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."
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.)
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.
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