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.'"

Comments

Money

[chiapetofborg]

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.

Emergence.... and demergence

[flyingsquid]

I recently read a book about "emergence": the idea that simple rules of interaction between unintelligent subcomponents of a system can lead to emergent behavior which is surprisingly complex and intelligent. In short, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; for instance, ant colonies, where the behavior of the colony is more intelligent than any given ant.

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".

Part of the problem

[Nf1nk]

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

Where's their motivation to?

[Shaper_pmp]

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.

attitude of society toward "artists"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Key questions.

[sundiver90]

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?

Re:choice quote:

[fyngyrz]

perhaps they arent writing because they don't have enough economic insentive on account of those filthy pirates?

I definitely think that is not the case.

Among other things, I own a literary agency. One of the oldest and most prestigious agencies in the US specialized in science fiction and fantasy. My remarks come from that perspective.

There is no shortage of writers. Quite the contrary. In fact, there is no shortage of good stories and good writers.

What there is, is a shortage of readers, more specifically, there has been a major, major downturn of book-buying.

That makes the publishers a lot less likely to buy a book. Especially good ones; the ones that make it to the shelf are the titles that are perceived by the publisher as likely to be "popular", and for reasons that make perfect economic sense: Shelf space is limited (fewer bookstores) and shelf time is limited. If books don't sell, they are remaindered or destroyed for credit (that's a very odd quirk of the publishing industry, and believe me, it has major effects on the publisher's bottom line.)

Americans, at least, are deploying the theatre of the mind upon television, movies in the form of DVDs and other recorded media. Books in general, the writer's bread and butter, are dropping in popularity like stones in the face of the new technologies. I'm not saying this isn't a natural consequence of progress, and I'm not complaining -- I'm just explaining.

The bottom line is that commercial writers are, in fact, having a harder time of it. The environment is such that it is definitely more difficult to sell your work. In this context, most writers welcome the idea that whatever work they do manage to market, will turn income for them for a longer period of time -- facing the idea that there will be less of it, they hope that what there is, can earn more.

Now -- personally -- I think they're mistaken if they take this view. There are other factors, particularly the very short time-to-live in terms of bookstore shelf life for even very, very good titles -- that will prevent long-term copyrights from giving most of them any income. The ones that do succeed, definitely make "enough", IMHO. A movie deal, something that is reprinted several times and is well accepted, those are serious cash cows for a writer. But they are astonishingly few and far between.

But the fact is, writers are not in control of this process. They are for the most part an economically weak class, and cynical or not, I truly believe that the political decisions that drive copyright law are made by money. If you consider who absurdly long-term copyrights and other IP entropy such as software patents do benefit in a consistant, industry wide fashion, you'll inevitably find yourself looking at the publishing industry (not writers -- publishers), the movie production industry, and the commercial software industry. Whatever they can create, they get to hold on to, for longer; charge for, longer; license, longer.

I would submit, not very humbly, that writers, musicians, and software authors (I also own a software company, a very successful one, and I am a musician and recording studio owner) are more than productive enough, generally speaking, to not require these long-term protections. In fact, I rather think that a truly productive author/coder/musician doesn't need them at all. Hardware patents are different, in that the financial outlay to create, and the margins once created, are so represssive to the process itself that there needs to be a follow-on reward, especially for things like chip fab IP where the outlay for the next fab is in the billions at this point in time.

Anyway, this is an issue that I have to deal with not just every day, but every hour of my working day (and I think about it a lot of my off time, too.) I am convinced that the US government, at least, is doing far worse than being "