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Deconstructing Stupidity - Why is IP Policy Bad?
An anonymous reader writes "There is a good attempt on the Financial Times site by James Boyle to explain why
intellectual property policy making is so bad. From the article: 'These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us.... Why are we making them? To some the answer is obvious: corporate capture
of the decision making process. This is a nicely cynical conclusion. But wait. There are economic interests on both sides. The film and music industries are tiny compared to the consumer electronics industry.'"
And just whos side is the electronics industry (e.g. computer and computer part makers, TV set makers etc). Obviously companies like Sony are a different kettle of fish alltogether :)
We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.
perhaps they arent writing because they don't have enough economic insentive on account of those filthy pirates? did you ever think of that you insensitive clod?
I've heard of ghost writers, but what about zombie writers?
Starsucks
Mozilla and secureads.ft.com cannont communicate securely because they have no common encryption algorithms.
What are the advertisers up to now? HTTPS without encryption (I assume) for ads?
I think it partially has to do with the money. I was working at a educational instution, and I created a very complicated system to keep track of a lot of things, and a couple of the things we did were cool, and we were thinking about patenting it, but the cost associated with filing a patent was too expensive. If we had a really broad patent where we could patent the entire world then it would have been worth it. In my talkings with one IP laywer he basically said he works under the following mindset: Ask for the world in your patent. They will narrow it for you saying what you can and can't have. If they grant your patent on the first time it wasn't broad enough, and you aren't worth your salt as a patent lawyer. That's the way patent laywers think these days, they try to patent the whole world. I think its a flaw of the system, becuase these broad ones get passed with way too much. More than they deserve.
Aaaaah, _this_ IP policy, not the other one related to QoS ... ok,ok.
#include "coucou.h"
It then occurred to me that many groups and institutions exhibit the reverse of emergence: you have complex, smart people making up your system, but when you get them together you get stupid decisions. In this case, the whole is less than the sum of its parts, sometimes less intelligent than any one individual. The obvious name for this phenomenon is "demergence".
I think one reason that electronics companies don't stand up to the music and motion picture industries is that the latter have unified organizations to act behind. To my knowledge, electronics makers are much more splintered than the entertainment industry. If the like of Sony, Panasonic, and others would band behind a single name, I think we would see more of a spine behind their agenda.
If the copyright holder isn't making use of a property, there should be a process to turn the title over to public domain. Perhaps a set fee per year of copyright, like a lease.
Because IP policies annually decided in meetings like this.
International Peni?
Mod parent down, it's a bunch of nakid men.
It's all well and good to look at the history of Intellectual Property law. It's good to look at how it's changed, and what got us to our current state.
The question which many of these articles fail to address is this - Yes, we know the current state of IP is bad for the majority. Why do we tolerate it, what can we do to change it, and, most importantly, what is best for -society- as a whole?
IP law that protects, say, drug patents for 60 years is bad - it enables drug conglomerates to develop medication and live off the proceeds for years without giving back to the community that granted the company a -temporary- monopoly.
What is a fair balance between:
* Sustaining the economy
* Fairness to the general public (a balance between the public good, and ability for individuals to be employed by IP-centric companies)
* Rewarding creators and inventors of intellectual property.
So, if I may ask, what do Slashdot readers see as fair? I would suggest that we need to look at different copyright and patent periods depending on the type and application of an item.
Additionally, what can be done about the state of IP law? Australia recently got reamed by the USFTA; and many other countries, as signatories to the Berne Convention, IIRC, have been forced to extend their copyright periods to meet other countries'.
The GPL needs IP to exist.
Otherwise the world would be run on the BSD license (sans credit)
If that what you really want.
Commie.
Then every month we'd be rolling in new properties into the public domain. Old Sinatra recordings and early rock 'n roll would be on tap this year, for instance.
Most of the "great American songbook" tunes from old Broadway shows should already be in the public domain IMO. If their publishers haven't cashed out many times over, enough to pay for dozens of duds as well as the original hits, they don't deserve any more money anyway.
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent After reading this my brain stopped working and I couldn't complete any more tasks, I'm going to do a reboot now.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
"The film and music industries are tiny compared to the consumer electronics industry."
In the US, the film and music industries have an enormous domestic presence, employ a lot of people, and can mobilize performers on their behalf.
With a few exceptions, the US consumer electronics "industry" is actually a bunch of importers of offshore designed and manufactured goods. They can't muster the bodies or the charisma to influence Congress. And most of the companies don't care if the products they sell are crippled by DRM, provided no one else is allowed to sell an uncrippled product.
Part of the problem is that IP is currently an untaxable asset. It is something that you can have tons of in inventory, but its not bad in the same way that having two years worth of wigets in inventory is. This leads to hoarding, some companyexist only to hoard and licence out bits of IP.
We Need to create an Intellectual Property Tax.
This will keep corpoartions from hoarding and speed the flow of material into the public domain. If $Member-RIAA thinks $Boy-Band latest album is worht $50 mil let em pay 1% for the goverments protection. Since the IP cartels want real protection for their "assets" let them pay for it in the same way you would have to pay for real assets
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Some of what he says makes sense, but at one point he appears to be drawing a false conclusion.
He said: "The point was made by an exchange inside the Committee that shaped Europe's ill-starred Database Directive. It was observed that the US, with no significant property rights over unoriginal compilations of data, had a much larger database industry than Europe which already had significant "sweat of the brow" protection in some countries."
But there's more to it than copyright. It's very difficult to access a corporate database to copy it, so copy protection is quite strong with or without legal copyright protection. Something that is more likely to have hindered the European database industry is stricter data protection laws. When you have to register, and are not allowed to sell information to anyone and everyone without exlicit permission, the industry sector is going to be a lot slower. This is simply a tradeoff between econmic growth and consumer protection.
Given the overwhelming happiness of naive consumers to use electronics with (even highly restrictive) DRM built-in (Napster-2-Go, iTunes, any non-native-MP3 digital music player), where is the pressure against strong IP laws going to come from?
Strong IP laws allow electronics manufacturers to make it harder for third parties to interoperate with their kit, thereby increasing vendor lock-in (and hence, their profits - iTunes makes a loss, iPod rakes in money hand-over-fist).
Weak IP means they can't stop people reverse-engineering their protocols and products and people can release cheap but interoperable knock-offs, which undercut their market and prevent lock-in.
Were I a consumer electronics manufacturer, I'd be lining up behind strong IP as far as I could - it would be all pro and no con, as far as I could see.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/
It has a lot of articles in the same vein. We can see Linus wrestling with this himself, having to stop and work on a new tool for code revision.
The U.S. should lead on this, instead, we are regulating away any competitive advantage our market provides. If I want to write an open source project, I can get blitzed by lawsuits from software patents I don't know exist and may have been filed in a trivial way. It kills innovation, stifles the creativity of the citizens to build, and only allows those with existing wealth to further aggregate and hold it. It's the same with the stock market. The commission model favors large institutional investors who can move 100,000 shares easily, and not the guy who can only afford to trade 100 or even 1000 shares.
I've nearly given up on Washington to do the righ thing. It now falls on the judiciary to become activist and overturn or find unconstitutional some of these patent laws. With Tom DeLay openly advocating violence against judges, it's obvious, this is a class war, and IP is just one of the weapons.
The West and America in particular has largely given up on producing consumer electronics. These are mostly produced in the East.
America does produce lots of movies and music.
It doesn't take a Nobel prize winner to guess who wants to protect IP the most and who will try to shove those laws down the throat of the rest of the world.
The reason it's bad is that it's being driven by ideology, not pragmatism.
." (actually, that's what the Constitution says).
Ideology says: "If we don't give the corporations what their lobbyists want, which is a guaranteed percentage of ROI for R&D dollars spent, all innovation will grind to a halt!"
Pragmatism says: ". . . to promote the useful arts and sciences. . . for a limited time. .
There's still a place for patent and copyright law, but the effect of today's laws is to remove the risk from R&D spending for large, established corporations, and eliminate competition from the marketplace. It has a detrimental effect, overall, on innovation, because it creates unnecessarily high barriers to entry in many markets and industries today.
This is an area of policy where lawmakers really need to tear everything down, and go back to what the Constitution said about Copyright, and what the Founding Fathers intended. Otherwise, the Free Market will make us it's bitch, and overseas competitors with less draconian IP law will supplant ours (already happening in some areas).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think our society just has an "unhealthy respect" for musicians and actors and so forth.
Imagine if plumbers demanded that you pay them every time you use the sink they fixed. Or if doctors wanted a percentage of your income earned with that broken arm they mended. You'd laugh and say "I'll just find another guy that doesn't demand those ridiculous terms". Or put another way, the free market would quickly eliminate those types of contracts.
But it's not that way with, say, musicians or other creative professionals. Probably because each musician is unique in some sense, and also the average Joe doesn't have a clue how to make a good piece of music.. so when you tell somebody that musicians are being "stolen" from, they feel more sympathy. They don't want the artist to "starve".
I mean, look how we worship (and pay big bucks) for Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, etc. There's a feeling that there will never be another one *just* like Elvis. And somehow people don't question this ludicrous state of affairs (dead people having these dynasties where they continue to get paid for work already completed).
That's the vibe I've gotten from people, anyway. We worship entertainment in this society.
IP laws are not about rights. They take freedom (to copy, to innovate, to use an algorithm, etc) from the public and grant exclusive permission to a private entity or individual. It's clear that if you want widespread innovation the solution is to loosen the restraints on the public - i.e. strengthen their rights.
I'm not totally against "IP". I think 14 years was an OK term for copyright, and that patents shouldn't apply to software or trivial ideas.
It's ironic that the only asset the Feds charge a protection fee for is patent maintanence. If there were one asset that should be exempt from such protection fees it is inventor-owned/assigned patents since by putting capital in the hands of the inventors themselves you are far more likely to create the sort of society that can sustain other sorts of ownership rights.
What we do instead is subsidize the protection of property rights of acquisitors -- with the dire consequences now observable in the technology creation field.
Seastead this.
Filing a patent in the UK is only £200. Same for a trademark. Hiring a patent lawyer to concoct legalese for said patent is very very expensive indeed.
It's really a general problem with "the law".
"I think one reason that electronics companies don't stand up to the music and motion picture industries is that the latter have unified organizations to act behind."
It's more a question of who needs whom? Does the content providers need the electronic industry to sell their content? Or does the electronics industry need the content providers to sell their product?
Anyway, there's a lot of stuff that the electronic industry produces that have nothing to do with content.
Let me be clear. IP is a good thing.
Just lost me. IP is a tax on people who use an idea to benefit the person who first brought it to public attention. It is useful only insomuch as it encourages the USE of new and better ideas. Discovering an idea, having an idea, these are not a benefit to society in and of themselves. The benefit of a good idea is measured in how broadly it is utilized compared to conflicting inferior ideas. Having the idea in the first place is a prerequisite, but only that.
So why is it a given that IP is good? Creating an inclination to have ideas by creating a disinclination to use them is NOT the open-shut case that the author or anyone else makes it out to be.
If we're really interesting in furthering society, we should be setting up a system that creates motivation to create new ideas and ALSO creates motivation to USE those ideas. How that should work is open to debate, but the fundamental premise is not. It is an obvious and incontestable fact that motivating people not to use good ideas hurts society to some degree or another. If a mechanism that has that as an effect is considered at all, it should be the last option that is considered when all others have been exhausted.
Can any intelligent human being really deny this?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I find it odd that the ``Featured Projects'' are all in RealMedia format.....
As Much as I don't like the idea of a new tax,
This is actually a really good idea. If a patent has future promise, it is worth it to the holder to pay a yearly (or regular) fee to hold the patent (this is how mining claims are managed). The Shit or get off the pot appraoch to a patent would help.
If a patent no longer provides income , or the income is less than the regular fee, it is no longer economically viable to hold on to the patent, then there is a chance for a final cash in, eithor sell to an interested party that might have a good alternative use, or use part of the money paind into the fees as a buyout to turn the patent over to the public domain.
We Need to create an Intellectual Property Tax.
That's one of the best ideas I've seen yet regarding IP. I think a good combination of the reforms mentioned in the article and this tax could produce a viable solution to the current problem.
I'm not sure how to implement these changes exactly, but I sure am glad someone's thinking of solutions instead of just complaining all the time.
We need to write these ideas down. Nothing will change if we can't spell out to our congressmen exactly what we want.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
That's why. And it's not new.
Why are the drug policy so bad?
Do a recursive "Why are [insert indiotic policy] bad?", the awnser is: Special interest groups subvert the demographic process through bribes and threats.
Might makes right, money is power.
Until the revolution comes, get used to it.
You can't take the sky from me...
If you are interested, look at this book: Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, Susan Sell
It's a great in-depth analysis of this topic and very enlightening for anyone who thinks this debate is somehow easy to understand.
Because it's going to slow down technological advances, giving us time to work on our society. Fewer fusion power plants, more riding bikes and planting trees.
More parenting, fewer gadgets. We need a good score of years, just working on American society. We need to get the ghettos cleaned up, we need to bus kids from LA to Montana for their primary schooling (K-12). We need yearlong school sessions, with a rotating schedule of instructors.
And with IP stagnating tech advancements, it's really the best way to go. It's not a nuclear bomb and California sliding off into the ocean, it's a very gradual reduction. We're not stopping tech, we're just slowing it down.
Think of it as a tech freeze. Just like a spending freeze, but without Congress passing a new law that allows deficit spending exceptions for their state pet projects.
They already have it, for patents at least: scroll down to Patent Maintence Fees
I had a patent which I was making no income off of, nor did ever expect to, so I stopped paying the maintence fees a couple of years ago. It's now in the public domain.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are free to create (although not to register and enforce) and last effectively forever. Copyright reform is a real necessity.
I noticed while reading the article that the word patent did not come up as much as I would have thought. The interesting thing is that companies are quickly swiping up all of the patents that have not been applied for, yet folks who know better are scratching their heads. I wonder how it is that some of these patents even get awarded. The idea of Intellectual Property makes plenty of sense.
One should be REASONABLY rewarded for something that they came up with. One of the problems now is that because some things, Elvis' estate, do not seem to die, things are carried to far, with respect to copyright. I apologize that this turned into a rant and does not make all that much sense, but I think that my problem is rooted in quicksand and the more I think about it the more it seems to spiral into some thing that I cannot really understand.
Are slashdotters so unoriginal that they will let language like this story header's go by with nary a comment? This story is just dripping with assumptions and unjustified bias.
Do you want a discussion or a rantfest? The article brings up some good issues, but assumes from the outset that many policies are "bad" only because it seems to be common sense. Common sense is a good guide sometimes, but shouldn't always be taken as unassailable. There are many counterintuitive effects in the operation of economic incentives.
This header frames the article in such a way as to draw unthinking rants against IP policy, rather than a decent discussion. This is one of the reasons so many have stopped reading slashdot.
To give the author of the article some credit, at least he admits that "IP is a good thing" near the end. It is.
The goal of IP law has always been to find a way to incentivize innovation without unduly burdening society. If you learn about all the equitable doctrines involved in copyright and patent law, you'll see it's true. There is a real effort to be fair and equitable.
There are many problems in the operation of the system, as well as in some of the copyright legislation, as with all aspects of government. But framing the dialog in this way is not productive...
I've said this before here and I'll say it again. Even though all you coders know you want to throw out that ancient spaghetti codeded system and start all over, you can't and you know it. It's often there for a reason and needs to be respected as something that works, for good or for ill. It may need to be refactored, but not trashed.
That is the proper approach to law as well, and I'd like to see some responsible recognition of that in slashdotter circles.
Since software is ultimately nothing but math and math cannot be invented only discoved (2+2 always equaled 4, E always equaled mc^2, calculus was all around us, is merely had to be discovered and expressed), then how can software be patented? It merely had to be discovered and expressed (copyright or left counld apply to a particular expression).
This hoarding of knowledge could ultimately be our undoing. An example: The fact that parts of the human genome are "locked" up in patents, prevents mankind the benfit of of that knowledge.
The classic part of economies are "make something" or "do something". Now we have folks that don't make anything and don't do anything, they merely demand payment for knowledge, so that someone else can make or do something.
This is a very scary trend that shows no sign of stopping.
People need to remember: "Knowledge is power, but only if shared". Hoarding it hurts us all in the long run.
No. He's just left the building...
It's a big problem with no simple solution. The real problem is trying to put a container around ideas and concepts and calling them "Intellectual Property". But that's what the Information Age taught us: Ideas are extremely, extremely Valuable.
Protection for IP is in place to give monetary incentive to people (or corporations) to create things (in order to drive the economy, make the world a better place, etc).
If I create something useful, it would be nice if I get compensated for my efforts. If I create something really popular, it stands to reason that I would be compensated on a relative scale. If I create something and someone comes along and steals all my ideas and makes a fortune on them, that's an injustice.
If there were ZERO IP laws, then you favor those with the big bucks. Simple: steal some idea, market it as your own and drive everyone out of business. Corporations would chase away any monetary incentive to create something and artists/developers would only be left with "personal pride" as a motivator.
Unfortunately, "personal pride" does not put food on the table. Thus, you definitely need IP Laws in order to police the soulless corporations who only see dollar signs.
Just off the top of my head, I feel that corporations should not be allowed to own IP. It doesn't feel "right" to me. Corporations are soulless, mindless entities with money, they cannot actually CREATE. What I mean is, only the ACTUAL creators (i.e. people) would be able to own the IP and (as employees) could license it exclusively to their employer for a maximum of 2 years (or some reasonably small number).
This still gives corporations incentive to fund research and secure the IP, and get a product out before competitors, but it reduces some of the incentive to blindly secure IP wherever they can.
When the "exclusive" term is up, the actual creator(s) can market the IP anywhere (including to their employer) but it can never be "exclusive", meaning if a competitor is willing to pay the license to the employee, the IP owner cannot refuse. They can even release it to the public domain.
I know this doesn't actually solve the bigger problem but it feels like a step in the right direction to me anyway.
Something Witty Goes Here
The different interests of media companies and equipment makes goes some way to protect us. But Sony is now a big player in both areas, and can be expected to go for whichever side it expects to be more profitable. Such cross-ownership puts all the decision-making power in one place, and should be prevented by government regulators.
I think that the U.S. should do away with the "Credited to" part of patents. Inventors should be able to LICENSE their works to companies, not sell them. Usually, the person who came up with the invention gets screwed, and the corporation makes out with the big bucks.
An example of this is Kary Mullis, who invented PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction). PCR is a breakthrough process that allows for specific strands of DNA to be replicated, often up to billions of times, quickly and easily. Mullis got paid $300 million for his invention by a corporation to sign off the patent to them. PCR is now a multi-billion dollar-a-year industry, and the company profits while Mullis watches as he doesn't get a share of the pie and counts his remaining money from 15 years ago.
I think there are a lot of things wrong with how copy protection techologies are being foisted on an unsuspecting public. I'd like to hear from you a similar discussion. Being devil's advocate for a moment, why should self-interested companies be permitted to shift the balance of fundamental liberties, risking free expression, free markets, scientific progress, consumer rights, societal stability, and the end of physical and informational want? Because somebody might be able to steal a song? That seems a rather flimsy excuse.
http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The electronics makers are suing one another over IP and patents constantly.
IP is a fundamentally flawed concept. It is rooted in the notion of government protectionism: based on the false notion that there can be no innovation without government monopolies. It is anti free-speech, anti-free market, and thus generally anti-democratic as well.
What is a fair balance between:
* Sustaining the economy
If business wants a free market so much, give them one. It's not the role of government to "sustain the economy": let businesses rise and fall on their own merits. End the IP monopoly handouts; let the best business win.
* Fairness to the general public (a balance between the public good, and ability for individuals to be employed by IP-centric companies)
Why are there "IP-centric" companies? If a company can't leverage it's first mover advantage, and produce a superior product, it should lose market share. Making the argument that R&D is a waste because the government won't grant a monopoly on production rights is absurd: it's protectionism of the highest order, and completely against the equality of the free market.
* Rewarding creators and inventors of intellectual property.
Why should the government provide hand-outs? Everything that is created was first thought of by someone; and nearly everything counts as "intellectual property".
Tangible goods fall under copyright, industrial designs, and patents: intangibles such as paintings fall just under copyright. Even dance moves or martial arts techniques fall under copyright, in my country, as "performance art".
The very notion of "Intellectual property" is odious. It is nothing more and nothing less than the outright grant of important portions of my intellect to someone else. It's becoming illegal to me repeat words, sayings, or even colours (see Matell's trademark on certain shades of pink, for example), become "someone owns that knowledge". It's not legal for me to read an entire book out loud, only what a IP court deems "a reasonable portion" of that book. The author's rights trump my rights to free speech.
IP is anti-free market, anti-free speech, and just plain unfair, period. It's all well and good to laud important intellectual discoveries: but if you're going to go for a socialist system of government patronage, just do it, be up front about it. Hand out your grants openly, pay the public coffers directly into the favoured arts and sciences, and let the public see exactly what's going on, and judge for themselves how appropriate it is.
Don't hide behind monopolies and censorship of free speech rights, and claim you're doing it "for the public good". Don't cloud the issue with the absurd notion that an inventor has natural rights to his discoveries, as expressed by my intellect. Respect the fundamental principles of democracy; and trust people to be smart enough to find ways to innovate without government interferance.
--
AC
The first time Joe Sixpack realizes how difficult it is to make a mix tape of his favorite Toby Keith songs for his sweetie
Not difficult at all. Just run sound card output to tape deck line input. Ye cannae stop the analog hole.
While I would agree that some IP policy can be overboard, the basic reason for IP is a necessity for innovation. Why would anyone spend money to create something new if it could just be ripped off by anyone w/ nothing better to do that reverse engineer their ideas? When companies make products that are supposed to have a lock-in, don't you think they take it into account when creating their pricing? e.g. You can go to Circuit City this week and pick up a TiVo for free after rebate (www.slickdeals.net). If you could simply point TiVo's subscription service to XMLTv or another free location, do you think TiVo would still offer the deal on their PVR? DRM sucks, and lock-in sucks, but that doesn't mean companies won't do it. I still have my crappy Archos jukebox while all my friends (wife included) own IPods. Meanwhile Sony built a total IPod killer, and made it so it will only play sony's music format... thus no one will ever buy it. Maybe as more customers become "Tech savy" they will, as a mass, start to move away from products that have lock-in, I sure hope so. But in the mean time, the problem is the abundance of dumb consumers, not IP policy.
Every once in a while IP needs a check up and re-evaluation. Our laws are dynamic and fluid and they need to re-evaluated from time to time. And frankly the current state of IP is getting a bit out of hand.
My dad always said if some law suddenly makes everybody a criminal, then what?
Exactly -- There's no direct economic tie between the size of the patent and its maintenance costs. (Litigation is the primary maintenance cost today, and it's one with a very high variance relative to the underlying patent.) If there was some way to guarantee that a more expansive patent would cost you more throughout its lifetime, we might see a reining in of "whole world" patents and better usage of those which are granted. One way to do this and fund the basic research necessary for future competitiveness: keep the patent system exactly as it is today, but tax patents based on their purported value and apply that tax to basic R&D.
m ent_rosenblum_mayjun05.msp. A subscription is currently required (or you can buy a paper version on a newsstand), but after it's moved to the archives, it should be freely accessible.
A bit of shameless self-promotion, but Legal Affairs just published an article to this effect at http://legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/argu
You're making a very common mistake in implying that innovation is always or necessarily driven by capitalism or the interest in making profit. That is wrong - in some cases this interest may speed up innovation, but in many other cases innovation is being blocked with trivial patents etc. Innovation always happens, whether there is money to back it or not. Look at slashdot (= blogs; innovative product, presumably developed without any commercial interests), Linux, Firefox, Apache...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
So in practice a patent is actually a way of burying an idea. Patents simply don't work.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
For instance, the company that owns the Empire State Building in NYC lists the asset on its general ledger as being worth exactly $1.
I'd buy that for a dollar.
No seriously. Whenever you use self-assessed value to determine tax on a property or exclusive right, it should represent an offer to sell the property.
It's ironic that the only asset the Feds charge a protection fee for is patent maintanence.
Don't most states charge a tax on land and the permanent structures thereon?
That's a very interesting idea. Let me expand upon it (and see what other slashdotters think...):
In this scheme, the original IP (patent or copyright) request would include an estimate of the costs that went into generating the IP. Society would then agree on an acceptable profit margin (which might vary from industry to industry). The IP would be protected up until the costs had been recouped, and the profit margin had been reached. At this point, it would be judged that the company had made sufficient profit, and the IP would be released into public domain. In this system, companies do not make endless profits. Rather, each work is rewarded commensurate to the effort put into it.
Of course, this system seems easy to abuse. Any corporation could mis-represent the amount of work that went into a project. In fact, who would determine what employees had contributed to a project (and hence their salaries would need to be included in the calculation), and what employees had not? The logistics would be hellish.
A possible way to discourage inflation of this "desired profit margin" benchmark would be to require a licensing fee proportional to the requested final sum. One could even require the licensing agent to hand over a significant fraction of the desired profit sum (perhaps 10%), which would be held until such time that the desired profit margin had been reached. The interest accrued on this money would be used to fund the IP bureau (it would not be given back to the company). This temporary loss of capital (without even obtaining interest from it) would highly discourage companies from requesting ridiculous profit margins, since locking up money is bad for the bottom line. This would also allow fair prices to be set on works, and would discourage companies hoarding patents or taking out patents merely speculatively. Each patent would have a cost and expected profit associated with it. An author could set a reasonable cost for a book that took him one year to produce, perhaps 60,000$. The 6,000$ investment he would have to make would not greatly inconvenience him. The laws could also stipulate refunding of the held fraction if the IP holder wishes to immediately release the IP into the public domain. That way, IP holders would have to make realistic decisions about their works. If profits were not matching expectations, they could cut their losses.
In order to further encourage innovation by independents, these fees could be waived for sufficiently small profit requests. It could, for instance, be free for any request of 100,000$ or less, which would allow independent writers, musicians, programmers, etc. to achieve reasonable profits without investment. In fact, the system could be non-linear, as taxation systems are: for small expected profits, no fees would be required, however the proportional fee would grow as the desired profit grew. This would force companies to accurately predict what the expected profits would be, to accurately assign a value to a given piece of IP.
Comments?
A thought occurs:
How mobbed up are the record companies? How many wise guys and friends of friends actually run that industry?
Are they specially treated in Congress, even tho their revenues are tiny compared to the PC and home entertainment companies, because there are Very Special People who might get upset if they are ignored?
None of us is as dumb as all of us. http://www.despair.com/
Say hello to my little sig.
"If we're really interesting in furthering society, we should be setting up a system that creates motivation to create new ideas and ALSO creates motivation to USE those ideas"
Not what you are saying mind you. That is most likely right. What is just wrong is what I am about to say, but I must. (This is an answer to you.)
The hot broad incentive.
What we need is for hot hollywood stars to promise dates to inventors who patent their inventions while giving free access to all who have no patents or all who will do the same with all of their patents.
I am not sure how the hot broad incentive can be applied to copyright. Perhaps dates for all who put their works under a copyleft license.
Might not even need to be all, just a hot broad date lottery.
Got a new patent and licensed it as above? Put a new work under copyleft? Get in the lottery. New drawing each week.
How about it ladies?
[ducks!]
Truly AC.
That is so wrong. Would it work?
Without IP people would be free to use GPL code any way they want, without contributing back.
Without IP, nobody would be able to download the GPL code in the first place; they'd have to rely on tape drives or CD burners.
Or did you mean "copyright"? In that case, without copyright, people would be free to use executable computer programs any way they want, including contributing commented decompilations to the community.
The way I see it, there are two seperate arguments in the IP debate.
First, there are the technological patents. I believe that if a company or person invests its resources in the development of a technology solution, then it has the right to enjoy the benefits of that development how it sees fit (for a reasonable period of time - we have to allow for truly innovative ideas that change the world and become ingrained in our culture(s)). That is a necessary component of innovation. People need that incentive to work toward something. Some people are looking for financial gain (Microsoft). Other people just want recognition (FOSS developers - although some get financial gain also).
The problem arises when patents are granted for obfuscated ideas. The operative term in my argument for protecting someones technological solution is SOLUTION. Abstract ideas that anyone could come up with if they only had a high enough grade of pot don't qualify as solutions. The patent office should not be awarding patents for those... but they are. That's the problem with that side of the IP debate.
The other side of the debate is creative content and copyrights. With this side, I believe that the content creator has the right to protect their creation and distribute/use/sell/whatever any way that they wish. However, today, most of the issue is with copyrights that aren't owned by the creator. Most artists sign over the copyright of their recordings to the record company in exchange for the power the record company suposedly has to make the artist more money.
There's nothing wrong with that, except, as TFA points out, the rights are retained long after the production is no longer commercially viable. So, the productions end up not being accessible to the public because it would actually cost the record company money to release the recordings or publisher to print a book for sale. So, these companies sit on the work and deny the public usufruct just because they can't make money on it.
Today, most recordings are only commercially viable for a few years. Very few, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, continue to sell and be produced for longer than 5 years. Copyright law should provide that if the product is not commercially viable, then the copyright should be released to the original creator. If the creator doesn't want to make it available, that's their perogative. However, most artists I know would rather have their works enjoyed than sit on them. I believe that that would resolve the copyright issue.
How do you propose paying for art outside the current system?
The way it operates now, the "cost" is spread among consumers. If only one payment is required, and after that it's free, then the cost for that first unit will go up. RADICALLY.
Once the cost goes up on that first unit, the buyer of it, will insist on some controls over it, once he's paid for it.
When I pay a plumber to fix my sink, that doesn't mean that everyone is then allowed to use my sink forever more. It's still mine. My asset to control, etc.
So if I pay a princely sum, for a particular piece of music from someone I like, I will expect similar controls over it's use henceforth. Otherwise there's no way anyone would ever pay out serious cash for art.
I think I'll quite happily stick with the current system over what I've just described. The system we have is not perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than it could be, too.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
This is the best, most concise argument against intellectual property that I have heard. I have long thought along similar lines, but haven't been able to clarify my thoughts as much as you have.
I will now copy your post and send it to a bunch of IP partisans.
-------
Incite and flee.
say we go back to the basics, set copyright back to the original 14 yrs. doesn't that mean that GPL'd code would be dumped unprotected into the public domain? doesn't that also mean that larger companies that manage to stay around for a while (ie Microsoft) would be able to take those 14 yr old projects and impliment them in closed source packages?
has anyone considered this? as the GPL is the darling of this here crowd, would it be worth letting go of the transparency of older projects? i'm thinking it would be, but how do those of you with more "zeal" think it would pan out?
Rise up in the cafeteria and STAB them with your plastic forks!
At least, not until the next computer he buys has only digital output on the soundcard and the speakers have a digital input and a small D>A converter built in.
And in just about every pair of computer-size digital speakers I've seen, that D>A converter goes through an amplifier to a miniplug connector for analog headphones. Call me back when DRM'd digital headphones become affordable to people like Mr. Sixpack.
But the quality loss with using it along with typical consumer-grade equipment will be so great as to render widespread copying over many generations of the recording impossible.
Which is the entire reason why the RIAA has backed off attacking the analog hole. When making a fair-use mix tape of copyrighted recordings of copyrighted songs, why should "widespread copying over many generations of the recording" be permitted? If you want to do that, use Free music instead.
Not only were people dialing up BBSes long-distance and using Zmodem (or Xmodem, or Kermit, or...) to get such files in the past, but mainframes were exchanging data with each other in various formats (sometimes worldwide) well before TCP/IP came along.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I was thinking more along the lines of "submergence", apropos of that sinking feeling one gets in a corporate environment where stupidity is mandated from On High.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Here's a solution to the problem of frivolous patents or submarine patents. The patent holder, in order to maintain the patent, should report the yearly royalties and profits due to the patent. Then, provided the time limit (which BTW should be 40-50 years regardless of the lifetime of the author or selling/licensing of the patent) has not been exceeded, the patent is maintained until revenue from it falls below 5% of the peak year's value. To avoid frivolous patents that the holder never uses, a token revenue of say $10,000 could be assigned for the patent's 5th year. Why wait 5 years to do this? To give legitimate patent owners time to develop and begin selling their idea. So all frivolous patents would expire in the 6th year, yet inventors (or their heirs) of all useful patents would enjoy 40-50 years of income. But if the level of income becomes trivial sooner than that, joe public could then use the idea without fear of legal repercussions. This idea could also apply to copyrights.
Seems like capping it at life, doesn't take into account premature deaths. I think some accomodation should be made, past death. Not 75 years, by any means, but some period. Seems reasonable for an heir to get something for his antecedents labor.
Perhaps 14/28 years, or 14 past the creators death. Whichever comes first.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I've spent a lot of time with doctors (there're a whole lot of doctors in my family), and being interested in medicine and healing is never the reason why they picked that profession.
To get back on topic, it's kind of like the musician who's just tring to become a "rock star"... they're usually not the best of the bunch.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
bureacracy
If you couldn't live very comfortably for the rest of your life off $300 million dollars... what is wrong with you?!
With that kind of money I'd quit my job, buy a mansion and a yacht, and spend my days lying on the sun deck writing F/OSS code.
You need this poster!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Second: who's going to be responsible for doing the valuations, and how much will it cost?"
h t_Term_Reform/Default
Let each copyright or patent owner value their own asset.
Oh, but they would value it to low.
Well, we handle that with compulsary licenses and forced buy outs.
Set the value at X and set a useful lifetime. Anyone can license the patent at X/y or the copyright for X/z. What should y or z be?
Plus, if the value is X, anyone or group can give you X adjusted downwards by the percentage of useful years used/left to go and copyleft the "property" or put it in the public domain. Or they can give you twice that amount and buy the remaining useful years from you.
"And there's one other BIG problem that I can see: every single creative work is automatically copyrighted, under the Berne convention."
We need to change this so the default for non-marked works is a copyleft license. Doing that will probably be very hard. Ideas anyone?
http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Copyrig
"The point is that most intellectual property has NO value, or at least doesn't have value in the definable sense, for much of its' lifetime. Stephen King sat on the manuscript for "Carrie" for years before finally getting it published, when it turned out to be worth bazillions. How can you possibly value something like that properly?"
Might have to treat copyrights and patents differently, which should not be a problem as they are treated differently now in any case.
Copyrights? No need to value or pay tax until "published."
Patents? No need to value or pay tax until patent is granted, or "product" based on patent goes to market, or until a license to the patent is "sold".
Somethink like that might work. Right?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
I wasn't suggesting anything like a long term of holding it, after the creators death.
But I think it's not unreasonable to allow inheritance to pass along the rights to a created work, for a short period of time.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
They can't keep drugs out of prisons. What makes people think they'll be able to keep drugs out of society even if we give up all our freedoms and turn the whole country into a prison?
Of course, on days when I wear my tinfoil hat, I think that making everyone in the US a criminal is what the government is actively trying to accomplish.
At $200 a pop virtually nobody will go to concerts. So there's no income stream there at all.
And do the labels get a slice of the revenue from the concerts? Someone, somewhere is going to be fronting money to the artists for production, etc.
Right now, I'd wager many/most recording artists make nothing for their CD's etc. It's all sucked down by the labels as an advance. If you kill off the revenue stream from recorded music, the labels are gone. There is no motivation for them to advance anything to artists, at all.
At first glance you may think that's nirvana. Unfortunately recording music still isn't cheap. And recording, and marketing professionally, is quite expensive. Without a major label, selection will go down. WAY down. I'm friends with guys that have major label releases. And they have no expectation of paying back their advance. But without the album(s) they've released, they wouldn't be touring the US, either. And that's where they are making a living.
So if you remove the labels from the equation, suddenly they aren't able to tour the US and earn a living with music. And they are now a bar band you/me/anyone never hears from again. A net loss in my book.
And my point about the rights to the art, still applies. You're advocating that the existing system be torn out, without anything in place to replace the income the artits, and labels have been recieving.
I don't want control desperately. I'm merely aware of the constraints on the system. Someone, somewhere has to pay for art, or the selection will be greatly reduced. And it's far more likely that money will be paid, if it's a fairly small price ($10-15 per CD) than if the first person to pony up covers for the rest of us.
And don't even think of suggestion something along hte lines of the NEA, on a larger, international scale. That would be a horrible system as well. I don't want *any* government sponsored organization being the sole arbiter of culture, and art.
I don't think the system we have is perfect. But so far, I have yet to hear much in the way of proposals for systems that would work better.
Simply saying what we're doing now is bad, isn't good enough. How about a reasonable suggestion for a system to replace it with? $200 concert tickets to see a band at a club, isn't it. That's for sure. Doesn't begin to address the realities of the market, in any way.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Sorry to be a stickler, but c'mon, democratic isn't that hard to get right, Mr. Berra.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
That's a well reasoned argument, but I thnk the real reason reason dead writers aren't writing any more is because they're dead.
cynicism is frequently justified
In other countries the IP issue is less important - corporations are not considered people. and there is less of a culture to use IP law as a tool to crush your competitiors.
i keep forgetting to post this idea i have. Most of this crazy copyright extension is related to a few big companies wanting to extend copyright length. We can in essense make the law different when necessary by allowing extension of copyright for a fee. normal copyright should be about 35 years, and extension beyond that can be done for about $10,000 a year. if that amount is more than the author or heirs deems worth it to extend the copyright, then the work passes into the public domain as it should. But for the few cases and extreme ones like star wars and disney, the whole of the copyright laws wouldn't have to be messed up for the rest of us, just because a few companies are will to fight so hard and spend so much to extend them. This helps all of us.
Will -the ac.
So they will be able to continue to produce things you like.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke