Slashdot Mirror
The Demise of IP?
meetmeonaholiday writes "CNet has an interesting article on why intellectual property owners should worry. Melanie Wyne explains how open source and open standards will lead to the downfall of IP and hurt competition rather than aid it." From the article: "As part of the discussion between Massachusetts and software developers who would be affected by the state's mandate, the designer of the OpenDocument Format policy, Eric Kriss, flippantly stated: 'Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property.' This sounds positively pre-Boston Tea Party to me ... It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further 'develop' it."
This is simply stupid - more spew from those that hate Open Source!
The reality is that Open Standards/Open Source will foster competition rater than stop it -
M-
This is not 'pre-Boston Tea Party', it's just that the sovereign state doesn't feel like being held hostage by proprietary formats - in this case, MS's .doc files
because we all know competing on the basis of the quality of software (in the massachusettes case) instead of proprietary format lock-in is really anti-competitive...
There's no logical outcome to the situation at all unless it's more of the same.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
The theory that we've all been taught is that copyrights are "intellectual
property" rights that protect creators, and give them an incentive to make
creative works that provide personal and public benefit. The truth is that
property rights exist to allocate finite resources, not to artificially
choke supply for the sake of incentive. Rather than protection, or a free
market property, copyrights are more like a regulation that micromanages how
people can use information. In practice, they are dangerous to rely on and
lock out more opportunity then they promote.
History has shown that just protection of property rights leads to strong
incentives, but coercion of incentive does not necessarily lead to just
property rights. Simply because an institution calls something a property
right, doesn't mean that it is. If, for example, an industry used the
government to artificially restrict the natural supply of food and called
shares of that monopoly a "property right", it would be very easy to see
how the artificial distortion of markets would not only cause opportunity
loss, but harm to society. Copyrights are a way for some industries to
use government to artificially restrict the natural supply of information
and force the market to center around information control rather than
service value. That causes opportunity loss, harm to society, and a burden
of enforcement that is too heavy to bear in the information age.
Normally copyright concerns would not be so eminent as they have been
effectively used for hundreds of years without failure. However, things are
different this time and faith in the copyright system is rather dangerous.
Just as the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of the labor
market and the ugly death of the plantation system. The information age is
forcing the commoditisation of information and the ugly death of the
copyright system. It is not a coincidence that the speculative stock market
crash around 1857, regarding industrial technology is very similar to the
speculative stock market crash in 2001 regarding information technology. It
is not a coincidence that the slavery issue created a raging debate about
artificial "property rights" as copyrights have today. It is not a
coincidence the disproportional prosperity of the plantation system then and
the disproportional prosperity of the copyright industries today (That is,
unless one thinks hollywood is underpaid). Things like the harsh
punishments for merely teaching a person of color to read, vs copyright
crimes having punishments worse than rape today. These are all symptoms of
drastically changing markets and entrenched dying industries trying to
prevent change. As for those industries that thought that the entire purpose
and meaning of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the
cotton-gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit - they
were deadly wrong in spite of all the money and intellect behind them. Those
industries today whom believe that the entire purpose and meaning of the
information age is to leverage inventions like the Internet to expand the
influence of copyright controls for vast growth and profit, well?
Well, over the next several years, the copyright system will not only be
changed, it will become effectively dead. All industries that center on
them will change or die a protracted death, and all institutions that rely
on a proprietary information infrastructure will be stuck in the mud as
they suffer numerous opportunity costs. The information age is doing for
information services what the industrial revolution did for production.
However, the copyright system doesn't center around the supply and demand
of service, but an artificial supply restrictions on information that
services bring about. Over the coming years as information becomes
commoditized and service value becomes more important than th
Hey man, ;), maybe capitalism is just a transitory stepping stone along how we go about doing things... A future where we don't have to eat soma would be nice too... Now, if this dang IntarWEb would just work all the time...
Shh.
The author of the article is directing her commentary to the focus audience of small to medium business owners who have a salary ~$250k/year. She's attempting to frighten them into thinking that their government subsidies will dry up if open source comes to kill intellectual property.
The article reeks of the mindset you'd expect from Hilary Clinton.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Replace "IP" with "government mandated monopoly" (which is what "IP" really is) in the article to realize just how silly it is. "Confiscatory government policy thrusting privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners"? Sounds just like what the government does when a patent is enforced against someone who has independently developed a piece of software.
There is a time and place for government protectionism, and some forms of "IP" do serve a greater good. But what the government grants, the government can take away. Ms. Whine^H^H^H^H^HWyne would do well to remember that.
Massachusetts wants their documents in a format that they can guarantee they will be able to use 10, 50, 100, 500 years from now. They could have used a patented standard except that no suitable patented standard even exists.
That sums it up exactly though. There is no natural right to intellecual property. It is an artifical grant by the state for a definate purpose. Of COURSE sovereignty trumps it, the right of the sovereign is the only thing that permits it to exist in the first place!
In other words, when the people give you an intellectual property right because doing so promotes a good they wish to happen, when they decide that another good is a higher priority, damn straight they'll take it away, and be perfectly in the right to do so!
Of course IP people have to worry this is why Copyright now goes on pratically for ever, why patents are granted for the bleeding obvious and why no actually owns anything they buy these days they just license it.
The Economist had a more interesting, and realistic, section on this a couple of weeks back, they were saying there would be MORE IP economy not less, but that things like opening up IP often helped areas.
To imply that the US Goverment, the creator of the world's most corporate friendly IP regime is in-fact loosening the controls is about as barking as it gets.
To then follow that up with a complete misunderstanding of the importance of standards for communication and information sharing (802.11x anyone?) and imply that specifying open standards is a constraint on IP put this article right in the "honey-nut fruit loops" category of journalism.
Specifying standards is about creating commodity marketplaces and reducing the cost of entry, and as any free-market economist (as opposed to close market politicians pretending to be economists) will tell you, reducing the cost of entry increases competition, standardising a market has the ability to decrease the cost of an individual good (product) but raise the total value of the market. 802.11x is a great example of this, and so is Apple v MS in terms of how the protectionism of Apple created a SMALLER market for them as they insisted on total control of their IP.
Releasing IP is often smart for business. Morons who have political opinions masquerading as journalists really irritate me.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I see...
So having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Right now, you need to understand that if you use proprietary, closed document formats, your data is being held to ransom. If Microsoft bring out a new version of Office, your choice is: buy it, or get everybody else in the whole wide world to save their files that they want to send you in the older format. Which really doesn't sound to me like much of a choice. Finally, someone who gets it: some things are more important than money. The right of all the people to access government documents is more important than the {supposed} right of one company to make money by charging the people a fee -- no matter how small -- to access government documents. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and the needs of the few outweigh the whims and caprices of the many.
As for mentioning the Boston Tea Party
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The strongest argument in favor of copyright protection is the GPL.
Without copyright, there are no licenses, which is almost the same as using the BSD license. So the fact that open source projects tend to prefer GPL to BSD means that even open source advocates appreciate the value of copyright.
Ironically, Richard Stallman's greatest contribution may have been to illustrate the power of copyright protection.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
ANY CUSTOMER should be in the same boat: they should be picking a product based on THEIR business requirements, not Microsoft's wants. That they've been able to dictate formats for this long only reinforces their monopoly status.
Here is more information on the Initiative for Software Choice. That who article reads like a clever troll, such lines as the one quoted in the summary
"It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it.
Man, wowweee, what a line.
'Whatever that means' nicely derogative in reference to 'even the score', by it's nature an inflamatory phrase, which as far as I can tell was applied to this by the Initiative for Software Choice. Nice trick: imply that your opposition is Evil/mean/cruel/selfish/etc by restating their position with inflamatory language, then attack their position based on that language that you used to restate it.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
What Melanie Wyne doesn't get is that it takes government effort -- and tax dollars -- to enforce IP. Physical property can be guarded by the owner, but aside from having a government police force and court system to prevent intellectual property from flying around on P2P networks, how does one protect IP? And the costs are rising every minute as the internet becomes more pervasive.
There are other ways for content producers to make money for their work. They may not be as potentially lucrative as today, with an effective subsidy provided by government's artifical intellectual property rights, but there will be lots of opportunity -- especially once money stops going towards enforcing the current IP system and is instead spent directly on entertainment.
GRATUITOUS SPAM: I'm personally involved with one agency that is using alternative economic models for paying content producers. Check it out here.
The article reeks of the mindset you'd expect from Hilary Clinton.
I was right there with you up to the Hilary (sp) reference.
Actually, I would expect the opposite mindset from Hillary Clinton. This is the type of mindset that I would expect from someone who sells their vote to the highest bidder... someone like Tom Delay, or Orrin Hatch.
"It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it."
"confiscatory government policy" ??? Mandating a standard (open) document format for government use is "confiscatory" policy? What in heavens name is "confiscated"? Not the holy IP anyway.
What is "confiscated" is the possibility for the currently dominant Office software vendor to maintain a lock on office software through proprietary document formats. And how is that bad? Every software writer on the planet can use the Open Document standard for free. Including the current heavyweight. Funny thing is ... if the document format becomes standardised, then you loose an argument for buying the next version of MS Office. Competition will be more on price and performance. Bad news for Mircrosoft, the firm wich currently has market dominance, good news for everyone else. If that is "confiscatory" then I can live with it.
But who is this Initiative for Software Choice anyway? According to the Economist, the Initiative for Software Choice, is a Microsoft-supported lobby group that also made itself heard to decry the adoption of Linux in Munich. (see http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=2054746)/
Ah, now it starts to make sense. If you want to villify something in US public perception, call it "Socialist", or even better "Communist". "Anti-property" will do nicely too. If you can make that stick, then you have them on the defensive no matter what. In the absence of credible evidence try the next best thing ... and call it "confiscatory government policy".
What better way to try and rub off a scary association onto Open Document than to have an innocuously sounding "initiative" worriedly denounce it as "confiscatory". It doesn't make sense but that it doesn't matter. PR pieces don't have to make sense, they have to make a splash.
Well done Initiative for Software Choice, and well done News.Com for publishing it without comment or research!
The reason this scares small, medium and even large business owners is that with the bodies of law that uphold "intellectual property" (copyright, patent, contract, DCMA, etc.) being what they are today, the holder of a piece of this property has a de facto monopoly on its production and use for many, many years. This gives these business owners an unprecedented amount of control over their competitors. To say that maintaining these laws further competition is ludicrous; you can't have competition in a monopoly or oligopoly controlled market.
You could counter that by saying it will give people incentive to invent new and improved ideas to be able to compete, but this is nearly impossible if these ideas are incremental improvements on existing ideas controlled by intellectual property laws. There's no usable base of knowledge to build it on, so these ideas could never get off the ground.
It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. The open source/open standards trend isn't intending to do away with the entire concept of intellectual property. The intention is to prevent the leveraging of a controlled technology for monopolistic purposes. If there is an viable open source alternative to a proprietary technology, that technology can never have complete control.
It's an opposite opinion... but the mindset is the same.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
It's not about stealing ip for the greater good.
MASS isn't stealing anything.
MASS is saying "we will buy your product if you meet this standard".
Governments spec out contracts all the time.
MS arguing they won't support the MASS requirement is like arguing in favor of building a government vehicle with custom bolts and nuts that require custom tools vs building it with standard nuts and bolts that use standard tools.
Because MS was the biggest nut and bolt company- they have gotten away with murder over the last 10 years making things more and more custom instead of more and more standard.
----
As far as libertarianism goes- Microsoft is not John Galt. Microsoft is larger than many governments while John Galt is an individual. This is the failure of libertarian philosophy- it breaks down when one party can destroy the other party with impunity because of wealth differences. I personally think libertarianism is a good basic philosophy but it breaks down when more than 10 to 15 million dollars concentrates under any one person/groups control. Without many competing small groups, you basically collapse into nobility and peasents.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
Standards are useful; but yes, they do also stifle creativity and invention. With all the electronic equipment we have these days, running 60Hz 120V AC (or whatever your local standard is) through our walls is rather suboptimal; if we could supply 12V DC to our equipment instead of having an AC/DC converter inside every box, we could obtain significant savings in equipment costs, reductions in power usage (those wall warts are horribly inefficient!), and improvements in reliability.
Now, in this particular case the benefits of having a standard probably outweigh the costs of limiting innovation; but this certainly isn't going to apply in general.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
That's because it doesn't work for any practical density of people.
The moment you get enough people together, sooner or later someone is going to disagree about "what's fair". Eventually, people will conclude that they need to write down "what's fair" in as unambiguous language as possible (putting aside the ridiculous obfuscation of the current legal language).
People will, of course, still argue about what that "unambiguous language" actually means. They will need some sort of abitration mechanism to try and clarify the meaning of "what's fair" in a manner that other people will understand.
Then someone else will decide that they don't want to play by "what's fair", whether it's written down and unambiguous or not. People will inevitably conclude that there needs to be some kind of enforcement mechanism to keep people-who-don't-follow-what's-fair from destroying the society.
And of course, often forgotten, is you need some kind of mechanism to make sure that elements of the other three mechanisms don't abuse their purposes for their own benefit.
I'm deliberately using the word "mechanism" to indicate that a strong central government isn't absolutely necessary to provide these societal services. If you can figure out some individual-based set of rules that implement these "mechanisms" in such a way to cause an overall stable society, then congratulations: you're a genius! You're going to have to be a little more specific than "if you get rid of government, people will automatically play fair" though, since that gets proven not to work quite frequently throughout world history.
Phrases like: "failure by the EU Parliament this summer to pass patent legislation" (which I would formulate as "success by the EP to block patent legislation) show just how biased this article is.
And then she jumps straight from open standards (who could possibly object to that?) to piracy and the threat to copyrights and that sort of crap. Even open source software is still copyrighted (which is why Sony's use of it is illegal).
What they mean by stifling competition is that small companies, which usually spark R&D, would go belly up without IP because they wouldn't be able to recoup the investment in any new invention / IP. If everything is sold for 'free' and the company profits are based on services alone - what will happen to R&D?
I don't pretend to be smart enough to know the answer to that question. You could take the side that thousands of developers working worldwide for the greater good will lead to greater things, or that if they do eliminate any proprietary companies that software will stagnate because nobody wants to put anything into moving forward. I don't think anyone can really show which way it would go - so articles like this can speculate until the end of time based on personal opinion until real long term facts become available.
The article reeks of the mindset you'd expect from Hilary Clinton.
...". By the time you rise to the upper echelon of a major political rank, you're surrounded by egg shells and the omelette is a distant memory.
I was right there with you up to the Hilary (sp) reference.
Actually, I would expect the opposite mindset from Hillary Clinton. This is the type of mindset that I would expect from someone who sells their vote to the highest bidder... someone like Tom Delay, or Orrin Hatch.
It's the sort of mindset you can expect from either Clinton, Delay or Hatch. Power begets power, and with the exception of a very select few who manage to stay grounded to their principals (Mandela, etc), those who have it want (a) to keep it and (b) expand it. Fearmongering is a damn good tool for doing so.
I'm sure some of these politicos started out with good intentions. But, every politician knows "You gotta break a few eggs
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon; it's only been going on for the past 10000 years or so.
Physical property is a natural monopoly -- in general, only one person at a time can enjoy it fully. Thus, the government's role in regulating physical property is to regulate an already existing monopoly. Quite properly, it is generally believed that the government should do as little as possible to interfere with physical property rights. All it could do, in any case, is to take the monopoly from one person and give it to another -- it can't eliminate the monopoly (communist delusions to the contrary).
So called "intellectual property", however, is an artificial monopoly. In the absence of government intervention, software and similar works could be enjoyed by an arbitrary number of people without loss. The tradeoff is that there would be less incentive to create it in the first place. Our society has decided that this incentive is worth protecting, and so is willing to grant these artificial monopolies. But we should never forget that they are artificial, and a fiction created by government fiat for the greater public good. And, sometimes, the greater public good is served by the government not granting the artificial monopoly.
If you've ever actually written any code, you already know this: producing something that is easy to use is hard. Coming up with the algorithm and the data structures isn't trivial, but compared to getting the thing so that it's useful to the end user, they are. Ironically, the thing that's hardest is the thing that's covered by copyright - you copyright an implementation of an idea. And the thing that's easiest is the thing that gets the most powerful protection - you can patent an idea (which is a scandal, by the way - patents are supposed to cover implementations, but at this point what they cover in the software arena is, effectively, the idea itself).
So what this means is that someone with a lousy implementation can corner the market if they get the patent first. In fact, someone with no implementation can corner the market. The thing with the least value winds up being the thing that controls the outcome.
Go figure.
...often convey meanings or philosophies exactly opposite of those actually espoused by the organisation?
The Initiative for Software Choice is backed by Microsoft.
It is indeed. Also note that they are strong proponents of software patents (which are totally inappropriate--the solution to any problems with software IP should be addressed with copyright reform) and have lobbied for the retention of Microsoft formats as standards in government. Apparently merely the ability of non-MS employees to see the specs without paying a boatload of money for the privlege is as open as any of us deserve.
The issue is really being badly distorted. No government in the world has brought forward legislation to shut closed source applications out of competition--the closest any policy comes to that ANYWHERE is to simply require that at least one open source alternative be included in a bid/selection process. State legislation mandating the use of officially open-standard file formats makes no mention of open source at all. Microsoft, Corel, Sun or any other corporation is still welcome to provide software to governments under such a policy. All it requires is that import and export filters be available to support proper file format standards. This INCREASES choice and makes industry competition MORE open and fair. One would think that an organisation named "initiative for SOFTWARE CHOICE" would embrace such a policy.
Instead, this supposedly "capitalist-friendly" advocate of "choice" is fighting hard to preserve strong IP laws and shut out open standards. This is neither democratic NOR capitalist. Ms. Wyne and her compatriots at the ISC are really against choice and are essentailly promoting communist/socialist ideas: they advocate the protection and promotion of business models that perpetually rely on protectionist government legislation, and attempt to block legislation that threatens the position of protected monopolies by exposing them to genuine competition.
Really, it isn't like the government is forcing Microsoft to hand over all the specs to Office file formats so the govenrnment can use taxpayer dollars to develop compatible software to distribute to every citizen for $0. THAT would be "communist" or "pre-Boston-tea-party". I'd like to know what MS is so afraid of. With their resources it would be trivial for MS to make OpenDocument filters for its Office applications. Are they so insecure about their products that they need special legislative conditions to assure their market position? I happen to think that apps like MS Word and PowerPoint are great in terms of features and usability that can compete on their own merits without lock-in. Yes the competition would be more challenging if it were more easily made compatible, but is there something wrong with Microsoft that they cannot survive without 80 percent of the price of their software being profit margin and even higher percentages in market share?
The "Initiative for Software Choice" indeed...the choice of software vendors to lock-in users as they please perhaps. It is certainly not about true choice.
Unforch, when an open source idea seems bent on a major debut in the market, thre is always some yahoo that scribbles it down on the back of the knapkin as he sits in the next booth with his hearing aid turned all the way up, just so he can run to the Patent office and get a monopoly he can then charge royalties for.
This is exactly what happened when the fcc setforth new rules and protocols for the digital alert now used in the EAS system.
3 or 4 years later (the patent office is always that far behind) we all get letters from some legal beagle whose mother should have been spayed, demanding $1500/year royalties for use of "their" patented methods.
I don't believe that any of us broadcasters even took the time to compose a go get screwed message. We ignored it, and rightfully so, based on the fact that this was a government edict, and we damned sure weren't about to pay some slimeball to use what the government said we _had_ to use. We in turn threw it back into the equipment makers lap along with the commission, saying we wanted indemnification against this patent.
The equipment makers gathered up all their notes and presented enough prior art to predate this slimeball by over 2 decades, and that patent quietly went away. But to actualy have a publicly available "we made a mistake" notice to all who got that letter issued by the USTPO? You must be new here, never happened unless we wasted our dime and called somebody who might have had an interest in seeing it revoked.
I was all for sueing the idiots for damages if it was upheld on a rehearing, and there were some pretty big names in the business thinking along the same lines from the conversations I had with a couple of them.
There needs to be a balanceing of interests in both patent, and copyright arenas vis-a-vis the public interest. Today there is none, as in absolutely zip protections for societies ills directly caused by our draconion laws directly purchased by M$, Disney & Company, et all.
When its pretty much an established fact that the piracy effects only the middleman, and not the talent, the talent often being the beneficiary of the distribution of their work via pirate channels making it more popular at the concert box office, its no wonder that so few feel any remorse for the copyright violations they may commit, they aren't harming the artist in the least. Its time the talent got paid a reasonable fee per sale that IS NOT IN ANY WAY DISCOUNTED other than by pro-rated agreement, by the total production and advertising costs associated with the production of an 5 cent cd. In other words, everybody needs to accept an equal sized piece of the gamble including the guys in the middle as to whether or not this particular cd will or will not be a hit. That appears not to be the situation now as the talent is expected to shoulder it all, and a million seller can still leave people like the Dixie Chicks in the red according to the creative accounting so prevalently used.
Thats BS, pure and simple, usually found in pastures shared by cattle. Be carefull you don't step in it as it reduces your choices of where to go have dinner unless you are in the Omaha stockyards near Johnny's.
--
Cheers, Gene
Which makes more sense?
Shooting her. We have enough idiots in this world.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Intellectual Ability should replace the concept of Intellectual Property. IP law blindly assumes that creativity is limited and there is nothing that count be wanted from the creator after the product of their creativity is available. Today that isn't true at all. Often IP isn't as valuable as the minds that created it. The change from putting value on creations to putting value on creators is a major economic change and such changes are always a little painful but for the good of all. The industrial revolution was a painful economic change but I doubt many would say it hurt the world economy in the long term. Doubtless people who produced their products and couldn't adapt to the changes went out of business during the industrial revolution. So it will be with the intelligence revolution.
As a tax payer I don't want my government paying for any IP to be produced that isn't available free of cost to the tax payer. That means research, software, and all other IP not of a sensitive (for national security) nature. If we're spending millions of dollars on software then we should be spending it on something that everyone can use freely.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.