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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 think that as a community we should provide answers to key questions as well but I am interested in data-centric answers:
1) Do patents stiffle innovation? That's the main argument pro/con. The answer HAS to be an economic one, ie an econometric study or something similar for me believe it. I hear too much rhetoric and NO hard data from either side.
The U.S. Constitution, Article I. Sec. 8 believes protecting the right of inventors will encourage innovation. Our community keeps saying 'well, in software that's different, the framers never had software patents in mind'. We have to show numbers again for this. Software was once NOT patentable so the data is there.
2) What is a 'good' length of time for copyrights? Yes, balancing the rights of authors to their works and the right of the public to access those works free of charge for fair use or after a 'reasonable' length of time makes sense. The issue of what constitutes 'fair use' and what is 'reasonable time' should once again be backed up with data that shows that under a given copyright system 1) authors are being remunerated fairly, 2) the creation of new works are not being unduly stiffled and 3) the public is not being hampered in their fair usage. My nirvana would be to run a copyright simulation engine that takes in different copyright models (ie times of expiration, usage scenarios, etc.) and outputs metrics such as income from works, amount of fair use, increase/decrease in works produced, etc.
Anybody has any ideas on how to go about getting hard data answers to these issues or am I being naive and it is not possible to get answers?
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.