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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.""
There's an article like this in this month's Wired too.
It is pretty clear that an idea is not something that someone can "own", because it doesn't exist in space and time. Property laws were developed because there is only a limited amount of material objects in the universe, but everyone can "own" ideas without "taking" anything from anybody else. In fact, it is better to spread good ideas around, for the same reason that it is better to live in a good neighborhood than a bad one.
The use of the word "property" in "intellectual property" is itself misleading. It is similar to the common lie of calling copyright infringement "theft". I prefer the term "copyrighted material".
It is just hard to apply the term "property" to something that is so easily duplicated and propagates so easily.
The mainstream press and acedemics are now saying what /. has been ranting about for years. This is not necessarily a good thing. I believe IP should be reformed, but great care should be taken lest we shoot ourselves in the foot. There are a lot of programmers as well as artists here that could stand to lose their livlihood. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Its a double edged sword this one...
A startup requires some kind of protection from companies that are bigger and more established from taking their idea and using their extra resources to get the product to market first. The IPR laws were orginally designed to protect the small guy and give him a fighting chance... in this case they add competition to the market.
The problem is that they are being used as bargining chips by huge global-hyper-mega corps as the corperate equivilant of a nuclear deterant (You sue me for this and i'll sue you for that!). This is absolutely NOT what they are designed for.
It would be great to come up with some hard and fast rule that prevents this abuse, but I cant think of one. Perhaps some kind of patent lifespan restriction based on company net worth (to prevent a company with ample resources to develop a patented technology from just sitting on the idea).
Any other suggestions?
Adam Smith and *Intellectual monopoly* (Score:5, Interesting)
by NZheretic (23872) on Fri 18 Oct 12:11AM (#4467943)
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 ...
I estimate that the iTunes music store holds around 500.000 songs, which requires about 2TB storage. At the moment, it costs only around $1300 in harddisks for consumers to store the entire iTunes collection. It is likely that in a few years, it will only costs about, say $300 bucks. Another few years and it will be affordable (in terms of storage) for consumers to have the entire library of songs ever published in their pocket. Does having copyright on music still make sense then?
The primary motivation for copyright is to stimulate more output by giving creators limited-time protection of their work. But do we really need stimulation for more musical output if you can a million songs with you at anytime? If copyright were to be abolished, the amount of new works will undoubtly fall, but it's unlikely to dissappear altogether. The benefits is that everybody can, for little costs, enjoy about the complete published musical output of the past with them. Is this a good tradeoff?
Copyrights and Intellectual Property are protected through the use of force by the only monopoly legally allowed to use force: our government.
Copyright makes sense in some ways, but if you look at copyright historically, much of the greatest art and music was produced with no protection for the author. Great literary works and poetry also had no protection under copyright until recently.
In the past 300 years, we decided in order to protect the "rights" of a creator, we need government to step in and threaten anyone who wanted to steal such creations and use them without compensating the artist. Fine.
Our Constitution gave very limited protection (7 years, extendable for another 7 years maximum). To many free thinkers, copyright was a great concern, as it now gave government a new power it didn't have before. As many of the free marketeers here know, every new government power is a slippery slope towards ultimate government power.
Copyright has been made into a monopolizing power for corporations, and now capitalism and the free market is blamed! Capitalism would never allow copyright -- if you create something, don't release it until you have the best way to market or distribute it. Should I have a better tactic, I should be able to move it too. Creating a product or art is only part of the profitability -- marketing, distribution, and other parts of selling the item are just as important.
Copyleft is no better. In the end, you still need some entity to enforce it. If its a free market entity, people will have no reason to support your copyleft as they aren't forced to. If you allow government the ability to enforce it, they will only use coecion through force to protect it, and that again creates a monopoly.
When it boils down to software, there might not be any reason to copyright or copyleft or protect the software through the monopoly of force. There are free market protections in place already!
If you were the author of Windows, and someone wanted to promote the product without your consent, you could submit to the buying public that they should buy your product as they'd get your support. They'd get your updates (as you have the source code) quicker than through your competitor. They'd get the support of knowing they can submit new ideas to you that might get into the code (your competitor wouldn't have that ability, no source code). Your customers would also have the knowledge that they'd be supporting you to continue to make better products.
Where does copyright fit into this? Is copyright preventing rampant piracy? Not a chance. If you want to protect your software from getting copied, force your software to register itself online at every use. Fixed. No pirating.
If you want to protect your software from getting copied, how about hardware locks like in the past? Sure, some have been worked around, but in the end, the pirates would have to work extra hard to do so. If you price it properly, business would have no incentive to pirate.
Copyright and copyleft are both automations created that can only work through force. Only government has the legal mandate to initiate force. And once we allow that power, we have no power to restrain it should it get out of hand.
I was recently listening to the NPR archive of a recent Science Friday. The guests were some folks from Xerox PARC who were there are the beginnings of it all. Some happened to be working for Microsoft now and their viewpoints were in line with that. One person (don't remember his name, unfortunately) did mention that Open Source ideals, though it was not called that then, was what allowed all those emerging companies that sprang from the Xerox research to blossom. It was the freedom that created this little industry of the Internet.
So I'd definitely agree that this travesty of laws that have sprung up at the behest of media companies is indeed harming the economy.
While these acedemics may be doing the hero's task of rethinking IP, I'm also concerned about this comment by a copyright professor who read the report:
Sloppy scholarship helps no one. Given how much bad research, lack of fact-checking, and fabricated hearsay (Jane Fonda and John Kerry photos anyone?) floats around on the net, the moment I encounter anything that I know is untrue or wrong in any piece, I stop reading and file the whole thing in the Intellectually Suspect folder.
The Committee for Economic Development has a spotty track record. Marshall Plan: Good. World Bank and IMF: iffy. Setting standards for public schools through testing: bad (and, yes, I am a parent).
To reduce crime, make fewer things against the law.
I have no problem whatsoever with treating everybody as a friend [for the purposes of sharing copyrighted materials via p2p] (yes, there are different 'levels' of friend, like all other friends.), and I have no trouble sharing with all my friends.
Great! Friends, I need to "borrow" $20.
Unfortunately, this time you'll have to share your own money, not an evil record company's money, and I don't actually plan to give it back to you.
I mean, as long as you can re-define "friends" to mean "people I've never met who share my musical tastes and my ethical blind spots", can't I be as intellectually (dis)honest and re-define "borrow" too?
(I am reminded of the Cowbirds in Walt Kelly's Pogo, socialist agitators whose motto was "To share! To share what others' have!")
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I don't know why the labels and studios cannot just realize the obvious:
1 - Sell each song on the internet for $1,
they will probably get more money than
trying to sell CDs with 12 songs for $15.
If for no other resason than because you
don't have to leave your house.
iTunes proves that a lot of people prefer
this to just swapping files.
2 - The same goes for movies -- if you could
"order" a high quality copy for $5,
you wouldn't have to go out to the
movie theater, but you will watch at least
4 times the number of movies.
When the networks get faster, to download a
high quality 4GB mpeg for $5 beats
downloading a crappy version for 0
During the 19th century, England tightened its patent laws to the point that reverse engineering was disallowed (cf. DMCA and some EULAs).
The main result was the decline of new invention and improvement originating out of England and a surge of advancement of invention in the US.
(England continued to 'coast' as a world power by expending its capitol (i.e.: the empire) for another 50 - 100 years before precipitous decline was obviously evident.)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
...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.
/. would be invalidated in a day. If e-online.intarweb patents had a running time of a year, we'd all pony up some one-click cash just fine, or we'd wait for it to expire.
But everyone else gets screwed. That's fine as long as it encourages people to come up with new stuff, but it's bad in the long term; which is exactly why patents and copyrights should be for a limited time only. Your comment is like saying that inflation is good, because some people benefit from inflation (e.g. borrowers with a fixed interest rate, etc.) at the same rate that other people suffer. But in the long run, you don't want runaway inflation or runaway intellectual monopolies; because it destabalizes the economy, and breaks the fundamental quid-pro-quo of copyright/patent/trademark law.
Just to give an example; if you want to make an album full of samples (like the Beasty Boys' second album) these days.. well.. you can't! Because it would be too expensive to license all those 1 second samples, even though they have questionable artistic merit per se, and combining them into a new work is an artistic endeavor which results in a holistic new work. And that holds true even for those with pretty sweet record deals; record companies won't even crosslicense between their own artists. This is an enormous barrier-to-entry for sampling artists, which the established rightsholders don't care about because it's not their model of either business or art. And you can count on none of those copyrights expiring any time soon, because they're retroactively being renewed by paid-for laws.
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.
The fees themselves, and the costs of contesting bad patents, and their running time, are as much of a problem as the USPTO's whoring for dimes.
If applying for patents was really cheap, the FSF would hold hundreds of them; if contesting them was cheap and easy (just mail the USPTO some prior art or explain why it's trivial), most of the patents that come up on
None of this is true though; applying for a patent is costly, contesting one (either through the USPTO or the courts) is fiendishly complicated and costly, and patents run for years and years. The rubberstamping is little more than aiding and abetting.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
All that realy needs done is to provide value. I bought a program to make lables with barcodes on them. It's called Lables Unlimited. It was less than $15 off the shelf. Before I found it, I found fonts for $200, Label programs from $50-600. Needless to say most stuff was way overpriced as they were trying to sell automation solutions instead of a simple version of Printshop. When the choices were part with lots of money or do without, I did without. When a reasonable priced program came out, I bought 2 copies. One for home and one for work. (It can be registered either way. I did both.) After that with word of mouth advertising, (the best kind) I bought and re-sold 5 more to coworkers.
Trying to own and sell automation using barcodes (the concept, not the product) is viewed by most as open seas type piracy. One of the major bar code manufactures was sued for patent infringement for providing factory automation solutions which used barcodes with a workflow database. Somehow someone thought the concept of tracking with a database and barcodes instead of hand entry was a violation of IP. It got thrown out (thank goodness). Unfortunately more and more stuff is being tyed up in a concept as IP rights, not product rights. This started with songwriters as far as I can tell. A band records a song. I respect their recording. Another band sings their song (produces new product). They can either pay for what they produced or are prohibited from distributing or performing it in public. Somehow this seems wrong to lots of people.
Imagine if the concept were copied to the building industry. Someone makes nails. Someone else makes screws. Someone else makes glue. Someone makes 2X4's. They all patent the idea. Do you know the problems this would create for the building industry. Screws and screwdrivers only from International Fastener, Nails only from National Wire, 2X4's only from Georga Pacific.. etc. Some in the fastener industry have already done some of this. Posi-drive screws, Torx tm., etc.
Building materials are much cheaper if there is not a single vendor choice. Market forces set prices.
I see Open Source, Creative Commons, Public Domain, and the internet as a great equalizer. We just have to wean ourselves off the **AA licensed stuff. Tonight I was downloading free Public Domain radio programs. Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee, and Jack Benny are great alternitves to much of the high priced stuff. Don't pirate. Shop for the deals. They are out there.
There are lots of sites dedicated to collecting the material, selling or trading for very reasonable prices. Why can't BMI, Capitol, etc. sell MP3 CD's full of over 20 year old stuff for $5 each? You just can't tell me it's the cost of production and distribution. They would rather sell a couple of copies of $100 CD collections of old stuff than sell thousands at $5. They are also unwilling to use MP3's. Funny but the competion is using MP3's. All the radio programms I downloaded tonight are unencumbered MP3's. They will work in my MP3 CD player unlike what they are selling.
Do a search of Old Time Radio MP3's. You can literaly get days worth of material on MP3 CD's for under $10. Hey RIAA, are you listening? Want to sell from your old catalog? Naw, they would rather sit on their archive while I shop the competion. Their artificaly scarce material is being diluted by the competion. Piracy isn't their only competion. Games, movies, Public domain, Creative Commons, and freebies are their competion. Killing piracy won't make it go away.
The truth shall set you free!
The major problem is that copyright should not be transferable.
The person who created the work should retain all rights to the work. Not some global megacorp that can monopolize on the giant mass of copyrights they have bought or taken from employees.
If you can only monopolize what you have actually created then the power and wealth would be spread much more evenly. An individual is normally much more likely to license or sell a product at a reasonable price.
The idea that a corporation has the rights of a person but no way to be held accountable for its actions was not taken into account when these laws were passed or when the US Constitution was originally written to grant copyright.
IMHO, returning a corporation to its original status of a group of accountabe individuals with individual rights and copyrights, rather than the current status of an untouchable person, would correct many of our current problems.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
I can't help but be reminded of why Hollywood is in Calfornia rather than New York. All the early movie studios were in New Jersey. Edison, who owned patents on the movie camera charged royalties on every foot of film shot, and send thugs out to (in some cases) smash the cameras of those who didn't cough up.
Eventually people got sick of it and moved to the other side of the country & got on with it unmolested.
Current US IP laws are a significant incentive to move any business involved in the creation of IP offshore.
I suspect in a hundred yeasr noone other thana few historians will know why it is that the biotech or IT industry is centered on, say, Australia or India or Marituis and that it once was centered in the US.