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."
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.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
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?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
Deconstruct the State
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.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.
I quit!
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
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.