Slashdot Mirror
Royal Society Issues IP Charter
An anonymous reader writes "The Economist
and the Guardian
both have stories about the release of the
Adelphi Charter – an international blueprint for how
intellectual property should be made – by Britain's Royal
Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce.
The Economist says “The Adelphi group are a varied crew
ranging from Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian culture minister (and pop
star) to Sir John Sulston, a Nobel-winning scientist who helped
decode the human genome, and James Boyle, a law professor at Duke
University. They believe that the intellectual-property system is
starting to lean so far in favor of private enrichment that it no
longer serves the public interest.” The charter calls for
evidence-based policy, and a balance between rights protection and
the public domain. It also condemns business method and software
patents."
The answer is obvious when you consider the Slashdot effect, that we can overload servers with traffic just by browsing to them. We should conduct a campaign of letter writings, followed by Slashdot attacks on government servers until our demands are acknowledged. The same thing can be organized at local levels for practically any political cause (and overloadable resource) through the net.
Our weapons for freedom can be our webbrowsers, because most of us are too untrained, too cowardly or too afraid of the very real jail sentence that awaits to pick up a gun and revolt.
Not speaking for the radical libertarians at all, but Ayn Rands' well reasoned view of patents and copyright (as detailed in "Capitalism : The Unknown Ideal" ), if implemented would NOT allow the patent of software, business methods or existing genetic material. Further her arguments provide solid support for the approach taken toward these issues by most slashdotters. Any Rand also predicted the problems that are now occurring in the intellectual property field due to non rational decisions made by patent offices.
True libertarianism would dictate that lowest cost producer triumph, since copyrights and patents are artificial government-sanctioned monopolies. The default state of things is that some farmer invents a better plow, and others copy it for their own use. Someone tells a story or sings a song, and others embellish and change it in the retelling. Only when you can prevent someone from making something, and thus have an artificially restricted market, does it matter whether or not company X is in danger of losing "billions of dollars" through "piracy". Look at China and India (although things are starting to shift) as examples where they can take almost any input and produce at very low cost, to the benefit of consumers. I'm not talking about dangerous or deceitful ripoffs, but very well constructed generic copies of drugs, and of CDs and DVDs licensed for sale in China to compete with ripoffs that are a fraction of prices here in the states (US$3.00).
Speaking as a writer and designer who theoretically benefits from copyright law (I say theoretically, because if ever I had to go to court over copyright, the court fees alone would bankrupt me), copyright and patents, although they are treated as tangible property, to be bought, sold, and lent against, should not be enshrined in common law AS tangible property. You can see this attitude at work when businesses and controlling individuals have an expectation that this "property" can generate profits indefinitely, without any sort of maintenance, upkeep, or recompense to the government and the people, for an artificially maintained monopoly and the tax-supported infrastrucuture built around it (like the FBI anti-piracy division.)
every slashdotter to make 1000 copies of the Adelphi Charter and deliver them to random letterboxes in his/her neighbourhood.
I think that it's a good thing that the more mainstream-oriented press is reporting on these issues - from personal experience, I can say that most people have a fundamentally flawed idea of what patents are about.
I had a conversation about it with my parents recently, and I was rather shocked to find out that they thought that the ONLY purpose of a patent was to give an inventor the ability to milk the market for as much money as possible (that's not the way they phrased it, of course, but what they said in essence). They didn't realise that there is a bargain behind patent ("we'll give you a limited-time monopoly, and in return, you make your invention public so that after a while, everyone will be able to make use of it"), and that patents are only supposed to be granted when the invention is sufficiently new to justify the granting of a (limited-time) monopoly.
Somehow, they never thought about that, and that's despite the fact that my father at least has a lot to do with different kinds of businesses, job-wise.
Until this changes and until the general public know *why* there are patents and what they are supposed to accomplish, the situation most likely will not change (or if it will, then only for the worse), and any kind of reporting on this in the mainstream press can only be a good thing.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
extended period copywrite protects microsoft in two ways:
first, would be valuable code in window 3.1 that would help the people writing windows emulation write better stuff. even though it's win16, it would still help to understand where ms started and give clues to where it went.
second, i would expect that there is a lot of source code out there (not just ms) that would have evidence of wrong doing. patent infringement would still be an issue for several more years and trademark/servicemark infringement (not as likely) would be an issue for a lot longer. while the statute of limitations might have run out, it would give ammunition to organizations claiming copywrite infringement.
i would also expect other bad things to be found is source code.
eric
An interesting article that argues for radical reform of copyright (do not let the words "intellectual property" spring from your mouth) can be found (in an unusual place I think) here. Maybe the tide is slackening and will begin to turn soon.
since there's no way to find out what our world would be like if IP protections hadn't existed.
There sure is. There are many nations that never enacted IP laws or don't enforce them. Look at the state of the film industry in Hong Kong for example. During the mid-90's Hong Kong produced over 300 features per year and had a yearly income of more than a bilion HK dollars. In 2004 the produced only 64 features because rampant piracy prevents studios from making money on film.
There are plenty of examples of this sort if you take the time to do the research.
Isn't that the wrong way around? Shouldn't the politicians have given a really solid reason why we should obey their law and finish by making sure there are a lot of people who agree with them? And don't you think such laws are automatically invalid until such rationale has been given? Perhaps in a dictatorship your way around is correct, but not in a democratic republic.
Since all laws restrict our freedom in some fashion or other, the burden of proof must always be on the person claiming that a law is necessary. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that copyright should ever have been extended, or that patents should ever have been applied to software.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
In fact, if copyright must exist, this should apply to *all* things protected under it. Copyright should be an opt-in system that requires the lodgement of the work to be protected in a "public information store" to be valid.
Also, since copyright is primarily used for giving "intellectual property" actual financial value, the length of a work's protection under copyright law should be linked to how much "value" it generates, but I digress...
We do believe in laws. We just don't believe in passing laws to restrict freedom. In a nutshell, the Libertarian point of view is: Get out of my way and I'll get out of yours. I should be free to do anything I want, so long as I'm not hindering anyone else from doing the same.
Not that voting for a Libertarian is going to help you. He who has the biggest campaign budget wins the election. If you're not "on the take" you can't possibly beat the people who are. Therefore anyone who is in office is there because they've accepted bribes. End of story.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Anyone who wants to understand false "property rights" only has to open up a history book and read about the 1850's. Just as the slave plantation system had to die for society to enter the industrial revolution, the copyright content controll systems need to die in order for society to enter the information age. And as other technologies make it easier to repliacte discoveries, patents will eventually need to die too.
Yes, slavery. They called it a property right, they screamed there was no incentive without it, they said it was responsible for great wealth and prosperity of American business and commerce. And it was all bunk, even though it was geniuses that were saying it.
Well the same is true with copyrights and patents. Anyone with an IQ over 20 can easially see that they are not anything like any other kind of incentive or free market property right. And most people with an IQ over 80 can see that inspite of the theory, that is is far more the exception that copyrights or patents help the small time creator than it is the rule.
In fact copyrights and patents are not only bunk, they are often pure evil. Like how copyrights have ripped apart american culture and replaced it with hollywood and ruined the persuit of knowledge in student text book industry, or like how thousands of patnets are sat on and not used for anything but to lock out competitors. Or how disputes and lawsuits in the world court involving AIDS patents arguably caused over a million people to be dead from AIDS in Africa who wouldn't have been otherwise. And now, for copyrights, they pratically want to shut down the internet and microregulate every technology chip maker in the US. Well I say F**k em, on the internet copyrights are dead and they don't even deserve the token support they are getting.
"I wonder how frequently I would need to mail $100 bills with "Repeal the DMCA" on them to my congresspersons before they would do something ..."
Hmmm that is an interesting idea, a campaign to put on $1,5,10,20,100 dollar bills "Repeal the DMCA" then simply spend them. Have the person's head say it as a speech balloon, if enough people do it it can make headlines.
Probably illegal I'd guess in the United States, to deface money?
Nice little protest.
The whole IP terminology is defective. Consider for example that as state enforced and state granted monopolies the concept of IP has little in common with free market economy, and even less with any form of 'property'. As a taxation system where the monopoly rent can be compared to a private taxation right on specific products, the IP concept is far from both left and right politics and really shows its roots; it's mostly comparable to some form of feudal economy system where nobles were given such monopoly rights or other taxation rights in exchange for supporting the crown.
Unfortunately, most of the players have an active interest in using such flawed terminology, as they would otherwise find it very difficult to obtain any serious support.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You are shifting the burden of proof and rather distorting the facts: You may only ever have seen exceptionally weak arguments, but that is not because only exceptionally weak arguments have ever been deployed - quite the converse is true*. The problem so far has instead been that no argument with even a semblance of strength for introducing software patents has ever been produced. And however weak you think any argument against the expansion of patentable subject matter is, it automatically wins unless you have a strong argument in favour of that expansion. But the expansion has occurred anyway of course, and in the face of strong arguments and strong opposition from industry and academia. That many companies, academics and individuals had to make such arguments at all illustrates the appalling state of recent policy making in this area (if you can call it policy making). Any credible economist will tell you that patent scope expansion without prior empirical and sound theoretical justification is verboten. Too bad - the damage is done and in the US it seems the fight's effectively over now, but the rest of what I want to say is appropriately Eurocentric anyway.
*
http://researchoninnovation.org/online.htm
http://www.si.umich.edu/~kahin/mip.html
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/mirror/impact/index. en.html
http://philsalin.com/patents.html
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul05/1557
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=stor y_16-8-2005_pg5_12
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/index.en.html
"You have to be prepared to deal with issues like why expressing a particular piece of logic in C or Ada doesn't deserve patent protection, while expressing the same logic in Verilog or VHDL, which look identical to a non-programmer should deserve that protection."
That is definitely not an issue. One does not ask whether or not some invention deserves a patent, but whether or not it is patentable subject matter at all and your example is a poor one because if the claims of a patent are directed to the expressions of logic, then they are software patent claims.
"Likewise, why a device that fits the description in a patent claim should not be protected if the implementation happens to be (even in part) carried out with an embedded processor with embedded code, even though it's not at all apparent to the outside world that there's any software involved at all."
The distinction between hardware and software is not useful and is not at all relevant to the question of whether a patent claim is a software patent claim or not. One way to discover how the distinction between software patent and non-software patent is determined (and it is not always easy) is to read the way it is expressed by Judge Peter Prescott QC in his recent CFPH decision, in which he carefully and fully interprets the EPC Article 52 exclusions. Unfortunately, Prescott's interpretation seems to me to leave a lot of room for claiming things such as image enhancement techniques derived from purely mathematical considerations, but at least compression algorithms and data manipulation and data st
This idea came to me: We should stick a copy of the Adelphi Charter, along with essays and papers supporting those positions, in archives with music, software, movies, and other media, name the archives for the media (of course), and put the archives on peer to peer networks and torrent trackers where they'll be downloaded. As people download and redistribute our media (everyone loves stolen music), they'll find political notices bundled with it.
Given those points as a backdrop, your assertion that what you call "piracy" (and please do stop using industry-sponsored emotive buzzwords) caused the production of films in Hong Kong to fall of is certainly false.
c leid=2175&pubid=5&issueid=551 6.htmli racy.html. htmls _1999_March_22/ai_54400833
It is no accident that cheap methods of reproducing DVDs coincided with the demise of the HK film industry.
http://cio-asia.com/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&arti
http://english.sina.com/taiwan_hk/1/2005/0430/296
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/8801/jcnop
http://www.pwchk.com/home/eng/e&m_article_apr2003
http://www.grayzone.com/hkmarch99.htm
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/i
The above articles describe economic slumps as a factor, however they point to piracy as the primary reason of the demise of the industry. Basically few will invest in making a new film because the returns are crippled by piracy.