Boyle on Webcasters and WIPO

pjones writes "It's always amazing to see an article in Financial Times that supports webcasters and open source, but James Boyle sticks it to the World Intellectual Property Organization in his latest article, "More rights are wrong for webcasters." Boyle lays it out so that "economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money" can get what's wrong."

Comments

Beating the Right's drum: Rights vs Entitlements

[ReformedExCon]

WIPO has confused the issue, and Boyle does little to clear it up. The term "right" has been used in place of "entitlement" or "monopoly" to describe the expanded ability of a broadcaster to claim public domain works as their own for 20 years. This is not a right, this is a reduction in rights of everyone else. It is an entitlement, an entitlement to something that no one else will be allowed to have. It gives broadcasters a monopoly on works that they did not create. Boyle is correct in saying that this is bad policy. Anyone with eyes can see it as so.

But he also tackles the issue from a strange direction. He sees law and policy as a means to an end rather than the description and implementation of a general principle. Laws should reflect the general will of the people, in my opinion, rather than be used to reach a specific outcome. By requiring that laws need a specific goal (in this case to expand broadcast network infrastructure), we leave ourselves open to exactly the problem of industrial horse-trading that Boyle seeks to avoid. If Boyle really believes that these laws are wrong, why does he attack it on the effects it will have rather than on the general principle?

The problem is that by granting special "copyright" to public domain works to broadcasters, it effectively removes those works from the public domain. As a result, the freedom to access or otherwise use those works becomes infringed. This is not a matter of the new rules having no positive effect. It is a matter of reducing the amount of freedoms of everyone except a handful of quick-moving broadcasters. That is the principle at stake here, not some untestable hypothesis regarding the reduced likelihood of new networks being set up.

This is, as Boyle points out, a bad direction on the part of WIPO. It is unnecessary and harms the freedoms of almost all involved. However, fighting this encroachment of rights should not be waged on an effects basis because then we become the horse-traders that Boyle seems to despise. Instead it is necessary to confront this on the basis of first principles from which can be developed a sane and equitable intellectual property policy.

Re:If nobody obeys the law..

[plasmacutter]

The war on drugs did accomplish something for nixon and his party.

The drug bills he rammed through congress circumvent the constitution by giving congressional/legislative authority to unaccountable fda staff.
Thanks to this law a cabal of fda hanchos are able to make any drug they please illegal to even research in direct violation of the constitution, which states affirmatively that congress and congress alone shall have the right to create permanent regulations.

Make more rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, I don't think there are enough monopolies, lets have more!

UPS should be able to own the packages it ships for an exclusive 50 year period.
Web-Email providers should be able to own my emails for 50 year period just because I read them over the Internet.
ISPs should be able to own everything sent over their networks for 50 years.
I should be able to setup an open WIFI hotspot and own rights over anything anyone sends through it, for 50 years.
What about supermarkets? They should be able to say how you use their produce, for example: "you shall only use this Walmart pasta sauce with official Walmart pasta".

We need more exclusive IP rights holders, because IP rights are the cause of Americas huge trade surplus.

Re:Make more rights

[maxwell demon]

You forgot: Every time you write or type something yourself, a secretary who could have typed it for you loses money. Therefore production of any text which is not typed by a secretary should be charged a "secretary tax" to support those poor secretaries who lose money due to the self-writing of text.

Ah, and of course there should be a public transportation tax on private cars, because owners of private cars won't use public transportation as often as non-owners. The possible results can be seen on horse-carriages. Due to all those car-owners the horse-carriage business basically broke down. Now imagine there would have been a transportation tax payed to the horse-carriage makers for every car sold, and likewise a tax on petrol payed to the coachmen, to compensate them for the loss they made due to people driving cars, imagine where the horse-carriage industry would be now. Not to mention DRM measures you could have put into cars to save the railway industry. For example a regulation that you have to buy licenses from the railway companies to drive your cars, and the cars would have mechanisms which switch off the motor if you try to drive more miles than you have payed for.

Wow, Mod Parent Up

[Rocketship Underpant]

It's great that people are starting to see "intellectual property" is just another way for corporations and crooks to control people's data and behaviour once the product leaves the producer's hands. Most of the examples given could come true, and we'd have all the corporate shills telling us that Walmart's pasta sauce is "licensed" and not sold, or some such nonsense.

Re:WHAT about Medical WIPO

[gowen]

And how will those funds be distributed?

Via the NSF, to fund research.

Without wasting 90% of the funds?

One can't help but waste a certain amount of money spent on research. As a friend of mine wrote at the beginning of his PhD thesis:"If I knew how long it would take, how expensive it was, and what the results would be, it wouldn't be research"