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."

Comments

Fatalism

[Chrontius]

"Top mice vote to bell cat" Yeah, yeah, more we can't win attitude.

Will current posters please instead offer suggestions for how to get the Government to pay attention instead of whining? Or at least, do both? How many millions of smart (don't prove me wrong) people read this? We're a force of Nature on the Internet, capable of manually DDoSing servers into a meltdown.

Let's turn that power to doing good -- statistically, at least one person here is bound to have a good idea.

Re:Fatalism

[Raul654]

"Will current posters please instead offer suggestions for how to get the Government to pay attention instead of whining?"

Easy answer - in discussions with 'said government officials, point to other innovative or useful applications of copyleft and the public domain. GNU and the GPL, Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia are probably the best examples. (Full disclosure - I am a prolific Wikipedia contributor). The surging disaster that is copyright and patent protection threatens such projects. On the other hand, their redistributable nature has made them wonderful sources of the most unexpected applications - witness the incorporation into google of Wikipedia's database for Google Answers.

Re:Fatalism

[belmolis]

I think that to see lots of organizations and individuals taking public positions like this and making sure that their government representatives are aware of it. So long as outfits like the RIAA are able to give the impression that they represent the "content creators" and that the only people who have problems with the way "IP" law has developed are people too cheap to pay for their entertainment and long-hair hippie programmers, they'll stay in the driver's seat. It's important for prominent scientists, engineers, inventors, film-makers, authors, musicians and the like, in short, the real creators and innovators, to make it clear that they regard the current IP regime as intolerable.

Re:Fatalism

[QuantumG]

Peaceful protest no longer works. Violent protest no longer works. A military coup won't work. So what's left? Campaign contributions. The only way to influence politics is with money. Therefore the people who influence politics to get money are the ones who will be able to influence politics the most with money. No, the only way to get out of the copyright mess we are in now is to educate the public. At present they still have the right to choose to use works that are freely licensed over works that are not. When the public stops paying the copyright cartel their political influence will fade and then maybe we'll have a brief chance to get rid of these crazy laws.

Re:Fatalism

[TheGavster]

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 ...

Re:Fatalism

[Jerry Coffin]

Will current posters please instead offer suggestions for how to get the Government to pay attention instead of whining?

Sure. Start by coming up with a really solid reason the government officials should believe what you believe, and finish by making sure the governemnt officials know there are a lot of people who agree with you. As a bonus, make it apparent that most (if not all) of those people are (at least potential) voters.

It really is that simple in most cases. The problem so far has been that nearly every argument against (for one example) patents applying to software has been exceptionally weak.

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. 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.

Along with that, you're going to have to define your terms so the distinction you're trying to make is sensible to somebody who neither knows nor wants to learn the details of the issue at hand.

At least in the US, you also have to deal with the fact that patents on inventions are enshrined in the constitution, so you'll have to figure out whether you want to revise the constitution itself, or only the patent laws that are written under that constitution. Again, when/if you do that, you'll have to make your decisions and arguments sensible to relatively average Joes on the street, not just to other programmers.

In the end, laws need to make clear-cut distinctions between what is allowed and what isn't. The reasons for those distinctions generally need to be seen not only by specialists, but by by the public at large, as meaningful and sensible. If that is not the case, even if a law is passed, changed, etc., it will almost certainly be ignored anyway.

So far, what I've seen indicates that the major problem with software patents isn't that they're allowed -- it's that for a long time they were NOT allowed. The problem here is that the patent offices of the world tend to treat previous patents (and applications) as their primary source of information about existing art. Since (for a long time) patents on software weren't allowed, nobody applied for them, so the patent office lacks a base of knowledge about what's really new and what's not.

Another factor tends to apply to patents in general, not just software patents -- I think there's a general belief that the tendency should be to assume something is not not patentable, and require the applicant to prove that it is original. At least in the US, the law more or less reverses that though, saying the patent shall be issued unless the patent office can prove that it's not patentable.

There are some other details along with that (e.g. the standard of evidence for getting a patent issued is much lower than for proving it's invalid) but it seems to me that when you get down to it, the problems we see are far less with software patents in general than with the way they've been implemented, that has led to the patent offices of the world believing, in essence, that any example of having an IQ higher than the average dog qualifies as novel and brilliant.

At least in my opinion, this is where the real changes need to take place. As it happens, along with making more sense, at least to me, these are also changes that are likely to be much easier to make. Most lawmakers are also lawyers, and doing something like adjusting the standard of evidence one step higher in a particular area is something with which they're quite comfortable. My guess is that they're likely to see s

Re:Fatalism

[waferhead]

Or ban the ability for "no-persons" (AKA Corporations) to contribute at ALL. In ANY way.
That would put their "influence" back to the traditional bribery and graft scenario ;-)

No vote? NO SAY.

Re:Fatalism

[The OPTiCIAN]

Before I continue - I realise that you aren't the source of the copyleft phrase, but you're using it which is why I'm posting here.

This whole 'copyleft' catchphrase really does our cause no favours. It muddies the water and scares off people who are not left who should be our allies. Hayek is arguably the definitive right-wing, twentieth century economist. Look at this paragraph from p35, _The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism_, 1988:
"""
Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made.

[... he introduces immatierial property rights invented recently having to do with as example literary productions and technological inventions]

The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.

Similarly, recurrenc re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period (Machlup, 1962).
"""

I realise 'copyleft' is meant to be cute, but it's really unstrategic. A lot of people tend to think that impies bad economic underpinnings when the word 'left' is used.

Re:Fatalism

[Raul654]

Wikipedia doesn't exactly have deep pockets. All it would take is one costly copyright infringment suit to effectively bankrupt the project. Bear in mind that many times every day, someone will - without giving copyright law much thought - simply copy and paste stuff they find on other pages on the internet. Have you seen Wikipedia's list of possible copyright violations? It's huge.

Re:Fatalism

[Wolfbone]

"It really is that simple in most cases. The problem so far has been that nearly every argument against (for one example) patents applying to software has been exceptionally weak."

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

Maybe it will have an effect...

[bloodstar]

Quite a few people on /. feel that IP copyright and Patent protections are out of line, so support groups like this that actually take the time to make some noise about things. When magazines like Economist pick up on these issues, I hope that it indicates there is some traction in the public eye for the reversal of some of these insane copyright laws.

I think our lawmakers are bought and sold by big corporations, but perhaps, just perhaps, enough of them can be shamed into doing the right thing. And that's to remember that the goal of government is to serve the public interest, not the person with the most money.

Maybe it won't happen, but at least it's worth the try. Because I can promise you it will never happen if we don't *start* trying.

How sad

[Bogtha]

The charter lays out a "public-interest test" for policymakers to use before changing intellectual property laws: an automatic presumption against expanding rights, placing the burden of proof on those who seek this

I've always thought that it's mind-bogglingly moronic to have anything but this. Surely laws of any nature should be passed only if there's evidence that it is necessary for the public good? And seemingly no law that's been passed in association with copyrights since I've been alive has had this.

I asked this question in the AWOL Sid Meier interview, but I'll ask it again: which software company would find it infeasible to continue if software copyright terms were limited to fourteen years? Fourteen years ago, Atari and Amiga were mainstream systems. Fourteen years ago, the WWW was being invented. Fourteen years ago, Windows 3.1 didn't exist. Are there seriously people out there that argue Microsoft depends upon copyright protection for Windows 3.0 today?

Cue Idiot Who Doesn't Understand Libertarians

[Shihar]

No offense, but you have absolutely no clue in the world what in the hell you are talking about. Go do a Google search with "libertarian intellectual property". Now before you post anything else, read a few of the hits you get.

Oh... what is this? It turns out that libertarians actually fall somewhere between against IP laws or vaguely in favor of weakened IP laws. I know that +1 insightful karma tastes wonderful, as you did manage to throw in a bunch of libertarian buzz words combined with IP law and disparaging remarks, but you can do it without posting in complete ignorance.

The libertarian position in IP law is weak at best. They do NOT have a universal stance on the issue. Libertarians do NOT like the idea of a government enforced monopoly via IP laws. Only the utility of IP laws has led some libertarians to abandon the extreme position of no IP laws at all to favor something more limited. In other words, your average libertarian is more likely somewhere left of your average democrat on the issue. The most pro-IP law libertarians are moderates at best.

So, thanks for your ignorance. It really livened up my day. Hey, how about you make a post showing that libertarians are pro-war and how they love drug laws. I bet you can score another insightful post off that ignorant bullshit too.

Optimism

[NickFortune]

How many millions of smart (don't prove me wrong) people read this? We're a force of Nature on the Internet, capable of manually DDoSing servers into a meltdown.

But our power can be more usefully applied as a grassroots political force than by merely DDOSing all and sundry in an ineffective attempt to change policy. That tactic just gives the opposition a ready ad hominem attack with which to dismiss us, no matter how just our cause or how rational our arguments. As with SCO, every web site outage for the next six months suddenly becomes the work of lawless commie pirate hackers who want to selfishly stop people making music and... well, everyone looses interest, expect maybe to pass tough new laws further restricting free speech online.

Not that I'm saying that was your suggestion, but I'd hate for someone to misread it that way. I'm sure you understand.

Let's turn that power to doing good -- statistically, at least one person here is bound to have a good idea.

I think the good idea is the charter from TFA. This is a tremendously valuable contribution to the debate. For one thing, the Royal Society have considerable prestige. It's a lot harder to laugh them off than it is slashdot. The diversity of the authors helps in this regard as well.

For another the charter gives us a good talking point - something to campaign for. So you can contact your local lawmaker type and ask what he'd doing to bring about compliance with the Adelphi Charter. We can use it as a justification to ask whether the public good has been considered in respect to a specific IP ruling, and as further support for the abolition of software and business methods and software patents.

This doesn't give us any new techniques for getting the attention of government - but then we don't really need any - the old ones still work. What this gives us a lot of new, high quality ammo. My bright idea would be to suggest that we use it.

Gilberto Gil, biopiracy, and Brazil

[wwwrench]

Gilberto Gil is a pretty interesting guy. A few days ago, the guardian had this pretty interesting article about him, which talks a bit about Brazil's stance on free software. What is going on in Brazil is pretty interesting, also in terms of patents on food. For example there was a huge outcry after a Japanese firm patented a modification of the delicious cupuaçu fruit. The term "biopiracy" is part of popular language over there.

Optimal balance possible for IP?

[Alwin Henseler]

From the summary: "The charter calls for evidence-based policy, and a balance between rights protection and the public domain."

Who says there needs to be a balance at all? You have 2 extremes when it comes to intellectual 'property': a) none, read: no IP protection of any kind, and b) the kind that would give **AA bosses a wet dream. You think (what is best for society as a whole) is somewhere in between? Personally, I doubt it. I seriously doubt that the whole concept of intellectual 'property' has ANY net postive effect for society as a whole. I think it's more like DRM: good for some, but mostly a net negative, overhead, 'red tape'.

Now since around the same time that the concept of IP was introduced, there's been an explosion in literature, music, scientific advances etc. And proponents of IP protection like to say that's cause and result. I think that's bull, and pure coincidence. Anyone think the world would never have seen beautiful animated movies like those coming from the Disney studios, had there been 0 IP protection? Or that MP3 audio format would never have been developed?

We'll never know, since there's no way to find out what our world would be like if IP protections hadn't existed. But I do know one thing for sure: the overhead that IP protections cause, exist. No doubt about that. Drawing up licenses costs money, enforcing them costs money, fighting over them in court costs money, destroying 100,000 counterfeit CD's is waste (of energy and production capacity), reading EULA's takes people's time. Anyone ever tried to make an estimate how big a cost to society this all adds up to?

For me it's been clear for a while: I fundamentally don't like the concept of intellectual property (even for what I might produce myself), and simply try to ignore it as much as I can get away with. Like so many people do in practice. Oh and BTW: that doesn't mean none of my money goes to creative folks like musicians etc. It's just not IP laws that make me do that.

Can we get some protection for receipes?!

[QuantumG]

Jesus, people continue to pirate receipes every day and the law does absolutely nothing about it. It only takes mediocre cooking skills to follow a receipe, which means people who would otherwise need to engage the services of professional chefs are capable of producing meals that are comparable to restaurant quality. No wonder chefs are so poor! If they had some legal protection they could continue to advance the culinary arts without giving up their livelihood. Stop home kitchens now! It's not like software is any more complex than a cooking receipe, and programmers get legal protection for their works.

Re:Can we get some protection for receipes?!

[QuantumG]

False. Clearly and absolutely. If I reverse engineer KFC and create a receipe I am free as the wind to publish that receipe, sell it to others or even set up my own chicken selling franchise. Same goes for Coca Cola. On the other hand, if I reverse engineer software I am creating a "derivative work" and their copyright still applies. Patents make it even worse.

Misleading Title (as ever)

[2008]

The Royal Society* is an organisation that promotes UK science, The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce is different.

*Yes, they should call themselves The Royal Society of Britain or something else a bit more specific to prevent confusion like this.

IP laws are no longer necessary for the public

[Turken]

Every time I read something about IP law, whether copyrigt or patent or whatnot, I always see the same argument that if IP law were not present then the whole economy would collapse because all the content and idea producers would stop producing their wares due to lack of profitability.

Pure BS. I can guarantee that at this point in our society the abolition of IP law would do anything BUT destroy the economy of a nation or the world. Why can I guarantee this? Because the general public has become accustomed to being content consumers. When something comes along (say, digital music) that is significantly useful or good, people will consume regardless of the "legality" of it. Hence, the widespread piracy of music and the eventual development of legal download services.

People want their music, their movies, their medicines, and their meat. The incumbent monopolies keep saying that without DRM, broadcast flags, or patents, they would never produce the products that they do. I say that's just fine by me. Because even if the big companies halted all production in protest of the removal of IP laws, the public would still maintain its desire to consume, so at that point the market will be wide open for ANYONE to fulfill the neeed of the people and profit from it.

I'm not saying the IP laws SHOULD be abolished, just that they are seriously flawed and need some reform a 'la the article above. Also, the public's need for "stuff" is a powerful force (capable of toppling governments in the past), so it is only a matter of time before the current establishment of monopolistc laws fall as well. The sooner the change comes though, the better all will be.

The Economist Brings Up A Good Point

[TubeSteak]

The charter lays out a "public-interest test" for policymakers to use before changing intellectual property laws: an automatic presumption against expanding rights, placing the burden of proof on those who seek this, as well as requiring rigorous analysis to justify changes, along with broad public consultation.

This is a good approach, and yet the Adelphi principles leave important questions hanging in the air. The charter declares that software, business processes, and medical therapies should not be patented, nor copyright extended to things like databases that are simply compilations of open facts. But the Adelphites have not submitted these ideas to the same kind of rigorous economic analysis that they demand from their foes.

While I congratulate the Adelphites for keeping their manifesto below 500 words, The Economist brings up a really good point.

Where's their proof that the ideas they're putting forward are right.

Yes, I know, this is /. & we have a million examples of patents stifling innovation... but no legitimate analysis. Until there is a enough money behind the idea that copyright/patents are overbearing, no one is going to seriously try to prove it.

UK developments WRT software patents are amazing!

[FlorianMueller]

About a year ago, someone talked to me about some ideas he had for campaigning against software patents in the UK. He saw my NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign and wanted to do something like that specifically for the UK, not primarily on the Web but in political/lobbying terms. At the time, I was so pessimistic that I honestly told him I viewed the UK as a strategically lost position for us: They had those key pro-swpat MEPs (Harbour on the right wing, McCarthy on the left wing), a radically pro-swpat government, a national patent office that used tax money to promote the idea of software patents, and case law that upheld some really bad software patents (almost as bad as that of the in-house courts of the European Patent Office).

In the meantime, there has been remarkable progress on most of those fronts. The two individuals who deserve most of the credit on the campaigning and lobbying side are Rufus Pollock and Gavin Hill of the FFII UK. Gavin is the "someone" who contacted me last year. In fact, that contact resulted from a slashdot discussion. And in parallel to the political stuff, we've now seen some really good rulings by Judge Prescott of the High Court of England and Wales who has already invalidated a few software patents.

Someone said in this thread that people should make suggestions for how to make political decision-makers more aware. Here's a suggestion:
Vote Against Software Patents / Vote For Your Right To Program

We're doing this online campaign and we've already had a very good start. This is about the most important political award series in the EU, and if our camp once again demonstrates its Internet campaigning power (we're trying hard!), then this will make politicians, press and the public more aware of the software patent issue.