always be a balance. Promotion should be allowed, but only on an intimate level with people you know, not the entire world, unless the creator or publisher says it's all right. Region codes on DVDs, encryptions, copy prevention methods, etc., are all just profits and ineffective in what they're named to do.
I love libraries, borrow from friends and let them borrow from me, and will take DVDs over to parties so we can watch movies. Some publishers, studios and organizations will call me a pirate, but I would like to think that I'm a consumer and a citizen of the USA who prefers to share what he rightfully paid for with those who would also enjoy it.
Just my opinion and observations.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
when [large corp] comes along and just takes your idea to market without giving you a bean, they make billions all the execs get to live in bliss and you can eat dirt out of the sidewalk
sounds fair to me, yeah "do away with copyright ! say already financially secure professors and stock trading buisness tutors"
of course you can just watch [large corp] spend billions on developing widget X then just steal it saving $$$$!
yeah sounds fair to me !!
A>S
If it's now being said by the Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School, you might say that it's no longer just being said by the long-haired hackers, but now it is also coming from the ivory tower.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
Existing copyright laws are not the major problem. It's the 'over-enforcement' of copyrights, and the ridiculous nature of the patent system that are really the major problems with IP laws in the US.
The issues here are too complex for one to argue either for or against IP laws. The simple matter of fact is that it does benefit some businesses and it hurts others. I could find cases of both and this kind of arguing over if it is really fruitless and only serves to deepen the pockets of the media which distributes such articles.
in the end, the free market will decide.
Jeff Cagle
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
It's been said umpteen times but these folks at RIAA just don't seem to get it.
Its good that these reports are coming from schools that might have a louder voice in getting the point through.
When Joe Sixpack buys the CD, there is no ulterior motive behind that buy. He is not thinking about ripping the songs and sharing it for free. The DRM/copy protection/encryption/blah and all other technologies only make the experience of listening to music bittersweet when you put the CD into the player and it refuses to recognize it. And no digital protection is good enough for the Black Hats who would get around it, no matter what.
I will say it one more time. I have bought MORE music after I listen to it online before buying it. ARE YOU LISTENING RIAA?
BR 10 years down the line, I am sure we will all look back and laugh at RIAA tactics.
Free XBox, PS2
The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support
Really? What a surprising finding. I would never have guessed that the vast majority of people, who happen to be the consumers of copyrighted material, would actually prefer the copy-left concept where that material was available to them free.
All sarcasm aside, people have always preferred free to paying for something but, the creators of the copyrighted material do deserve to make a living off of their work. The RIAA may be going to extremes with draconian practices but, the presently unspoken idea that "music wants to be free" is not justifiable. When I create a work, what ever it may be, I should have the right to determine how and by whom it may be used. The fact that someone else would rather have it for free is not an adequate reason for me to give it away if I choose not to.
...if you're Amazon and you're talking about one click ordering, or RAMBUS if you're talking about royalties on DDR RAM, etc. Obviously, if you're not the one holding the patents then you're not so lucky. But if you are that guy then you're laughing all the way to the bank.
This isn't a post about how good patents are. On the contrary, it's a post about how patents can be misused or abused to give one company an unfair advantage over its rivals.
I don't know where you draw the line between good patents and bad ones but it seems to me that a patent should at least illustrate a degree of innovation and invention beyond "Let's take this old idea and put it together with that old idea and have ourselves a licence to print money!", which is where we're at now with the USPTO handing out patents to overly-broad, far from unique ideas to anyone who ponies up the relevant filing fees.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Once a person decides that a price of $15 is not a good price for a CD, or that $150 is not a good price for Windows XP, the economy as a whole is better off with that person downloading said program. Sure, the RIAA or Microsoft are happy with it, and would fight to the death over it, but that sale would never have been made in the first place.
The access to the infinitely duplicable material destroys the notion of scarcity of the product itself - whereupon the obvious price for such a product is no more than the cost of transport - usage of an Internet account.
We're seeing the destruction of an entire industry; its old guard will cry foul every step of the way, until the market eventually drags it into this new age. Observe the American car industry in the '70s, or of US Steel.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Or did you think all free software has been developed by a bunch of teenage hackers?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Intellectual property laws may be bad for business in general, but they are invaluable to big business. How else could they ensure that upstarts don't come in, undercut them, and take over the market? Yet, as anyone who's taken Economics 101 should know, monopolies are hopelessly inefficient - they restrict output leading to high prices for the consumer, whereas a competive market produces more and can only charge around their cost to produce the product. It's hard to be optimistic that big business interests and their lobbyists will ever allow the status quo to change.
If you look back, the entire motivation for IP laws was to promote the greater creation of those works.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the current system of IP laws produces the greatest benefit for the least cost to society.
If not optimized, the laws just preserve some artificial revenue stream protection scheme.
Having invented a patentable idea, I can say that the term of the patent had absolutely nothing to do with my creation of that idea. It might have something to do with how much money the patent is worth to a company that wanted to buy it, but it had nothing to do with the creation of the idea.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Wouldn't work. Any big company with significant resources would have little trouble spinning off a subsidiary company with very little net worth whose entire purpose was to hold all the patents and license them and/or hammer competitors with lawsuits. And if you say "any company a big company has controlling interest in" as a caveat to get around this, you run into a catch-22 for small startups: their patents are gone if they get too much investment, but without investment their patents are useless....
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I think a lot of this has to do with the continuious copyright extensions. If copyright were left alone and implemented as it was originally, it wouldn't seem like such an oppressive system.
Basically the copyright extension lobbyists are killing themselves slowly by stretching out copyright terms longer and longer. Each time they stretch it, the thinner it's importance becomes to the general population who see it as unfair to the common good.
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Actually, Copyright law is designed so that artists, inventors, etc.. have some kind of incentive for creating. The idea is that if you take that protection away artists won't bother creating because they can't sell their product without someone stealing it and selling it. Or that you invent something and someone else copies your idea thus taking away some or all of your ability to make money. Since we (at least here in the US) live in a capitalist society the idea is that people work to gain, in our case they work or create to gain money. Copyright law has nothing to do with protecting matter. However this is not to say I do not agree that music and art should be copyrighted for a hundred years either. A reasonable amount of time to profit from your work is all that is needed to give artists a reason to create, not what is likely to be longer than their lifetime so that greedy leeches can continue to sell their creations indefinately.
My take on it is this.. We shouldn't make a blanket statement about all IP laws. They initially do what they're supposed to: Give the creator control over his property in order to recoup costs of creation. It's also good to let the creator make a profit as well. Pharmaceuticals have a high research and development cost, especially considering the time it takes for FDA approval in the US. Entirely removing IP protections from the area would likely make the industry not want to invest their time.
I feel that tuning the amount of IP protection for different types of industries is helpful for business. Long-term or indefinite-term copyright just doesn't make sense, especially when the original creator is long gone, or the current owner isn't the original creator. Fifty years should really be the maximum, or should be the maximum if the property has been sold by the original owner (thinking of printed materials here). There are some other issues that need to be addressed with the sale of specific types of rights. One example that comes to mind is that of the works of Philip K. Dick. Hollywood basically gave him the "we'll call you later" line while buying movie rights at bargain-basement prices. Now that he is deceased, we've got three big-budget screen adaptations of his work that raked in the dough. There's also the issue of studios which review a script, reject it, then make a movie based on that script (without proper credit) years later. Occasionally a couple of studios will do this, producing similar movies at about the same time. Weakening IP laws in this situation will only hurt the "little guy" even more.
The area that definitely needs the most tuning is IP with regard to technology. There should be some type of orphan clause, if the creator goes bankrupt (or the author dies), and no one had previously made claim to the IP. I'm thinking primarily about software source code lost in limbo. In specialty sofware areas where there isn't a high profit margin this is a major concern when picking the right package: Will this company still be in business 10 years from now? And, of course, (everyone's favorite) tech patents on methods really need an overhaul. Seven years seems to be a bit to long. We really need a new way of reviewing patents. It's not that all of them are overly broad, but a problem that exists because changing a few key words makes something patentable. The "pausing live broadcast" patent should be tossed. The concept has existed and has been implemented since probably the late 1950s for the purposes of "instant replay" during sporting events. Throwing in the words "digital" and "disc", or the amount of time that can be "shifted" shouldn't have a bearing on the validity of the patent. Likewise, the concept of recording in the background shouldn't be patentable either, even if it uses the buzzword "buffer".
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
This IS the point, and the whole point. IMHO, read the constitution and THIS is what you come to.
Let's phrase it a different way:
A person can be supporting his/her self and family OR advancing the Arts and Sciences. The purpose of Copyrights and Patents as put forth in the Constitution is to remove the devilment behind that 'OR' decision. Even if it's not enough incentive to enable and Artist/Scientist/Engineer to make a life wholly supported that way, it's got to be worthwhile, as opposed to putting in a few more hours at a day job.
The other side comes from the phrase, "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Patents and Copyrights are SUPPOSED to release that stuff into the Public Domain, so others can use it as a basis for further works. THIS is the single most broken aspect of current IP law, IMHO.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"no more new music for you!"
It'd be funny if it happened, even as a marketing ploy.
You mean it hasn't happened already ?, all i can hear on the big radio stations and tv are "professional kareoke people" aka "manufactured pop" singing a bad cover of a song that another band from 1980 wrote (inspired by a 1970's band) because the record company can't be bothered to nurture real talent because they now deem its too financially "risky" better to go with what we know right ?
now as a result you have the odd phenomonon of "manufactured garage bands" as in bands that are designed to look like "real" bands (like in the pub/club variety) but really they are completly assembled by a marketing team and dont usually write/play their music (meaning covers) or subcontract it out to "real" songwriters all because "real talent" is too risky
so yep im pretty convinced thats it !, you have heard it all, for the rest of your life you are going to listen to basically the same songs from the same 60-90 eras repeaded ad infinitum, until you end up hating that song and can no longer tolerate it, if its a bad song tough shit, it will be played to you regardless until you do like/buy it (if you play something enough for long enough they will like it MTV method)
same goes for movies too, have all the tales really all been told ? i could go on but i won't, looking at the this centuries film output and what they are planning in the future, i don't hold a lot of confidence.
marketing is clever at being stupid
Things are not always that simple. My own employer recently presented me with a new contract. It included among many other things the three following points:
1) A clause about 'any software/hardware/idea/invention... etc' of mine being the property of the company'. It was so loosely worded that they could theoretically have laid claim to things I 'coded/designed/invented' in my spare time even if this had nothing to do with the business the company is in was likely to cause the company loss of revenue.
2) Forbid me to code in my own time for an Open Source project even if the project is in no way related to the business the company and is completely unlikely to cause them loss of revenue.
3) They also tried to insert what they called a "competition protection" clause in the new contract where they reserrve the right to place an injunction on me, forcing me to remain unemployed for a period of upto 6 months, if I should happen to quit working for them and begin working for somebody they feel is a competitor or if I might be using knowledge obtained in my old job at my new place of work.
All but the third clause were shot down after intense negotiations (read: most of the empoyees staged a small scale mutiny). The third point has been kept in the new contracts but nobody expects it to hold up in court, at least not here in Europe. Although the poor bastard who the company decides to honor by testing that clause on is probably going to have to shell out a small fortune in legal fees to prove them wrong and employees will probably think twice beore signing the new contract. Fortunately I was able to avoid swapping my old contract for the new model.
Now, I will agree that a comany owns what I code/design/invent on company time. I also think that a company is no worse off rewarding employees for valuable innovations in some way. But when the company starts trying to dictate whether or not I can innovate in my own spare time in a way that does not undermine the company I work for I think the company has gone too far.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'm not sure that they don't realize it. For all the twaddle that is spouted about destroying economic incentives, there is one thing that somehow goes unmentioned (although Eben Moglem did touch on it in his recent speech at Harvard). The core of what's going on with all this (and you can add proprietary software companies to the labels and studios) is perfectly explicable from Economics 101: specifically, microeconomics, which says that in an efficient market, price = marginal cost. (Marginal cost is the incremental cost of adding one unit of output; note this is different from average cost!)
Given today's technology, the marginal cost of producing one more CD or DVD or copy of a program is very close to zero. Also, there is no particular benefit to having the physical object (e.g., a CD) for itself, unlike, for example, a beautifully printed, illustrated book.
So I'm not sure that lack of realization or understanding is the problem -- studios, labels, and software companies may well realize it. They just don't like the answer, because it means their business model is broken beyond repair.
I hate to be be a bitch and point it out, but it works fine in Norway. And I believe that Sweden, Denmark and other socialistic democarcys are doing rather fine as well.
You guys just got to realise socialism is an idea, and a not a totalerian system. Socialism is about that the wealthy/resourcefull in society is obligated to help the less fortunate.
It might not be obvious, but this actually saves society money. Say, for example, if people aren't left to starve (actual, working social security), they won't have to steal or resort to crime in order to survive. And thus, less police is needed. Money saved.
I guess I can go on, but this post is probably offtopic enough allready.
So for a practical (and working) socialistic system, Norway and it's democracy is a good example.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Steal means "to take, and carry away, feloniously; to take without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another." You haven't stolen anything from the mechanic, but you have breached your contract to pay for his work. You've probably also trespassed in his shop or yard while collecting your vehicle. He can sue, and if the state agrees it will use its monopoly on violence to compel you to pay. He may also be able to press criminal charges for your trespass.
Electricity is an interesting thing if you try to think of it as a physical object, since the act of consuming it actually involves flowing electrons through a device and then back to the producer. Of course I'm no more entitled to use the city's electrons in my cellphone (even if I send them right back) than the city is entitled to go using random stuff in my home - even if they put it back right away.
Electricity makes a bit more sense if you think of it as a service, like auto repair, but the same principles apply. If you're obtaining electricity without the provider's consent, it's probably through trespass, fraud, or similar unlawful means.
Personally, I would love to get rid of the "life" part of life+70 years in copyright law.
Just make it a fixed amount of time, preferably no more than 30 years (this is, after all, for *copyright* not patents), then it all goes into the public domain.
Yes, I'm well aware of how the record companies would hate to lose some of their classic hits from the 60s and 70s, but I doubt they sell much from there but a small selection of the very best albums and whatnot.
This would also make it MUCH easier to determine when the copyright was over, rather than having to figure out when the author died, figure out if it was a joint work, or a company owned one, etc. Might also allow them to have an unpublished period of five years or something, too, and other bits like that.
But still, making copyright last forever is rediculous. I'm kinda glad that the 'freezing' of Walt Disney was mythical, because I'd hate to see them argue that since he's still "alive" (theoretically, at any rate), his copyright will live as long as he stays frozen... (e.g. forever, because it would cut into profits to bring him back, even if it were thought possible to in the far future...)
While we're at it, ditch software & business process patents entirely, make normal ones a bit more narrow, and possibly cut the time on them a bit.
One other thing we need to address, though, is the "IP vampire" companies with no actual products who buy up "IP" from dead companies and use it to extort normal companies, making them the living dead of the business world, since they can't be stopped with defensive patents... I'd like to think that open source/free software ideals can help fend them off, if applied more broadly. They are within the current laws, but they certainly don't advance the original purposes of those laws at all... (This, ironically, is one "business method" that I wish had been patented defensively... alas, it is probably too late...)
Copyright extension and legislation is nothing but a mechanism for the brokering of power and influence. Period.
There IS a fundamentally valid reason for both copyright and patents (and trademarks) to exist. But the scope has been blown way out of proportion by the power brokers, who are only in government to make a buck.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The "industry" is using their monopoly protection not to increase creative output, but to reduce it. There are hundreds of thousands of performing musicians in this country... how many are represented by "industry" labels? Almost none. Meanwhile the most prolific songwriter I know works at Guitar Center selling knockoff Fenders to teenagers in order to pay the rent.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Also, consider the possibility that the same process was independently developed. Is it still "theft"? It doesn't map as easily onto property law now, does it? Yet independently developing a process which happens to be covered by a patent is still a breach of patent law.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Indeed. Copyright and patent were created to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" to quote the U.S. Constitution, but how can censorship do that? It doesn't. If I can't express an idea that has been expressed bfore without getting permission, and/or paying a royalty, then I don't have freedom of speech, or freedom of the press.
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