Slashdot Mirror
Is IP Property?
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent article, Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley argues that intellectual property is not 'property' in the traditional sense. According to Lemley, while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society. Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
And don't even think about Elvis' "Lemonade, that cool refreshing drink."
<SARCASM>
Because, after all, if you do play it without paying the RIAA, Elvis won't have any incentive to produce new works...
</SARCASM>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations.
I don't think this is all that suprising. Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone. Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
IP isn't property. It never has and never will be. For example, A granted patent isn't valid if there's prior art. How could you apply that principle to say the ownership of a car? I don't think you can. I can smash, steal, set fire to or urinate on a car - I can't do any of these things with a patent! When patent infringement occurs it isn't even stealing in the traditional sense. When someone steal something wealth is transfered atomically. When infringement occurs wealth can be diverted (and that's a dodgy word) away from the patent holder but it's never a transfer from the patent holder directly to the infringer. It's just not correct to call IP property in the traditional sense of the word.
Simon.
What about liberals like Howard Berman? I think it affects both sides equally, as both sides have people willing to take money for whatever cause.
What a lot of people who take this kind of position often don't realize is the fact that treating IP as property, and protecting peoples' rights to those properties, is what provides the motivation for many of people to be so creative and to pour themselves into their work.
I realize this may not be the case with a lot of open source developers and project members, but in the case of corporate America and entrepreneurs, the financial benefits derived from the protection of IP is a huge motivating factor to its creation.
I agree with Mark Lemley that, given the level of IP creation today, total sharing of it would definitely benefit mankind. However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
Again, I realize this motivation doesn't apply to everyone. But it does to me, and many of my heartless capitalistic cohorts.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
I don't think that distinction is surprising at all. Conservatives traditionally call for more government protection of property rights of all sorts, and liberals usually put less emphasis on property rights and more on other rights.
The two sides often disagree on what constitutes a "right," and this seems in line with usual liberal/conservative divisions.
I'm not buying the liberal/conservative bit. Wasn't Clinton's administration responsible for bringing us the DMCA?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
That's not really true. There are plenty of Liberals who support Intellectual Property, and plenty of Conservatives who do not.
Use any definitions you like, but the distinction between Left and Right is moot for IP.
Lemley's distinction also points to the unusual fact that in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Let's get this correct: True Liberals and true conservitives, both, want less regulation - or alt least, reasonable balances between the public-domain and free enterprise.
It's the self-serving politicians that want more regulation - regardless of their labels.
Remember: it took both a Republican house/senate and a Democrat president to pass DMCA and idea-monopoly extensions (read copyright extensions)
Remember: it was Democrat politicians that were pushing for the v-chip and music labels.
Remember: it was Republican politicians that were being bought by Disney.
Both parties suck.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The claim is mostly inaccurate because it presupposes that the copying individual would otherwise have bought a copy from the publisher. That is occasionally true, but more often false; and when it is false, the claimed loss does not occur.
The claim is partly misleading because the word "loss" suggests events of a very different nature--events in which something they have is taken away from them. For example, if the bookstore's stock of books were burned, or if the money in the register got torn up, that would really be a "loss." We generally agree it is wrong to do these things to other people. But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got. The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book. In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them.
The claim is begging the question because the idea of "loss" is based on the assumption that the publisher "should have" got paid. That is based on the assumption that copyright exists and prohibits individual copying. But that is just the issue at hand: what should copyright cover? If the public decides it can share copies, then the publisher is not entitled to expect to be paid for each copy, and so cannot claim there is a "loss" when it is not. In other words, the "loss" comes from the copyright system; it is not an inherent part of copying. Copying in itself hurts no one.
"...traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
This is why I think the line between conservatives and liberals is becoming obscured. It used to be relatively simple: less government versus more government. Now, with intellectual property and the conservatives looming over the bill of rights in the name of fighting terrorism, I think the parties are primed for a switch. (And don't call me a lib, I'm a small govt. conservative deeply concerned with our rights).
to me it is more interesting that many law-makers want intellectual property treated as 'real' property for certain purposes, yet not treated as real property for others.
if IP were 'real' property it should be subject to value-based tariff when it enters the country. this might keep things like drug research, materials research, heck, analysing radiograms in the US instead of being exported as labor and imported as... thin air.
I'd be much more agreeable to strict IP laws if my 'real' job were treated with the same 'IP is real property' menality.
MORTAR COMBAT!
The Natural Rights Perspective. This section quotes John Locke's Two Treatises on Government, in which he writes:
For this "labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what this is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
The Personhood Perspective. This section quotes Markaret Jane Radin's Stanford Law Review Article entitled "Property and Personhood." (34 Stan. L. Rev. 957 (1982):
One may guage the strenght or significance of someone's relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss. On this view, an object is closely related to one's personhood if its loss causes pain that cannot be relieved by the object's replacement. ... If a wedding ring is stolen from a jeweler, insurance proceeds can reimburse the jeweler, but if a wedding ring is stolen from a loving wearer, the price of replacement will not restore the status quo.
This section also quotes Hagel:
The person has for its substantive end the right of placing its will in any and every thing, which thing is thereby mine; [and] because that thing has no such end in itself, its destiny and soul take on my will. [This consitutes] mankind's absolute right of appropriation over all things.
The Utilitarian/Economic Incentive Perspective.This book covers a few articles/comments here, and gives this summation:
Thus the economic justification for intellectual property [in the US] lies not in rewarding creators for their labor, but in assuring that they (and their creators) have appropriate incentives in creative activities.
Not wanting to re-read the entire book, I remember the following. The origins of all IP dates back to ol' England, when the King granted rights to produce something exclusively (and pay the King money). This became patent law. Trademarks arose in a similar style, the exclusive right to mark a product's source (in exchange for paying money to the King). Trademarks became a lot more important during the industrial revolution. Until then, people would buy generic products from their local market/seller. As goods were transported distances, they needed some sort of identification so that people could recognize them. I forget where copyright comes from (I'm a trademark and patent guy). Basically, the origins of IP law were a method for the King to tax producers, who then could make exclusive money on their goods/products.
You are standing on the shoulders of giants. There is no idea in your head that was not influnced by those who came before. They never got their due, and yet you sit around demanding yours. As it is freely received, it should be freely given.
Most people have half formed ideas anyway. They usually need to be finished by someone else. IP slows this process down, and in turn slows down progress.
while 'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable, freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society
And therein lies the problem in his argument, I didn't even have to RTFA. He uses the word 'society'.
Of course free IP is better for society. That's why science tends to grow exponentially. (historically, at least -- lately even science seems to be greedy) Mandel didn't horde his findings and keep them to himself -- and now the whole world teaches his experiments in high school classrooms as the foundation for further work -- if his experiments were a tightly kept secret, they wouldn't have become the foundation for anything.
But people -- as individuals, not as a society -- are more interested in personal gain. They want to hold on to their IP for whatever perceived advantage they think it gives them, however brief or delusional. I doubt you'll be able to convince them otherwise. When it comes to ownership, even of ideas, people tend to resort to the five-year-old "MINE! MINE! MINE!" thinking.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I just want to make the point to all you non-lawyers out there that property is not just physical objects.
;)
Property is anything in which you have "property rights". Property rights are a bundle of rights, different for different types of property, that give you some level of legal control over the object of those rights.
Probably most of the property in our society is not actually in physical objects. Consider money. Consider easements, equitable servitudes, usufructs, licenses, etc...
To say that intellectual property is not property is actually blatantly false when you understand what property actually is. To say that inventions shouldn't be the object of property rights, well, now you're at least being honest. (Although, I agree with the previous poster about creative incentives)...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought that originally patent law was supposed to protect the individual inventor, to give them time to make some profit off of their invention rather then having to compete directly with companies that already had the resources/retail connections/whatever to produce his product, profit off of it, and leave him sitting there wondering why he bothered having the idea in the first place.
I concede that the recent flurry of corporate activity concerning IP has turned it into almost a corporate owned environment because they finally realized they could pay people to sit around and think up ideas for the company, thus pre-emptively getting rights to the IP instead of that employee getting the full rights...
Plus there is the fact that now individuals are running into stonewalls trying to create their own products (whether or not you make a dime, it is still a product) based on technology that is considered to be someone's IP.
I grant that IP is a terrible title for patents, copyrights, et al, and the corporations are running amuck with the current laws, but I fail to see how abolishing the laws that protect an individuals invention from corporate theft is really good for that individual. Yes it leads to a more open society in that there is no protection for inventions, etc, but at the same time it also means that inventors have less (read: no) incentive to continue inventing products, or if they do invent them there is no incentive to release them. At least now they are released (under protection for a time, then for all) fairly quickly. With nothing to look forward to but Big-O'l-company taking the idea and turning it into their next product line, why would individuals bother releasing it to the world at all? And if there is no incentive to the individual to create new ideas, how is society freer?
And also realize that doing away with IP rights (such as patents) does not necessarally affect the big corporations heavily in terms of patents. In fact, I think very little would change for corporations because they can always fall back on trade secrets while still screwing the little guy that invented something in his garage and has no such protections.
Saying that getting rid of IP would suddenly make a freer society is short-sighted. The commentary that various political parties weigh in stronger on one side of the argument then the other is less than meaningless without knowing exactly how the question was asked and who was asked. It boils down to opinion and FUD, ie "Democrats want a freer society and care about you and me, Republicans want a closed society and don't give a damn about you unles you own a corporation"...without getting to deep into politics, I think the recent antics by politicians on both sides of that fence tend to show they both care most about who is putting money in their pockets...
Whee signature.
They both want government regulation. They just happen to want regulation for different things. To say that one doesn't and the other does, is just plain ignorant. Now as far as liberal vs conservative on IP regulation, that's a tough nut. There will always be people from both sides of the fence that will want some sort of regulation because it's not just the wealthy who come up with some "great ideas". They just happen to be the people that can make the ideas happen and hire lawyers to enforce the "regulation" of said idea.
-Randy
Sorry, posted the wrong link. It should be this.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
"...in IP, traditional liberals are often calling for less and less government, while conservatives demand regulation in order to protect their exclusive right to use their intellectual creations."
Hollywood must be quite the bastion of conservatism, they way the MPAA is fighting for stronger IP laws. And it is also interesting to hear that the Right has strong conservatives like Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) and Bill Clinton (signer of DMCA and Copyright Extention Act) on their side.
Interesting theory, but no. On this issue, there are good guys and bad guys on both side of the aisle, and which position they take has more to do with who they represent and where they get their funding than how conservative or liberal they are.
That's OK, Einstein came up with an independant (and superior) reimplementation of gravity.
I like to think what the world would look like if Pythagoras had patented his theorum. Think about it! No more diagonal lines!
Or if Plato filed for some copyrights: "I think, therefore I owe royalties!"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The whole idea is that there are suposed to be laws in place to protect the minoriy from the majority.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
There are many artists who barely make enough money from their 'intellectual property' to scratch out a very modest living: freelance writers, most novelists, most musicians. How are they supposed to make a living when you copy and steal their art, their IP? With no income from their art they'll be reduced to working in McJobs and have little time for creative work. Eliminate IP and you will greatly decrease the number of people who can afford to spend their time being creative. On the other hand I care nothing for the rights of evil corporations such as Viacom/CBS, AOL/Time Warner, Disney/Miramax etc.
The single worst offender of the past 15 years on internet laws has been a Democrat: President Bill Clinton, who signed into law the Sonny Bono copyright extension, the DMCA, and the CDA. He was the single person in the best position to stop these laws, and he signed them into law.
As a pragmatist, this makes me wary of electing Democratic candidates until I see evidence that they plan to stand up for my civil liberties.
Oddly enough, the only person I've seen stringently taking a stand for online civil liberties is that old conservative Republican with whom I disagree on just about all other issues, Jesse Helms.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, they may pescribe 1) the manner in which marriage shall be proved, and 2) the effect of that marriage.
1) Are they going to declare that there's no way to "prove" a marriage in which the state makes publicly available its records - or that they can only "prove" some of the records (despite both same sex marriages and opposite sex marriage data being publicized in the same manner)? That would be a hard sell, especially given equal protection.
2) The effect thereof. Again, quite a hard sell under equal protection, if the state treats both same sex and opposite sex marriages the same.
Note also that congress is not given the right to *forbid* full faith and credit - only the right to determine the details of implementation.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
From page 37:
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Although I know /. is almost violently anti-capitalist and anti-corporate to a fault, it needs to be said: IP laws have their place and can be beneficial to society so long as they are not abused. I will illustrate this point with a bit of example and a dash of history, and unless you're a frothing zealot, it would behoove you to read on before knee-jerking that "mod down" option.
/. would like it that way, but reality has a tendency to intrude on such Utopian Worker's Paradises.
IP laws exist so that researchers and developers of new things can do their researching and developing with a reasonable expectation of being reimbursed for their time and efforts. Sure, the system gets abused, but that's more due to the overly-legalistic culture of the U.S. and the woefully-outdated patent system in this country, not because IP laws are a faulty concept.
Let us assume I am a multinational drug company researching a cure for cancer. I employ hundreds of researchers and doctors along with their thousands of assistants, accountants, network administrators, and janitors needed to support them. This headcount is not free; these people expect to be paid, and pay them I must if I want them to work on the cancer cure.
Now let us assume I (being the head of the company) spent $20 billion over five years researching this cancer cure and finally succeeded. I'm now $20 billion in the hole and have to find a way to recoup my costs. Society now has two options:
1. I can use IP law to protect my research and my creation, selling the cure and recouping my investment with the profits. Or...
2. With no IP laws, a competing firm can immediately copy my cure and, having not spent a dime on R&D, can vastly undercut my price and prevent me from ever making back my $20 billion investment.
In scenario 1, the world gets a cancer cure, I make back my investment and modest profict, and my company goes on to develop the Next Big Thing.
In scenario 2, the world would never get a cancer cure. Why? Because no company is going to spend $20 billion developing anything if it can't be assured of making that money back!. Any research project or invention requiring any significant amount of investment in order to bring to fruition simply won't be done. Why should it? After all, you do all the hard work, someone else makes all the money, you get nothing. I'm sure the socialists, communists, and anarchist who make up a significant fraction of
Now, I'll be the first one to admit that IP laws have been taken to unhealthy extremes. Instead of being used to protect companies that take risks on long-term research projects, it's being used to lock-up potential avenues of research and squelch competition. What's needed here is tort reform, not a dissolution of IP laws.
A few centuries ago, around 1791 to be exact, France tried a little plan of abolishing patent laws. All the "people" thought it was such a great idea. After all, all these nasty, evil, wicked companies were just making beaucoup bucks off the backs of the noble, kind, honorable, downtrodden working classes. "Why work to feed a bunch of fatcats?" they thought. So, out went the laws, and in came Utopia.
Only it didn't work. Companies ceased to innovate in France. Instead, they left France and went elsewhere. Unemployment skyrocketed, invention stagnated. The poor got poorer than ever. The middle class evaporated. The upper class pulled up stakes and went elsewhere. After a bit of this, the laws were changed back to something more intelligent, and things recovered, but for a while the "workers" got a real taste of what they'd wrought, and it wasn't pretty.
The moral of the story here is IP laws are necessary, and anyone claiming otherwise is living in a fool's fantasy. You can despise the company you work for, you can despise other companies because of their patents and ridiculously-complex and overreaching copyright statues, but
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fixating on the word "property" is a mistake, taking this discussion in the wrong direction.
Invariably, someone asserts that IP is equivalent to "ideas" and that it is wrong/unethical/immoral to claim ownership of ideas.
I assert that entire line of argument is pointless. By its nature, an idea cannot be owned. An idea exists only as a thought confined to someone's brain.
However, works of intellect are not ideas. They are physical entities that use symbols to express and convey the information, the story, that the work's creator is trying to convey to others. Yes, those symbols express an author's ideas, but they are not ideas. The ideas remain in the mind of the author and, perhaps, in the minds of his audience.
So, therefore, if I write a book, the file or manuscript that is the single existing copy of that book belongs to me. Society may or may not benefit from exposure to that book, but society has no rights of access to it unless I, as its owner, transfer those rights.
The same applies, of course, to any such work -- music, sculpture, painting, etc. At some point, each work exists as some sort of a single physical entity that is owned, exclusively, by the person who made it. All rights to that object are vested in that person. No one else can legitimately access that work unless its owner transfers the necessary rights to them.
None of this has anything to do with ideas or access to ideas. To cite an extreme hypothetical example, if I conjure a formula for immortality and write it down on a piece of paper, I can do whatever I wish with that piece of paper. I can make millions of copies and drop them for airplanes, post it to Slashdot, or burn it and never tell anyone.
The counter to this argument requires explaining how rights to an object can move from that object's creator to someone else without that creator's sanction. (Such rights cannot move to "society", which is only a useful linguistic construct. They must move to one or more specific individuals.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The problem is, they were into the whole "IP is property" scam since day one (go read Atlas Shrugged for an early example). It used to figure more prominantly in their platform than it does at present, but it was one of the main reasons for my disenchantment with them (toning it down is good, repudiating it would be better).
The path they seem to be following (slowly) is the realization that "IP" is actually a government created monopoly, which they would on priciple oppose, rather than a natural property right, which they would on principle support.
-- MarkusQ
"freely benefitting from someone else's intellectual property rights is often the best way to form a free and creative society."
Yes, I'm sure given the billions of dollars required to develop prescription drugs, and the relative ease required to copy these drugs to produce generic equivalents, in a world without IP, there will certainly be a huge influx of money to develop prescription drug ideas that will immediately be stolen. Hell, regulating prescription drug prices in Canada and Europe has alone caused a lot of investmnet in prescription drug development.
If you didn't notice I was being sarcastic.
Vote for Pedro
It isn't absolute. Absolute property is defined by being physical property, unique and in your possession. No one can deny the existence of that property, although they may deny your continued ownership of it (communists, thieves).
Intellectual property is artificial. It doesn't exist in the real world. It exists only because we allow it to exist, and (currently, at least) grant it the status of absolute property, supposedly for a certain limited period of time. Under the Constitution, the ONLY reason for the existence of artificial property is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention that copyright is to be used as an absolute guarrantee of profit, nor does it say anywhere that anyone has a right to profit. Profit doesn't enter the equation, except indirectly, by allowing an inventor or creator time to ATTEMPT to make a profit, if he or she so desires.
All arguments concerning copyright and the 'right' to profit are pure bullshit. The Constitution never mentions a right to profit, or the right to make a profit from copyrighted materials. That right doesn't exist. Many people here and elsewhere seem to (deliberately) be confusing copyright with a right to profit that does not, and never has, existed. That includes profit which is dressed up in the doublespeak known as 'lost sales'.
The sole purpose of copyright is to spur development by allowing an inventor or creator a LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME to get the jump on potential competitors. Current copyright laws, while they may fulfill the technical definition of 'limited', are ridiculously long. The copyright has been extended several times to keep works of art which belong to certain powerful corporations out of the public domain, and for no other reason. This directly contradicts the purpose of copyright as defined by the Constitution, even if it doesn't violate the letter of the law. But it seems that the purpose of a law means little these days, and it's only the actual wording that counts in court.
It's rather clear that extending copyright to an absurd extreme does nothing whatsoever for the public welfare, and is designed solely to protect the profits of a few vested interests with the ability to buy Congressmen through bribes (colloquially known as 'campaign contributions' or 'a weekend in Tahiti with a teenage hooker'). But it's gone even farther than this, in that copyright laws are being used to prop up outdated business models in the face of advancing technology, an attempt to put a halt to that technology altogether. Copyright laws are being used as a weapon AGAINST innovation in a vicious, winner-take-all fashion. If the RIAA, MPAA, Disney et. al. have their way a number of new technologies would be banned from the United States altogether.
That's what the most serious issue is. It isn't about a 'right' to profit, which doesn't exist, and it isn't about the 'rights' of authors or musicians or movie makers, who only have the rights we feel like granting them when it comes to artificial property (re the Constitution). The biggest issue is that current vested interests are using whatever weapons they have at their disposal (or 'encouraging' Congress to create new ones) to slow down or put a complete halt to a variety of new technologies. They are, in fact, doing their very best to cripple innovation and impose a form of stasis over the entire American economy (with the help of a whole lot of other businesses who are doing the same thing by abusing the patent system) so that they'll remain at the top of heap, forever, secure that the government will destroy their competition for them.
Whether or not you happen to agree with free market principles (I'm a libertarian, so you can guess my take on this whole sorry business), the only logical outcome of this tangled mess is that America will no longer be a leader in technologica
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
IP should only belong to its creator and/or inventor. When the lone geek invents something and accidently dies, corporations might store his stuff on DVD and make insane absurd profits out of a dead man/woman's IP. Certain corporations go as far to lament the complete branch of expertise with a dead persons work. For a society its unacceptable.
So when the creator/inventor dies , his works and IP should go into the public library, except if his will describes otherwise.
If the corporation created the IP by themselves, the corporation owns the IP and is valid as long as the corporation lives. If the corporation is taken over, a special ruling board should decide if the merger of take-over does not mean IP is being destroyed , intentionally or unintentionally.
Bottom line for me : IP should never be allowed to die or get jailed into someone's office drawer.
Robert
Lemley makes the grand mistake (made so often by people arguing for an "IP-free state") of making this statement:
In a market econonomy, we care only that producers make enough return to cover their costs, including a reasonable profit . . . . so long as the price stays above marginal cost producers will still make the good."
This is true for a mature product. But we're talking about invention, which implies innovation, which implies risk.
Lemley uses the example of a copy of "Hamlet". If the actual production cost of the book is $5.00, how much should a producer be allowed to make? What is a fair profit? 20%?
Now, say that the product isn't a book. Let's say it's a pill for cancer patients. The pill costs $0.30 to produce (that is the "marginal cost"). Still think 20% is okay?
Lemley would ignore the fact that this company spent billions of dollars on the research that led to the cure, in addition to billions of dolloars on ongoing research that never leads to a cure. How do they afford this? They have shareholders who are willing to take a risk: let's spend billions of dollars, and maybe we can get a return on our investment. Lemley says that "rent ['unfair' profit] seeking behavior" is "socially wasteful." Nothing could be further from the truth. Rent-seeking behaviour is the essence of entrepreneurship, and it is the very behavior we should encourage.
The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward that is required to make entrepreneurs take that risk. Any academic who uses the rhetoric of "covering costs, plus a fair profit" should be summarily ignored. Entrepreneurs do not take giant risks and invest in the creation of world-changing technology for "a fair profit."
The stuff you create, whether physical or intellectual, should be yours, and you should be able to do what you want with it, at least for some period of time. If it is in your interest to release your property under the GPL (as it most certainly is for some companies and their software assets), you should be able to do it. If you want to be the Grinch and stuff it under your mattress, you should be able to do that, too. For the good of the world and everyone in it, entrepreneurs should be allowed and encouraged to seek profit. And "zero-sum", "profit is wasteful", "you-should-only-have-'fair'-profit" academics like Lemley should be dismissed.
Professor Mark Lemley argues that intellectual property is not 'property' in the traditional sense
Not to mention the fact that, as Larry Lessig points out in his most recent book, the "property" is the copyright or patent, not the protected work itself. Funny how "IP" attorneys so frequently pretend the distinction doesn't exist.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Makes sense to me!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Since the concept of private property has for the most part been eliminated from American life.
Think about it, ever since the advent of "property taxes", you have no real property rights, all you really do is lease from the gov.
Don't believe me? Try not paying your property taxes and watch what happens. Do you get compensation from the gov after they sieze your "property"? No, and according to the concept of property and the Constitution, you should. That is the end of the idea that you actually own something here in the USA.
Later...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Nope. The "collective wisdom" is that conservatives want less government, but it's not quite true. I'd re-phrase it this way: they don't want to pay for government unless it protects their interests. I learned this the hard way, while working at a bakery 20 years ago: we had a machine that allowed us to dump in eggs by the dozen. It would then spin them really fast, thus cracking the shells, which were held up by a strainer, and then dumping the eggs' contents into a container for the bakery to bake with. Nifty idea, and kept us from having to buy pre-packaged, less-fresh, already-shelled eggs.
Until the owners of the businesses that sold said already-shelled eggs noticed. They, in turn, called up their (republican) congressmen, and screamed that they were losing profit. So, under the guise of "protecting the public's health" [despite the fact that NOT ONE SINGLE CASE of disease/sickness was reported], a law was passed outlawing the nifty egg cracker.
Needless to say, there are zillions of parallels to this lesson in IP-land, deCSS-land, etc. Sadly, it's not just the republicans who stand behind larger gov't to protect interests: the dems are just as bad with the DMCA as the republicans. Just one of the reasons I'm an independent.
intellectually speaking, yes.
PCB#@
free ipod and free gmail!
The flip side being: should Rowling's grandchildren still be raking in the royalties?
Remember that in America, copyright length gets extended every time Mickey Mouse is about to pass into Public Domain. I believe it's happened at least two times already.
This is very ironic when you consider how much of Disney's body of work involves taking works which have fallen into public domain and selling them.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
A: No.
That's the short answer. The long answer is that while many people would like you to believe in "intellectual property", it has no support in nature or law. Copyrights, trademarks and patents are very different things, and are only in existence because we as a society (of the people), through the government (by the people), have decided that it is beneficial to society (for the people) to encourage people to create by giving them financial incentive to do so. There is no such thing as "intellectual property". There is copyright, patent and trademarks. Lumping them all together is not only foolhardy, but short sighted and misleading.
See the Disinfopedia article and the Wikipedia article for more details.
Nathan's blog
What the DMCA really did was grant copyright holders a new right that they had never had before. Before the DMCA, a copyright holder could not tell you what you could do with a copyrighted work once you'd bought a copy, so long as you didn't make more copies and distribute them. But you could read the work, set fire to it, wallpaper your bedroom with it, or wipe your ass with it. And you didn't need the copyright holder's permission to do any of these things. In fact, before the DMCA, it was entirely legal to buy a DVD, break the encryption, transcode it into a DivX file, and store it on your private file server so that you could watch it on your computer without needing the disc.
The DMCA made it illegal to break the encryption, even if you legally bought a copy, without explicit permission from the copyright holder. Combined with encryption methods that were themselves protected by IP law (like CSS, on DVDs), and suddenly the copyright holder can legally control how you can use their work in the privacy of your own home. You can decrypt the DVD by using a player that is either licensed by the CCA -- thus limiting what you can do with the DVD, since the CCA only licenses players that have a restricted set of functions -- or by using a player which is not licensed by the CCA (and allows you to do whatever you want with the DVD) -- but doing so violates the DMCA.
So now, even though the right is not explicitly spelled out in law, copyright holders can legally control what you can do with the work in the privacy of your own home. This is a right they do not need and should not have, and thus the DMCA should be repealed.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Let's face it - patent and copyright laws are utilitarian. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to promote science and the useful arts (that's copyright and patent, respectively) by providing authors and inventors exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries. Therefore, once the advancement of science and the useful arts is hobbled by copyright and patent laws, we've gone too far.
Hi, and thanks for googling....
The Statute of Monopolies modified the power of the crown to establish monopolies--limiting it, ostensibly, to granting monopolies for devices. Like a lot of English law, there was a gulf between word and deed--the crown kept right on issuing monopolies (the Hudson Bay Company springs to mind, and I expect that the East India Company had not been chartered yet). And inventors were not given property rights to their inventions--they could petition the crown for a monopoly, but there was nothing that said they'd get one.
And, in fact, few did. It was not until the development of "modern" patent law, in the 1740s and 1750s, that the rules changed.
Read Longitude--there's an excellent discussion of the situation there.
Furthermore, many members of a president's own party won't support a veto override
The president was a Democrat, and the Democratic party was a minority of Congress. Sonny Bono got upwards of 90% approval- there was no way a Clinton veto would stop it.
overriding their party's leader.
The President is not the leader of his party.
Sonny Bono was passed on a voice vote. The dynamics of voice votes are much different than the dynamics of roll-call votes. Especially if Clinton had vetoed it, you could expect that if the veto was overridden, it would be with far, far less than 90% support. And there'd be a good chance it wouldn't be.
Either way, it doesn't excuse Clinton signing it into law. He should at least have put up a fight. Except that he actually supported the law, which is the problem.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
By the way, Australia isn't a republic. They have a parlimentary government. Their experiences with IRV don't make good analogies with a republic style of government
Being a republic or not has absolutely zero influence as to how democratic processes work. In fact, the phrase "republic style of government" is an oxymoron. The only reason Australia isn't a republic is that their nominal head-of-state is a (foreign) Queen.
China is a republic, and they're still stuck in a one-party system... I seem to remember a place called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, too... what was it like?