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."

Comments

Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!

[RouterSlayer]

So are we going to see a real-life Boston tea party all over again?

Are we going to (hopefully) see thousands of people throwing boxes of Microsoft products into the harbor?

Who can organize this and when can we have the party?
(I'm serious!)

and bring your x-box 360s too!

Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!

[SilverspurG]

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.

Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!

[Floody]

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'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 ...". 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.

This isn't exactly a new phenomenon; it's only been going on for the past 10000 years or so.

Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!

[mellon]

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.

Re:Throw your Microsoft boxes into Boston Harbor!

[Almost-Retired]

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

Nonsense!

[mwfolsom]

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-

Re:Nonsense!

[MrWorf]

I agree... Rather than compete with different non-interoperable standards, the companies will be forced to compete with better products. Sure, there will be casualities in the beginning, but in the end, it will benefit the endusers in terms of better working software.

As for open-sourcing all software aswell, that will be harder (ie, take longer time) but since the standards are open, they're forced to compete with functionallity and implementation aswell instead of just adding fluff (I heard MS Office 3000 XP Ultra Chrome Edition(tm) will be able to brew coffee for you when it finds the wordrate too slow), otherwise they'll fall behind and users will switch application.

(Hmm... guess I repeated myself somewhat with the last paragraph, ohwell)

Re:Nonsense!

[Foobar of Borg]

Or, to put it another way, if the for-profit software/IP companies can't even compete with something that is free, then they are really screwing something up somewhere!

Tea Party?

[TeacherOfHeroes]

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

Backed By Microsoft Shill

[Kope]

The Initiative for Software Choice is backed by Microsoft.

Yet another shill decrying the evil of sharing information.

Re:Backed By Microsoft Shill

[Fox_1]

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.

Straight Talk About Copyrights

[argoff]

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

Re:Straight Talk About Copyrights

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'd just like to address a particular point you raised there.

The information age is forcing the commoditisation of information and the ugly death of the copyright system. [...] Well, over the next several years, the copyright system will not only be changed, it will become effectively dead. [...] The information age is doing for information services what the industrial revolution did for production.

I truly hope this is not true. The principle of copyright is sound: to encourage those with the ability to produce useful and/or entertaining works to share what they create for the benefit of others. It is the corruption of this system, such that giant middlemen like the megacorps of the publishing and media industries reap all the rewards while effectively dictating terms to both sides through a complex monopoly, that causes pretty much all the problems we see today.

The solution to this, IMHO, is simple: copyright should not be transferrable, and should remain for the duration with the creator(s) of the work. Instead, the law should allow for exclusive licensing agreements, and probably restrict them to a relatively short period to avoid the same sorts of abuse we have now where anyone wanting to get published has to accept terrible terms from the megacorps in exchange, or go independent and take their chances.

The analogy you suggest, between the information revolution and the industrial one, is probably rather closer to the truth than most of us would like. Consider that in days gone by, skilled craftsmen and knowledgable traders could bring quality goods to society who wanted them, while still catering for those who just want cheap 'n' cheerful. In contrast, in today's industrialised economy, almost everything is cheap, nasty, mass-produced rubbish (or at least nasty and mass-produced). It's hard to find a skilled craftsman even if you want one and are prepared to pay for his services.

Right now, most software is released full of bugs, and the fact that some consumer device you've paid tens, hundreds or even thousands for doesn't actually do what it's supposed to is just "the way it goes". No-one who has a better way of doing things has much chance of getting into the market and taking on the big players. As a consumer who prefers quality to quantity, I find there's no-one competing for the quality end of the market, because the money isn't there to go up against the mass-market industrial firms.

If the system were fixed, the effective cost of entry would become lower, more niches for smaller players would become viable, and those with a superior product could ask and receive a fair price for it without disadvantage or risking having their market wiped out by the big players on a whim. In time, they could increase their market share, driving standards up for everyone.

However, if the system were disolved rather than fixed, you would embed today's status quo just as various other industrial firms have done, and the concept of a quality product would be just as dead in software and high tech goods as it is today in average consumer fare. Perhaps that's what the market wants in its short-sightedness, but it's certainly not what I want, nor in the long term interests of society.

Netcraft confirms it

[saskboy]

TCP is Dying! IP is near demise, and Iraq's insurgency is in its last throes.

confiscatory government policy

[erturs]

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 decision has nothing to do with OS

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times does this have to be said? The Massachusetts Open Document standard has nothing to do with open source. It is about open standards which do not conflict with copyrights or patents. Open standards have been used for ages to handle everything from which side of the road a car should drive on to what technologies are required in new automobiles.

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.

Is it just me...

[PhilHibbs]

or is that article so full of shit that it's hard to know where to start?

All together now

[TubeSteak]

All together now: "Intellectual Property"* is a privilege, not a right.

Your patent does not make you a unique and beautiful snowflake. The gov't does not usually invalidate patents outright. More often than not, they force you into a compulsory licensing scheme.

OMG ITS COMPULSORY!!!111

Calm down. Some governments won't even bother to license it.
Asian bird-flu example.

If the government feels that its national security is more important than your patent, it can and will take your "IP". In a small fraction of cases, the government says "You can't patent that idea. It is to sensitive." And guess what... you can't file a patent.

Ultimately, patents are a gift from the government to you.

*In this case I'm not including copyright...
even though its a privilege granted by Congress,
it has the word 'right' in it.

What a load of cobblers...

[MosesJones]

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.

So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitalism?

[MagikSlinger]

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].

Times are Changing

[ajs318]

The whole article is nothing but a bad-tempered whinge. Aren't you glad that the people who used to fit oil lamps to horse-drawn carts didn't feel the same way that Microsoft and co. feel today?

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.

From the article:
"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."
- Eric Kriss.

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 ..... that's just sweet, considering which state kicked off the whole Open Standards thing.

IP = Taxation Without Representation

[gabble-blotchit]

Speaking as a Brit: AFAIK the British tax on paper was a major instigator in the war of independence, because it represented a tax on free speech. IP protected file formats is the exact equivalent today.

IP protect file formats means MS is taxing us for the right to communicate. Every email containing a word document I receive is tantamount to saying I can't communicate unless I pay MS (and by that token, contribute to the US economy :-) ) for the privilage. Every JPG copied to a FAT formatted solid-state drive which is taxed by MS represents a limitation on Free speech etc.

That's why OpenStandards are the opposite of pre-Boston tea party, in fact they are the Boston tea party.

Chuck the tea in the river, let's brew our own!

FUD through Astroturfing !?

[golodh]

According to Melanie Wyne of the Initiative for Software Choice, we are facing disaster.

"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!

Re:Who is John Galt?

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:I don't understand

[mOdQuArK!]

Don't gasp so hard. I know it's a novel idea in this day and age. Almost unthinkable.

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.

Biased nonsense!

[mcvos]

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).

who is the Initiative for Software Choice

[Anonymous Coward]

"Melanie Wyne is executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a global coalition run by the Computing Technology Industry Association"

"Microsoft is a member of the Washington-based Initiative for Software
Choice, that has written to Australian MPs asking them to oppose open
source preference Bills .."

http://www.sam.org.au/club_news.asp?clubid=4685&ne wsid=3651

"In August 2002, Microsoft became a member of the Initiative for Software
Choice. The ISC has close associations with the Computing Technology
Industry Association (CompTIA) based in Washington DC .."

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6927/print

"One editorial labeled Massachusetts' OpenDocument Format plan as the "domino" that will cause other governments and private parties to follow suit," Melanie Wyne

There *is* no mention of a 'domino` or any phrase to that effect on the linked to article. There is this quote thought:

"Heck, it's just standards...Outside of some politicians and some Microsoft-backed industry groups, there's an overwhelming support for this thing," he said. "It's kind of hard to argue against it." Bob Sutor, IBM

http://news.com.com/OpenDocument+format+gathers+st eam/2100-7344_3-5942913.html?tag=nl

"Through privately owned and developed IP, American and European IP companies have given back untold public benefit" Melanie Wyne

This is nonsence. It was because of the lack of IP legislation that companies prospered by utilising a common pool of knowlege. If it had been locked down we would have no national electricty grid, television, radio or a car industry.

What you are trying to do with your IP legislation is get a lock down on the developing markets. So they pay you to use their own software on their own computers.