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What's the Solution To Intellectual Property?
StealthyRoid writes "I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. At the same time, I find the current trend of increasing penalties for minor violations, criminalizing civil IP matters, anti-consumer technologies like DRM, and abuse of the legal system by the *AA's of the world really disturbing. You'd think that by now, there'd be a reasonable solution to the problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation, but I have yet to find one. So, I pose these questions to the Slashdot community: 1 — Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why? 2 — If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"
Easy time limits to stop patent camping. For example if you apply for a patent and get you have 12 months to produce a "product" based on the IP otherwise it goes into public domain. Or another one, patents not licensed (to make a product) or used for 3 years automatically go into public domain.
Good luck with that anarcho-capitalist thing.
farmers have shared seed for thousands of years. Now monstanto claims they own the seeds. When you start fucking with seeds and shit the entire paradigm of money for ideas breaks down. you are not god, we do not owe you tribute.. all IP is this way
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If we assume that technology and communications is improving, and the pace of progress is increasing then logically the duration of monopoly should get shorter and shorter rather than longer.
Nowadays if a movie is good it makes a profit within a few weeks of its release. If it's not good, stop making bad movies then.
It is ridiculous that there should be a monopoly for > 100 years.
Think about it, if copyright only lasted 7 years, do you think Microsoft would dare release something as crap as Vista? They'd have to make something significantly better than Windows 2000.
If Microsoft won't want to play by those rules, I'm sure Apple or some others will be happy to take over.
As for patents and people talking about drugs needing long patent terms, the AFAIK drug companies spend more money on marketing (aka bribing doctors with goodies and holidays) than R&D, and FDA approval.
1->no, i don't. ->because ideas and universal constants cannot be owned, much though many have tried. If an idea or a string of bits exists and can benefit others at no cost, it will propogate. Soon that constant will be as well known and accepted as pi.
The goal should be to encourage innovation and creativity. Copyrights nowadays just last too long. This encourages hoarding because you can make tons of money by collecting essentially endless copyrights. It encourages lawsuits because the value is in the ownership and money earned over time, not improving the product and giving something people want to buy right now. It discourages derivative works because building off the original costs so much, which, for instance, seriously harms hip hop music. It also discourages new works from going commercial since you can sell a proven product much more easily than creating a new one and teaching the public about it. An individual creator deserves to make money off their work because it gives them an incentive to make more and improve our lives. The current system does the opposite so the social contract is broken. Until balance is restored, I have no problem disregarding pretty much all claims of copyright, short of selling someone's product myself. Then there's patent law...
Human intellect belongs to humanity. Intellectual property is a after-fact of capitalism, not the other way around.
Intellectual Property = information.
If you want to control intellectual property, you need to be able to control the information exchanged between people. That is a very difficult thing to do, and may give you a totalitarian society as a side effect.
I lost my sig.
property and intellectual property are not similar.
property rights are important b/c of the problem of scarcity; if there were enough of everything, there wouldn't be fights over who owns what.
with intellectual property, there is no scarcity of the idea or musical recording or what not; it's free (or close to it) to copy.
IP (or some of it) can be arguably justified on purely utilitarian grounds to incentivize creativity, and certain rights are granted that are similar to property rights, hence the use of the word property, but the analogy is taken too far when people think of IP as actual "property"
1. No
Ben Franklin gave his inventions to the world, why can we not do the same? All IP is based on MINE MINE MINE and preventing people from building on your work as long as possible, under the self-interested characterization of other people as THIEVES until proven otherwise. All IP is based on rationalizations of this very selfish behavior.
We've had enough of compromise, all that has given us is unending nibbled-to-death-by-ducks as the lawyers extend and extend and extend the reach of copyright and IP and patents. Soon your great-great-grandchildren will be living off your IP which was never the intent. It always starts as "reasonable" laws passed to encourage innovation and then pass things into public domain as soon as possible.
Do people now feel OBLIGATED to send money to the heirs of the Shakespeare estate every time they quote the Bard? Do you send money to the heirs of Volta every time you use a battery? No? If you don't then you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
No, intellectual property is not a valid construct. The purpose of these laws is to promote creativity, that's the beginning and end of it. A society that views ideas as something that someone can own to the exclusion of others is not compatible with a society founded on free speech and free enterprise.
Play Command HQ online
Whenever a dispute arises regarding intellectual property, it is usually, though not always, rooted in physical property. For instance, disks, books, or other material holding that property. The laws surrounding intellectual property limit use of your own physical property. For instance, you can purchase a hard disk with the bits set randomly, but once you re-arrange the magnetic charges in a specific fashion, you are infringing upon someone else's rights. This goes to show that intellectual property is indeed an illusion. Shouldn't you be able to do what ever you'd like with that chunk of metal in your room?
You can also look at ideas akin to something like fire. You take a candle and light another candle, and nothing was taking from the first candle. Ideas are the same - they are not a limited resource and thus should not be analogized to physical property.
I live in China right now, and the concept of intellectual property is relatively new here. It's a more natural part of Chinese culture to take ideas from each other. Instead of innovating into uncharted territory, Chinese innovate in place, creating immense depth within a single discipline, for instance martial arts, tea drinking, and calligraphy. This is because there are no intellectual property laws retarding development of these disciplines, and people have been copying and improving upon each others' techniques for thousands of years, spreading across a huge nation.
Chinese culture's reputation for the mysterious and secretive also comes out of this. With no protection of intellectual property laws, valuable ideas are kept secret through guilds and lineages.
Anyway just a few thoughts.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
no more "look and feel" patents.
1. I do not believe in intellectual property. However, I do believe that creators must be compensated for their hard work, to, as the US Constitution stated, "promote the sciences and arts", or something to that effect. As such I acknowledge the fiction of intellectual property as a necessary evil, much as I acknowledge a corporation as a fictitious person as a necessary evil in order to better help commerce (though whether or not corporations should be manifest in the form they are presently in is another story entirely).
2. Simple. Flat-out time limits. They may have a limited ability to be renewed, but cannot be extended. Seven years is probably plenty for most copyrighted works, possibly with an option to extend to another seven, resulting in fourteen total. A similar system seems to have done well for patents - a little too well, as a matter of fact, from the way the patent trolls seem to have sway. I think that people would be FAR more sympathetic towards copyright enforcement if we knew for a fact that it was for a limited time. There might be ways to have a limited form of protection in the case that something is suddenly popular after being out for, say, 18 years - I'm not sure what that would be, though, and if need be, this provision could be discarded for the greater good.
Perhaps a definition is in order?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property
The system worked fine before it was repeatedly "fixed" in recent years. Increasing copyright periods to ridiculous lengths, DMCA, allowing software patents, etc.
Our system worked FINE. The Internet actually brought no new cards to the table except speed. I could go on about that one for a long time, and bring up copy protection in the context of player pianos (which court cases also involved patentability of "software"). But that would take up a lot of time and space.
In a nutshell: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke. But they did it anyway, since the mid-90s, all in the name of corporate protectionism and profit. And in the process, they broke it pretty badly.
The solution is simple: put the laws back the way they were, when they actually WORKED and we had, arguably, the best-working set of "IP" laws in the world.
If anyone believes that DRM is there to protect IP then you are dreaming. The use of DRM in most cases is to protect profits. On the other side intellectual property rights have become abused in the US by poor laws that need fixing or otherwise IBM wouldn't try and patent processes for everything including dealing with natural disasters.
Bits (a.k.a. numbers) are free. No one should have a monopoly on any number.
It's really that simple. There's this funny idea going around that if you create something "intellectual" you have some God-given right to it. You don't. Period. End of story. It's not physical property. You are not diminished IN ANY WAY by my utilization of it. In fact, trying to make it so thru arbitrary legal means simply destroys all the values that we gain by the sharing of ideas. It's an attempt to drive control into an arena that governments have desired for years.
If I have the bits, I get to time-shift and space-shift. Period. No DRM. No copyright violation. No nothing. If you persist I will show you just how imbecilic it is by time-shifting the bits and space-shifting them regardless of control schemes. My bits are not yours to control just because you created them. If you sell me a DVD it better damn play everywhere. Same for CD's and same for MP3's. AND THE SAME THING FOR SOFTWARE.
If you discover something, you don't have any rights whether I use it or not. That is the basic and fundamental aspect of our reality. Ideas are to be shared. The only thing you have right to is *attribution*. Einstein gets credit for E=mc^2. He doesn't get to decide whether I use it to make a particle accelerator or a nuclear fusion reactor.
And god-damn all of you think the words "intellectual" and "property" somehow should sit next to one another in sentences.
The 3 first posts just gives the solution using Common Good Sense (CGS). Just reduce the time of State granted monopoly for copyright or patent owners. The time limit can be determined by evaluating when shorter it reduces innovation. This shortest time is clearly domain dependent, and should be shorter for fast evolving domain and vice-versa.
The solution to intellectual property is obvious. Get rid of the intellectuals.
Trev - used to be interesting. Honest.
Why do we have IP laws in the first place? Contrary to what many evidently believe, it's not so that people or companies with good ideas can get rich. It's to foster innovation by ensuring that there is adequate incentive for people to innovate. (Read: Not 100 years of copyright so your great-grandchildren can keep milking it.) Any IP law that impedes innovation should be pruned from the books with prejudice. While it would take a rather extensive amount of pruning to eliminate every IP law that stifles innovation, a simple exemption for innovators might be all that is needed.
Although it would probably be difficult to implement in such a way that the spirit would not be overcome by the letter of the law, I would like to see exemptions to all existing IP laws that apply to those who take copyrighted or patented ideas and produce something original and of merit. If some patent-troll firm amassed a bunch of software patents without producing viable products, real software companies producing actual software could use this exemption and use those ideas without paying ransom or getting sued.
Of course, it might be better to just prune away.
The concept has its merits, but RMS makes a good point here. Using the term "Intellectual Property" distracts from what we're really talking about: Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents.
And, within that, it's possible to break things down even more. Math should never be patentable. English prose should pretty much always be copyrightable. And so on. That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? Oh, it absolutely is illusory. Big fat "duh" on that point. What you're asking is whether or not we should behave as though it's equivalent to physical property.
I do believe IP -- especially copyright -- is a valuable concept. It's not equivalent to physical property. Specifically, copying something to which you do not have the right is not equivalent to physical theft -- and, more importantly, the only way to "steal" intellectual property would be to obtain legal copyright for something you shouldn't have.
And I believe we're far too early in the game to even know what the ethics around this should be. If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system? That's a bit over my head, but if your concern is things like DRM, that's absurdly easy to deal with: Just don't. It is entirely possible to make money without DRM.
In more depth: What I would do is remove DRM from the game, drop the minimum damages (whatever that's called?) for lawsuits, and try to educate the courts a bit on technology, so that real proof is actually required.
And then, I would let the content creators figure it out for themselves.
As a content creator, I would stop seeing piracy as anything other than a competitor, and start looking at what I can do to compete. For successful examples, look at real-world systems which don't have a serious piracy problem, and also don't employ any of the tactics we despise (DRM, etc). Big, obvious examples: Radio, World of Warcraft, most books, and some indie music sites.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
To save you 300 pages of reading "Against Intellectual Monopoly," basically patents don't spur innovation, not even the ones on concrete inventions. Case after case is presented where it is clear that the idea of spurring innovation through patents is flawed at best, and highly damaging at worst. They basically prove that steam engine development was slowed down by patents and only really began to chug when the patents expired. Inventors you thought were heroes finally come across in a more realistic light. They present lots of examples like this and you just basically see the light (at the end of the tunnel?). Now, if your goal was to slow down technological progress or science itself, then maybe patents would be a good idea.
Before reading some chapters from Boldrin & Levine I was somewhat convinced that copyright at least had some beneficial elements to it that should be respected and preserved, but they sure put the nail in that coffin too. They went through the origins of copyright as a *relaxation* to a censorship regime by the crown (IIRC), and it just went downhill from there. Now it just seems like copyright is extended to every damn little thing, and that wasn't the original purpose of it by far. While they don't prove that removing copyright would be beneficial to everyone, they take a shot at showing that it wouldn't be a total disaster to authors/artists. For everyone else, it wouldn't prevent new books from being written, new music from being produced, etc., and it would be a net gainer, by far.
If you have the time to read a 300 page book this summer, by all means at least read a few chapters of Boldrin & Levine. You will understand intellectual property much better and hopefully lose a few sacred cows in the process.
You can select what you may want to read from this landing page:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
Here is how I would fix it. Copyright 7-10 years, after that you pay a tax on your IP every year, for another 7-10 years to keep it your IP, just like property taxes. This tax is based on your first 5-7 year revenues. If no revenue during first period, then a minimum tax per year adjustable by 2nd 5-7 year period revenue. No revenue, or not paying taxes on your IP then you lose your IP/copyright, becomes public domain. Regardless, after 14-20 years, public domain. ....
Patents, 20 years. No product after 2 years, patent becomes public domain.
Intellectual property protection is less about protection and more about incentive. If you copyright a given set of information with the library of congress and a person infringes you are entitled to a set amount of compensation, not based on the value of the information.
The problem is that both legally and culturally we've created an equivocation between the inalienable right of property and the "right" to own your ideas and all derivatives of your ideas.
Of course it is a good idea for government to create incentives for authorship, but infringement on that incentive is not the same thing as infringement on "real" property. There is nothing is the "state of nature" that prohibits you from coping what you see your neighbor doing or saying or writing.
Any intelligent discussion of the future of IP law needs to include a historical understating of how and why IP came to exist in the first place.
I do not believe in intellectual properties at all. From my point of view its just an artificial market that has no connection with real life at all.
I can find that it can be of some use with a very limited monopoly but if its not very short; like a couple of years, its doing more harm than good. Todays protection are so heavily slanted towards the IP owner. There has to be a balance for it to be beneficiary to the public because most new innovations and media builds on previous work. Just think about where Disney had been if they hadnt been able to rip off Grimm and all the other folklore? Where would Lucas and Star Wars be without Akira Kurosawa to rip blatantly from? Where would Microsoft/Apple/Linux stand had Xerox Parc patented their GUI? What if IBM had excerted patent and IP rights on the PC?
The world of today is full of people who have their predecessors to think for their success still they so desperately want to exclude others from doing the same in the future. IP is just a wet dream about replacing factories outsorced in endless greed and short sightedness with selling ideas and thoughts instead of actually doing something. Like a stock market of brains.
HTTP/1.1 400
You cannot be an anarchist and acknowledge "property rights." Property is the one thing society is built upon. Property is what the police protects, property is what laws enforce. If you're an anarchist, even an individualistic one, you can't be "for" property.
Sorry to break your illusions kiddo.
"Intellectual property" is a misleading term that should be avoided entirely, precisely because it leads people to assume that there is or at least may be some similarity to physical property.
In reality, there isn't. Copyrights and patents etc. are a social contract: one that says "we encourage you to be creative, and as an incentive, we'll let you profit from you creation exclusively for a while". It's a win-win situation: the creator gets to make money (if his creations are worthwhile), and the world as a whole gets more contributions to the public domain.
People need to get that into their heads again. Or, more precisely, we need to make sure that a) congresscritters aren't bought by industry lobbyists anymore, and b) that people aren't subjected to the *AAs' and others' propaganda anymore. Needless to say, these two things aren't independent.
(On a side note, trademarks are a different issue from copyright and patents; but they, too, are being misused, since trademarks are intended for the protection of the *customer*. If I buy a can of some beverage that says "Coca-Cola" on the outside, I want to be able to be sure that it really is Coca-Cola and not some concoction brewed in the back yard of someone who wants to make a quick buck; any and all use of trademarks must be evaluated in the light of whether it is for the protection of consumers or not. Or at least, that's the theory, just like the social contract I described above is the theory for copyright and patents.)
I think intellectual property(IP) rights are valid, but not equivalent to physical property rights (because the scarcity of physical property doesn't apply to IP).
People who create useful IP must be compensated enough to financially survive (and be able to produce more useful IP). That does not have to require that the IP is made artificially scarce...aren't all the photos taken by NASA are in the public domain? The photographers/astronauts who took them were paid for their work (public financing of photography).
I have no idea if public funding for the creation of IP is a good idea overall, but it's one example of compensating creators while sharing the IP freely :-) With trial and error, some equal or better
solution should be possible.
www.cgstock.com
> 1 - Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory?
It is imaginary (aka: illusory).
> If not, why?
Because the "natural" root of "property" is that if take something from you, you don't have it anymore. This is why property have been a necessary evil in human society (because if I let you take my axe and go away with it, I won't have it when I need it to cut wood). Note that the extension of property rights to real estate is already slightly dubious.
In the Imaginary Property field, if I take an idea from you, you still have it, so it you don't loose it. What you loose it the opportunity of making money from it, but that is a vastly different issue.
To see why this is a different issue, let's compare Imaginary Property to Protection Racket. Why isn't that legal after all ? I can argue that I was the first to racket a specific road, hence I should have the right to extort money on businesses or people there. This is very similar to being the same having some specific idea.
The difference between Imaginary Property and Protection Racket, is that it is supposed that Imaginary Property gives society back some value, while Protection Racket doesn't (it could be argued that correctly implemented protection racket is similar to some private police and that it could be a Good Thing if properly managed).
On can argue that Imaginary Property is somewhat worse than Protection Racket, because you can be racketed multiple time for the same thing by different people (in the patents case). In general, racketeers offer a better deal: "you only pay me, and I take care of the others".
So I think that Imaginary Property is effectively a Protection Racket, that I can only find ok if properly managed. In particular, the racket should be temporary, the amount to be paid should be low and fixed, and stiff penalties should be served to abusive racketeers.
(Btw, that is a quite a nice flaimebait, slashdot. You've got a winner here.)
That is a complex question, and it's best to start with where copyright came from.
I'd highly recommend that you read the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig:
http://www.free-culture.cc/
Physical property and intellectual "property" rights are incompatible. You simply can't successfully have both - the one necessarily undermines the other, as Stephan Kinsella laid out. See http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/, particularly "Against Intellectual Property" [PDF].
Since the choice is ultimately between physical property rights and intellectual "property" rights (and of course I already think the latter are rather suspect for a number of other reasons) I simply choose physical property rights.
When people say "but I'P' is valuable!" I say - of course it is, each EU or US patent granted steals value from literally hundreds of millions of people's physical property rights. A patent lets you usurp the value of everyone's physical property - A patent, by definition, says "you can no longer make your physical property into this particular form without my permission".
An I"P" system is death of a thousand cuts to the physical property system. "Anarcho-capitalists" who think they can support both should get a clue.
To own something it must be possible to construct a mechanism for
preserving the ownership. With movies and music this has been easy in
the past as it used to be hard to copy and move the media on which the
material was stored. With the net this has now changed, and I suspect
the change has only just started. With new technologies such as future
generations of e-book readers and rapid prototyping machines (and
later on matter compilers), larger parts of what today is "safe" IP
will become easy to distribute.
This is great news for the consumer, imagine for example that you only
have to buy one pair of sneakers in your whole life, after which you
simply scan and copy them. Not so great news for companies that
produce designs though, as it will be virtually impossible to earn any
money on them. However, this will, I think, sort itself out. There
will be ways to earn money on IP, I would for example be interested in
paying a subscription fee for having easy access to all movies and
music that has ever been made, i.e. you can charge for the easy access
but not the material itself. It will however be a bit harder to
maintain a "rock and roll lifestyle", and the entertainment business
may go back to be a low income job as it used to be in the days before
cinematography was invented.
I also think that this development will open up for more services in
custom design, where there will be an exchange between online and real
world IP production. For example, you will pay someone in second life
to make you a T-shirt design, which if you like it can be made into a
physical T-shirt in your matter compiler. The other path would be that
you have or see a nice T-shirt, that you scan and use for your avatar.
The purpose of patents is to get inventors to disclose their inventions in exchange for a temporary monopoly. It's a deal between the inventor and everybody else: tell us how you did it, and we won't compete with you for a set amount of time. The alternative is that the inventor attempts to keep it a secret, and the idea dies with him.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How about exponentially increasing fees for patent renewal and copyright protection. E.g. first year is free, second year 1000$, third year 4000$, forth 16000$, tenth year 10,000,000$. That way, researching expensive drugs still pays off while less relevant patents expire reasonably fast.
The corporations want to screw us for every penny.
That's not a criticism. It's what corporations are there for. Consumers want to get as much from them as possible while spending as little money as possible. That's just basic careful spending.
These goals are not totally compatible. So we need to find a compromise. Fair use exceptions are an example of one of the many compromises. No compromise will be perfect. The internet gave a little more power to the consumer. The DMCA gave a little more power to the corporations, but it was extremely badly balanced (especially the notice and takedown aspect).
Seriously,
If you think that defending the control over 1s and 0s is even sane, then you are not in any conceivable sense of the word an anarcho capitalist.
If you can't defend it yourself and you want to whine to big brother to protect your belief in illusory nonsense, then just man up, grow up and give up any delusion in believing in the anarcho part of that.
You are a whiny, big government pussy and nothing more. It is not at all, in any way possible to have one without the other.
The fact that you would even disgrace yourself with such a clearly contradictory question demonstrates your utter refutation of the ideal you claim to support.
In short, fuck off you whiny shitbag.
1) Yes, I acknowledge intellectual property as a legitimate construct. More specifically, I acknowledge the exclusive right to the creator or sponsor of intangible content to derive income for a limited period of time.
2) As many people have said (and I am sure will continue to say), time-limits need to be shortened. Simple enough to make that statement without a discrete number of years, I know, but I don't have one as yet.
Usage rights need to be effectively unlimited - i.e. treat the purchaser of a "licence" to access/use intellectual property the same as a sole purchaser of tangible property. I can copy, backup, sell, modify, install on multiple machines, change hardware, do whatever I like. If the copyright holder grants/sells to me a right to use that intellectual property, he forfeits all other "rights" with respect to me.
This is talking primarily in the personal/domestic setting. I realise that in the commercial world, licences which are limited (both in duration and use) are commonplace and useful. These generally, however, arise from *signed* contracts. Don't try and BS us with this click-through, shrink wrap EULA business.
Outlaw any technology which impinges on a purchaser's right to access his purchase. DRM, TPM, etc, throw it out the window.
Establish *reasonable* penalties for infringement. Million dollar file for downloading a movie from Channel BT? Disproportionate penalties tend to encourage flouting of the law, IMO. If I were slugged $100 for a movie I downloaded illegitimately, I would probably say "fair cop". Set up an IP tribunal to stop the combative litigation style of the MAFIAA.
In the same vein, do not allow IP holders to act as police (a la DMCA takedown notices). Do not tolerate any conflicts of interest by letting ISPs and content producers to get into bed together. Ban any so-called "TOS" which permit your ISP to boot you off your service if they think you are serving copyrighted material. Provide safe-harbour protection to ISPs so they can ignore threats from IP holders. Packet filtering/inspection is and should be treated as a gross invasion of privacy.
This is just a start. I'm sure there are a good deal of other great ideas.
How can you believe in restricting what people can do with ideas IN THEIR HEADS then? How can you justify government interfering in a private business transaction between two individuals because a 3rd one have been artificially protected from competition. You are not much of an anarchist or a capitalist. You favor a government planned economy where certain corporations (patent holders) are favored over others in the same of supposedly social good ("promote progress of art and science"). Sadly, the current system had effects contrary to its stated purpose.
I'm very skeptical of IP, for the most part. Trademarks are legitimate because they prevent consumer fraud, one brand pretending to be another. If anyone could use the Nike name/label everyone would be ripped off all the time. However the law should not require trademark holders to zealously defend their names or be deemed to lose them. Why encourage, or even require litigation? Patents, for bona finde inventions, not derivatives, not marketing systems, not software, not combinations of inventions (a vaccuum cleaner with a lightbulb should not be patentable, but the first internal conbustion engine should be) are legitimate. However, these days there should only be about 1 or 2 patents per year. If even that. Maybe 1 or 2 every couple of years. A patent being granted should be a rare thing, newsworthy in and of itself. Nowadays, pretty much everything new and unique has already been made. I won't rehash patent abuse here on Slashdot - you all know better than everyone else how patents are abused. No more than 1 invention per year is truly unique and worthy of patent protection (for a limited time, of course). Copyrights have proven to be worthless. Copyright provides absolutely zero incentive for artists to create works - people with artistic talent will create works of art no matter whether they can have a financial monopoly on said works. In fact, as a rule of thumb, works made for profit are far worse than works made for art's sake. Copyright has been used for nothing more than to stifle free expression, to blackmail consumers, and to purge knowledge and art from availability. I don't mean just from the public domain. Everything should be in the public domain. I mean there are movies and books that are out of print and unavailable b/c they can't be legally purchased! Anything that reduces the available knowledge to mankind needs to be done away with. But on a more personal level, the idea that people have to pay to sing happy birthday in a movie, that a restaurant owner can't turn on the radio in his establishment (let alone play a CD), or that I can't make a mix CD for a friend is simply asinine and contrary to a free society. When you make something, the only thing you deserve is credit for the work. Plaigairism is bad. Nobody should be able to take credit for your work - but credit is all you deserve. Nothing more. In sum: Copyright has to go. Patent needs to be limited to, say, the top 5 submissions per year (and that's generous, it should be 1 per year at most). Trademark is legitimate.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
But corporate interests have been hard at work. Many creative artists no longer own what they produce; the new improved laws reduce their products to nothing more than "work for hire" for their corporate masters. The creators don't reap the profit of their labors anymore. And there's also been changes in the laws that extend the protections for these creators long, long beyond what was a fair exchange between the creator's interests and the public interest.
It's not enough that the whole "protect creators, protect the public interest" system has been perverted in the name of corporate profit. To further enrich themselves, they hired marketing and public relations experts. The false concept of "intellectual property" was created and used to justify even more perversions of our legal system. You can only infringe a copyright - but if you can call it property then you can say that someone is stealing your property. Bring on the draconian criminal penalties and secure the corporate interests from having to compete in the modern net-connected world.
Using music as an example: Record companies and their trade associations file lawsuits against their customers by the thousands to protect their copyrights. Those people didn't write or perform any music; where did they get their copyrights from? They say they're doing this to protect the artists - but those artists aren't getting much (if any) of the profits from their creative works. The real creators don't even own what they create; the copyrights were "stolen" by the record companies and the new improved laws mean they won't have to release the music into the public domain for a very, very long time (if ever).
The motion picture studios have been watching and they're starting to play the same games.
Note well: none of this is to protect the artists. It's to protect corporate profits, pure and simple. As long as they can get away with using "intellectual property" to get lawmakers to further protect their profit margins they will. But at the end of the day it's still nothing more than a phrase that means less than nothing. Ideas are not property; never have been, never will.
Which is to say, I want whatever I can get my grubby little hands on. Don't hate me because I steal, and will steal from you if given any chance. That's the way I am.
I'd have put it a bit more nicely. Something like "parse error" would have done better.
An anarcho-capitalist who believes in IP is like a libertarian who advocates for a monarchy.
While drinking a glass of water is healthy, trying to drink an ocean probably isnt.
There are things related to intellectual property that are right. Ok, you created something, you deserved to be recognized for that, maybe even getting some money for it. But from there to owning all the ideas that have the letter "e" in their formulation in english, forever and ever, well, there are a long way.
A line should be drawn separating the reasonable/fair/whatever of what is not, and there are happening a lot of things in that field that are definately in the wrong side of that line. And as with drinking water, maybe wont be immediate to realize how much harm are you doing to yourself.
Enforcing an artificial scarcity will never work in the free world. The only thing that can be done is turn the free world into a police state and I think that price is too high.
The only priviso, that I can see, is that an idea that is described in *detail* with dimensions, materials and/or processes required to make it a product. Also if it appears obvious or even(especially) done previous, one should need to explain why it is different and better than what is already out there. I'm thinking of software patents in particular but there is no reason why it can't be. That takes far more work than coming up with a great idea. I've had heaps. Some if I'd worked at I may have even been the first to bring to market. I didn't (lazy) but it anecdotally demonstrates that it is possible for others to come up with a similar or even the same idea.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
$70 Billion a Year for Drug Laws While Predators Remain Free
$70 Billion a Year for Drug Laws While Predators Remain Free
Erin Hildebrandt Salem-News.com
"Outdated drug laws intended to lock non-violent offenders in jail results in more leeway and fewer arrests for violent criminals and predators.
(SALEM, Ore.) - Imagine a town, somewhere in the United States. At the local police station, Officer Joe is pouring himself a cup of coffee at the start of his shift, when a call comes in. A citizen thinks she smells marijuana coming from her neighbors house.
Joe proceeds to respond to the call, driving the 30 or so odd miles to the house. Just then, another call comes in. An armed man has taken 27 children hostage at the local elementary school now 25 miles away from Joes location.
In this extreme example, there can be no doubt that Joe should abandon his investigation of the marijuana smell and proceed immediately to the school. No officer in his right mind would consider putting childrens lives at risk, in order to pursue the smell of cannabis, would he?
But on a larger scale, when we fund drug enforcement to the tune of 70 billion dollars every year, we are effectively putting lives at risk by not funding other important police work.
Officers are only charged with enforcing the laws that we the people, through our legislators enact, and according to the priorities these legislators reflect through their funding of all of the various departments of law enforcement. We must demand that our leaders choose to prioritize the health and safety of our nations communities, over policing the personal morals of the citizens of the Land of the Free.
As a nation, weve lost sight of the forest for the trees. Weve charged law enforcement officers with the awesome responsibility of not only preventing violent crime and apprehending violent criminals, but weve further empowered them to act as the morality police, saving America from the evils of everything from cigarette smoke to cannabis to sex toys to, of all the crazy things certain kinds of fat! Where does it end?
The U.S. currently incarcerates more people for non-violent crimes, than for violent crimes. We lock up more of our citizens per capita than any other nation, even Russia, China and Cuba. Yet, according to national data from the FBI for 2006, the clearance rate for all violent crime was an abysmal 44.3%. Our current approach is not working. In all of this often politically-driven chaos, our priorities have been perverted.
Its time to reprioritize.
For decades weve waged a War on Drugs, supposedly designed to prevent and deter the abuse of ten substances through their prohibition. Instead of encouraging our citizens to abide by the laws of the land, this war on some drugs encourages entrepreneurial anarchy in a game won by survival of the most corrupt and callously capitalistic.
It has driven the major funding for organized crime and terrorism, created and maintains a black market so enormous that it rivals the wealthiest industries on Earth, and which has become directly responsible for far too much of the vigilante violence in our communities. It encourages everyone who would dare to taste the forbidden fruit to live outside of, and develop disrespect and disregard for, the laws of our land.
Instead of seeing heroes among police officers, suburbanites like me grow up to become adults who fear law enforcement. We view them as potential threats, terrorizing patients who need medical marijuana and pursuing and persecuting cannabis consumers, while child rapists are given slaps on the wrist some never spending a single day in jail, even for raping multiple children. And that only includes the small percentage of predators that are caught.
Additionally, NIDA reports indicate that survivors of sexual assault are 4-10 times more likely to abuse illegal drugs, than those who do not suffer
I do accept the concept of Intellectual Property, however I do not like the way things are horribly broken now.
The problem as I see it is that companies and a few racketeers want IP to be of unlimited length.
I think it should be treated more in line with actual property when it comes to time limits.
Just look at actual property around you. How much of it is over 10 year old? 20 year old ? 100 year old ?
Even most houses in America are not 100 year old, and even very old houses will have gone through many renovations so not much will still be at a 100 year old age.
As for Monsanto and their seeds, I find it ridiculous that farmers that don't even want the Monsanto seeds get stuck with them because of their robustness then they get sued for IP theft.
It would be the same as me taking a bag full of "manure" spreading it around with an air circulation device then suing you for getting in the way of the flying "manure".
Personally, I don't think that knowledge should be anything but free- that everybody, all over the world, should have the right to think and create freely, informed by the sum total of previous human thought. I think it is to our benefit as a species and our credit as a civilization that today, more knowledge is available to the laziest and most disinterested dropout than was in bygone years known by the wisest and most studious. And I think we would be wise to continue that trend.
Economically, though, the RIAA and MPAA have one thing right- distribution is just too easy for the system of paying for the right to possess intellectual property to continue, and somebody has to make a living. Two alternatives come to mind: the first is the charity system, where an artist earns what the people feel they deserve. The second is a patronage system, where a patron commissions the work in advance, and pays for it on a similar timescale.
I expect a lot of people to say that neither scheme will work. Generally the arguments against these systems revolve around the basic question of why would people would buy the cow when they can have the milk for free?
I don't think anybody who says this has ever waited tables. Sure, a heavy percentage of tips will be mediocre, and some percentage will suck, but considering the fact that nobody is making the customer pay, it all works out pretty well. It turns into a statistical question, and if anybody has any has any real data on that, I'd like it if you'd post it.
I also don't think it squares up with the state of the music or movie industry. I mean, lets face it- it just isn't prohibitively hard to download a piece of media. But many, many more people do it than download illegally, and that to me says that people are still willing to pay for their media, for the convenience of having it on a disc, for the liner notes and album art and all kinds of things. In other words, just because the dominant distribution channel changes doesn't mean that people aren't willing to spend some money on their music or their movies.
The question is badly formed. For starters it presents two extremes, in a "have you stopped beating your wife lately" style choice.
I do believe that intellectual effort is valuable.
However I do not believe that calling intellectual effort 'equivalent to property' is necessarily the best option. In this kind of debate, the one side will say "protect intellectual property" and the other side will say "why bother, it cannot be stolen, because if someone takes it, you still have a copy?".
The ability to trivially reproduce certain things* in bulk is what separates intellectual property from real property. Into this category we also introduce grey areas, such as Art, where a painting can be replicated in the real world (via forgery), but it can also be fairly accurately mass reproduced in digital form as a poster, without necessarily losing its 'artiness'.
But what makes this area interestingly bad is that certain crowds (of which Slashdot is one) tend to consistently massively over-rate the value of ideas. Ideas are cheap, available in great quantities, and are trivially easy to digitise and duplicate. I think the problem is the idea (sic) that all you need is an idea and anyone can become an internet millionaire. I would say that 'The Idea' is one of the least important aspects of any start-up company. The real money is in the execution of The Idea.
Now, there are certain things, like maths which perhaps should never be protected. I should not, for instance, be able to lay claim to "2 + 2 = 4", and run around suing early childhood educational publishers.
On the other hand, if some university professor, through years of effort, finds the proof to some conundrum, then shouldn't there be recognition of some kind?
And with programming, it is always going to slide around these murky waters, part maths, part art, part fish. At some point it crosses over from a trivial formula, to real effort. "Hello World" should not be protected, but if I have a company that writes a million lines of code to do OLAP better than everyone else, I shouldn't have to see it get copied by Microsoft or Oracle. Yet producing copies of that software is trivial and 'won't destroy the original'.
I think that other artists deserve recognition and compensation. I also don't think that just because touring works well for The Grateful Dead, doesn't mean that we can say "oh, we'll take away their other forms of compensation, and then the artist/band can just go on tours to make money". Additionally, there are some parts of the music process which are universally despised (*cough* RIAA *uncough*), but we can't just say "well don't compensate the evil idiots running the show", because they do perform a useful function. (They are not unlike a venture capitalist - they put up the initial capital, but then take the lion's share of the profits). Or possibly two useful functions (promotion of the artist).
Likewise in programming, we shouldn't just say "oh well, everyone should make their money purely from selling services", while that may work for one or two, it isn't necessarily going to work for everyone, and is, I think, one of the worst things about some Linux supporters, that they want to force programmers into a particular narrow economic niche.
And this doesn't even touch on the difficulty of 'design'. For instance designing a car. If anyone can just come along and copy your look, then it destroys the incentive to innovate. Just be the third mover (like Microsoft in the early days, you wait for someone to initially prove it is possible (Visicalc), then you wait for someone to prove that money can be made with it (Lotus 1-2-3), then you step in and prove it can be mass marketed (Excel)).
*I.e. anything that can be digitized
... needs to be revised, unfortunately nowadays, "Intellectual Property" is attributed more and more to those who are the first to get protection for an idea.
In my opinion, for all this to work properly, it should be the first to get a new idea.
On the other hand we need to think hard if we really want IP protection. We see patent applications for the invention of fire or the wheel, which altho laughable, show a concerning trend: "we want to own any idea that others will fail to own".
Be reminded that human societies began true development and innovation once the sharing knowledge became widely available (one example is the end of the middle ages for European societies) not the other way around. Where "widely available" means available to most ppl as opposed to those with power and money.
Superb Hosting
I am writing as a nonspecialist, but to me the problem of copyright infringement, to use Thomas Friedman's analogy, is a little like the sunrise; it's going to happen whether or not we like it. Before capitalism there was no real need for copyright that I know of. Authors were flattered to have other authors borrow their ideas; Erasmus was highly insulted when someone suggested he had written for money. It might well be that centuries from now, if other economic systems develop, that there will again be no need for such protections. In our present system, we do need some form of protection to guarantee further investment, whether it be in music, film, software, or medicine. Nevertheless, I think that much of the problem would disappear with considerably less greedy copyright periods. A film or recording might have ten years; a piece of software or medicine might have five. This would ensure profit while permitting a much vaster repository of public-owned materials, and I think the key difference is fairness. This concept sounds a little naive, but one emotion which I believe drives piracy is the partly justified feeling that copyright has been abused. I agree that intellectual property exists, but perhaps property is indeed a misleading word, as it suggests something permanent and tangible. I also think it is important to point out that free access to someone's ideas is different from plagiarism. I would not have a problem with a book falling into public domain in a shorter time period, but there still needs to be recognition of the author's origination of the work in the academic world.
The real disturbing thing is that you are asking this question at all. Here's why.
What is nowadays wrapped under the common label of 'intellectual property' (copyrights, patents, trademarks) was never, EVER, intended as any manner of property.
The ONLY purpose of patents and copyrights (trademarks being a different thing altogether) is to maximize the availability of intellectual production in the public domain.
Let me repeat that: their only purpose is to help along the enrichment of the public domain.
The temporary exploitation monopoly rights that both copyrights and patents allow are only means to that end; they only exist to make investment in creation and invention economically worthwhile. They were never, ever, meant as the end itself, regardless of what mind-boggingly rich executives would have you believe.
Which makes the very term of intellectual property a misnommer of outright Sapir-Whorf scale; let us please stop using it and denounce its use? Thanks. Intellectual creations don't belong to anyone; we just grant their creators a temporary exclusivity on the rights to make money of them. And that's all there ever was to it.
(Note: IANAL, but the above comes straight from the law courses that were mandatory in my tech studies; details may vary from country to country. Mandatory law courses didn't make me happy at the time, mind you, but man, have they come in handy since then.)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Some nice articles here:
http://www.telekommunisten.net/news?path[news]=/mail.cgi/archive/friends/20080128141114/
There are many different areas of IP, not to be confused: patents, trademarks, industrial design, geographical indications, copyright... with different issues and problems.
IMHO there are areas of IP that make sense: protecting brands, otherwise known as trademarks, so that "company identity theft" is more difficult.
Patents were initially created not only to protect the inventors by giving them a limited monopoly time but also to
1. encourage publication of inventions so secret inventions would not die with their owners, in effect creating a global corpus of invention descriptions.
2. to help distribute the collective invention effort instead of having everyone try to replicate a given useful invention, in effect encouraging innovation. this is why patents are published before they are accepted.
The problem i see with the monopoly given is that too many patents are obvious and in effect lock-down effects stifle innovation instead of stimulating it. In a perfect world, the length of protection should be connected to a measure of obviousness and to the speed of the industry. It takes longer to apply an invention in the field of trains than in the field of software.
Sounds hard but a panel could grant patents a variable length, which would also help filter through the massive number of frivolous patents that chokes the patent offices.
In fact, by its very nature it would have to not be equivalent. For example, if I infringe your intellectual property, I haven't deprived you of the use of it, as would be the case if I stole your physical property. Since the natural consequences of infringement are different, it follows that the rights should not be completely equivalent. However, that's not at all the same as saying that there shouldn't be any intellectual property rights.
A lot of verbiage has been expended on the nature of intellectual property, and whether the system is in need of "fixing". But what exactly is the problem with the current system?
The funny thing about laws is that no matter how carefully they are designed and written, they must still be enforced somehow. And by and large, it simply isn't practical to enforce every violation of intellectual property laws as they currently stand. The vast majority of lawsuits against IP infringers involve your run of the mill flagrant copyright violations: Party A creates something, Party B publishes it without attribution and profits from that action, Party A sues. In these cases, it is up to the courts to decide what the damages are for such infringement, and they generally do a pretty good job. There is even a whole body of law permitting some such uses under the doctrine of fair use. So the system is not weighted completely in favor of copyright holders.
Then there are the very few, but high profile cases that involve file sharing and such. Most of the parties involved in these cases are infringers on a grand scale--people who run sites explicitly dedicated to trading pirated music or software, for example. Certainly, one could point to a few cases where a grandmother or a four year old were sued, but these cases make up a very small portion of infringement cases as a whole, and a practically negligible percentage of the total infringement that actually goes on. But the people who run the sites know what they are getting into, and they make the choice to facilitate massive copyright infringement. Whether they feel morally justified in doing so, they are aware of the risks going into it, and should be willing to face the consequences should it come to that. Besides, there will always be others willing to take their place.
Perhaps organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have been given somewhat too much power to enforce their IP rights. But as a practical matter, they simply cannot do anything to significantly reduce the amount of infringement that actually occurs. Nor can they chase down everyone who has ever downloaded an MP3 and sue for damages, real or theoretical. The fact of the matter is that, even if it is flawed in principle, our current system actually works fairly well on a practical level. There really isn't any need to scrap the current system and start over. Refine it, perhaps, but that's why we live in a free society where we can make and change laws as needed.
Intellectual property rights are beneficial to society as a whole in that they encourage people to create who might not otherwise do so. Many industries that revolve around the creation of intellectual property simply wouldn't exist but for the broad rights granted to IP creators. To those who say that copyright shouldn't last more than 7 years or some other short time, I would counter that, as long as a creation is profitable, why shouldn't the creator be entitled to enjoy that profit? Many films and works of literature that were created decades ago are still popular today, and still generate significant revenue. Should someone else be entitled to that revenue simply because he decided to package it up and sell it at a cheaper price immediately after the copyright expired?
In fact, it seems to me that a term of copyright equal to the life of the creator and then some is not unreasonable. It benefits the individual artist as much as anyone. If not for the significant length of a copyright today, writers wouldn't be entitled to royalties on their work after the copyright expired. In fact, if you wrote a novel or a script, for example, it would be in the best interest of large corporations to simply wait the brief period for the copyright to expire, at which point they could simply use the work in any way they see fit rather than having to negotiate a fair arrangement with the content creator.
I see no way IP can equate to physical property without infringing basically on what an individual can think, speak and do. I can tolerate that such freedoms can be restricted for a time span limited by the life of the individual(s) that conceived the work in the first place (with a possible extension for a surviving spouse): this also means that I do not see IP as a tradeable/trasferable good.
A non-software example, for the sake of diversity.
As of today, Italian musicians have to pay dues to the Italian authors and editors guild (SIAE) to perform a gig entirely consisting in (say) Cole Porter standards . These dues - that can in no way benefit Cole (R.I.P.) - seriously hamper live music performance in this country, where venue owners wanting to offer live music often find themselves owing more to the SIAE than to the performers. Now THAT makes sense.
Do I need to underline the counter economic implications of this policy, which works towards making scarce resources (live performance) even scarcer in order to prop the price of something (tunes,recordings) whose infinite reproducibility should make abundant and extremely cheap?
Cheers,
alf
For the tiny improvement Vista brings it's not worth the pain/cost of upgrading an XP machine.
No sig today...
1 - No. Intellectual property is an artificial construct. You compose a song. From the moment you sing it, it's ridiculous to assert that you have a right to the knowledge of that son in other peoples' heads. Assert that you have a right to those persons not writing your song down, singing it or modifying it is just a god-complex. We are so used to the idea now, that we don't recognize how ridiculous it is.
That said, I also think that perhaps patents may be helpful in improving technology and general well being. But I also find that a rigorous study of the alternative has not been done. Would we be so much worse off if there were no patents? Are engineers going to suddenly stop searching for better ways of doing things just because they won't get rich for doing it? The classical example for patents is medical investigation, but how many good drugs have been pushed out by others less good, just because the new one has still the patent valid? Perhaps if there were no patents, medical investigation would take another form, probably less manipulative, funded by governments and others non-for-profit entities. Perhaps the end result wouldn't be so good as what we now have, but perhaps it would be better. Who knows? There is certainly little debate on the topic.
And of course copyright is just a tax on knowledge, serving no useful purpose but transferring wealth from the general public to a minority, that uses the said wealth to prevent any change in the absurd but very lucrative situation We have better medicine now than two hundred years ago, and perhaps patents have had something to do with that, but music and literature and poetry haven't certainly improved in this last two centuries.
2- N/A
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
A different approach would be to collect additional sales tax from anything that benefits in intellectual property, and then distribute this tax to patent and copyright holders.
Of course the tax system and patent system would have to be re-factored.
It remains to be seen how simple, non-totalitarian and non-bureaucratic this kind of system can be designed.
Currently something similar is done in some countries to avert piracy. Like in Lithuania there is extra tax for any storage media, that goes to paying copyright holders.
Intellectual property isn't even property in any real sense of the word. It's obviously illusory since IP doesn't exist in any physical sense.
That being said, a government-granted monopoly in the dissemination and exploitation of creative works for the purpose of edifying the public is a valid government objective and I support such a monopoly. I support the monopoly only to the extent which those goals are satisfied.
HTH
In a perfect world, where I was dictator, we'd have a 5-year commercial copyright with an option to renew for another 5. Copyright protection would require registration and a copy of the work in question would be deposited with the Library of Congress. For example, if MS wanted Windows 7 to have any copyright protection at all, they'd have to turn over the source code to the LoC.
Patents would work much the same way, but I'd have them only for physical processes where a working model of the invention exists. Business method and software patents need not apply. If someone comes up with the same process independently of another, the former need not pay patent fees.
Trademark law is, for the most part, acceptable.
Trade secrets would have no legal protections outside of standard contracts. No one would be subject to criminal prosecution for divulging company secrets.
'Nuf said.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Profits are up for cinema, DVDs, ringtones, etc., it's only the music industry which is currently suffering.
Maybe the problem is with their product, not the copying.
I think the way people listen to music has moved away from the "album" and more towards "top 40". Apple has partly responded to this and is making a lot of money from selling music. The RIAA OTOH has completely failed to respond, with inevitable consequences.
No sig today...
Parent post says exactly what I wanted to, only better.
Naturally, I have no conflict, but the submitter has to choose what's most important to them: property rights or freedom?
The rest follows from there, and there's not much middle ground if you ever want IP rights to be enforceable. Smart businesses turn IP into a service of some kind (radio, WoW, etc. to borrow another post's examples).
- I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property
so why then do we have IP at all? because capitalism can only deal with scarcity: you can not sell sand in the desert. this shows a principal problem with capitalism. and if you look a bit closer then you see that this does not only happen with intellectual goods but with almost everything that capitalism deals with: it introduces artificial scarcity:
- advertisement: to create new demand for mostly useless things where there was no demand before.
- war: the most effective way to create new demand: destroy what was there before, create insecurity and create weapons that "protect",
...
- crisis: like the bursting housing bubble...
- ....
my employer pays me to filter out spam for him. other people are being payed by there employer to send out spam. etc..etc..the capitalist system is fundamentally broken. every year 10 million people are starving even though there would be enough food to feed them all... capitalism just does not cater to those with no money...
our so called "democracy" is becomming more of a farce every day: voters being manipulated by $$$-media... those with enough corporations behind them have more money for their election campaign... this all leeds to the fact that you can only rule if you represent the profit-interests of the big corporations...
greetings mond.
Many Slashdotters are adamant in their assertion that intellectual property is not a valid right or concept. They often cite legal history, and technicly they are correct. However, it seems they are doing this more for rhetorical purposes, as opposed to actually caring about how the law is constructed. The argument usually goes something like, "IP theft isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement". I always like to counter this with something like, "would you rather I steal $50,000 from you or embezzle it?". It is readily apparent that the effect is the same.
Therefore, I personally DO recognize IP as a valid concept and right. If I'm the first cave-man to discover fire after rubbing sticks together for months, and you light your fire from mine without rewarding me, you do indeed take something from me. The fire-maker deservers to be fed from the next kill, lest the wheel-maker observes that the fire-maker starved, and decides to give up on his endeavor.
OTOH, when the fire-maker stomps out fires and demands a portion of the meat in perpetuity, he shouldn't be surprised when he gets clubbed on the head.
In other words--common sense.
Therefore, software patents -- get rid of 'em. They dont't incentivise. They just make software developers worry. Everybody knows it.
*AA enforcement? None on low-quality encodings that get radio airplay. Why? because you can already time-shift broadcast radio. Pulling it off digitally is really just the same thing, format-shifted. Same deal for music vids, which you could have legitimately recorded off MTV 25 years ago with your VHS (in fact, WB and some other studios are putting up their own YouTube channels with classic MTV vids, perhaps they finally are realizing it's actually good for their PR and not taking away from new sales). High-quality encodings and/or lossless recording should be more restricted. The penalty should be ordinary restitution: steal 100 CDs worth of music, pay 200 CD equivalent penalty. None of this $30,000 business for downloading one song.
IP in the music/vid business can be a *good* thing. Bits don't go to landfill. Availability of high-quality recordings in a manner that ensures payment will help that.
Abandoned works should lapse into the public domain, but registration shouldn't be required for copyright on each work. I could go on and on...
The short answer though, is common sense. Isn't it always? Unfortunately, it always seems to be in short supply. The laws are written by lawyers who are paid by businesses. Hence, all the legal hang-ups.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I might get flamed for this...
We have shown that socialism doesn't work with the nature of human beings as we are today. And having no IP is socialism. To say that what I create with my mind is not of value and cannot enrich my financial life flies in the face of capitalism.
Yes, the arguers will throw around that you cannot copyright a letter or a number and then that argument will be stretched into a logic that states that you cannot copyright a combination of letters and works, and as a result, there is no code, no book, no knowledge that can be copyrighted as all of our communications are simply combinations of un-copyrightable individual parts.
Well, that is a flawed logic because the process of combining words and numbers into certain orders is of value and the creation of those combinations should be something we celebrate and attempt to motivate.
Now, to say that I should have sole access to my ideas forever and that no one can ever utilize them is flawed as well because eventually someone else would come along and have thought of the same combination that I did. SO yes, the current system of copyright is flawed because they keep extending it. Kinda stupid to serve the bigwigs more money. But do remember, that I do deserve to make whatever comes with creating that product for a certain time period, because otherwise, I would have no motivation to create and the world would never benefit.
The Pirates Bay is theft. So was Napster and so is most of what occurs in the warez rooms on IRC. The foolish logic that they don;t do the stealing them self, they just allow for people to do it on their own is a foolish logic. Imagine being a judge and hearing the argument, "Your honor, I have nothing to do with people looking at kiddie porn, I just link to the websites where it is hosted. Those people choose the actions on their own." Well guess what, you are directly aiding a crime.
But that is OK for now in my books (stealing shit from the Bay) because in order for the big wigs to make money from all of the data we are stealing they need to evolve and something the motivation to evolve needs to be forced by taking money and stealing from them. Its a great motivator that, in the long term, will benefit us.
I like IP. I like The Pirates Bay. And I like my double espresso BLACK!
Mad, adj : Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. Ambrose Bierce - The Deveil's Dictionsary
google already reduced the practical lifetime of IP rights to nil.
...and avoid flaming you, unlike much of what's here.
I personally acknowledge some degrees of IP. The first and foremost IP I acknowledge are stories. Anything of that sort of creative nature deserves to be acknowledged. I feel that, in instances of short stories (as in around or less than 25,000 words) copyright should last approximately ten years. For novels, lifetime plus three years (giving the family some time to adjust to not having that income).
After that, the things I recognize most are that which I consider to be music. Yes, I realize that this is an extremely objective assessment, especially with my tastes! That being said, I feel that music, as in the actual written music or composition, should hold copyright at maximum for life of the person who dies earliest and has their name on it plus three years. Yeah, that would mean Sir Paul would hate me cause he'd actually have to be creative again, but do I really care? As for the actual recordings of it, ten years with a slightly expensive option for extending it to twenty when the ten is up so long as the masters are owned by the musician or musicians who recorded it and not some company .
As for patents, I feel that this is the most idiotic IP we keep around. Patents should have up to two years to make something happen and the ability to extend it until five as long as the person or group show a reasonable degree of progress on the final product. As soon as the product is on the market, the group should have around five years to put it to use, but if it is an individual doing it, give then ten years.
So, basically, I feel that IP isn't terrible, but the current regulations suck ass and should be remodeled. Ideally though, we as people, would put more into patronage, like paying what we really feel something to be worth, kind of like Radiohead's In Rainbows worked before it hit shelves.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
IP today? No
I beleive in the concept of intellectual property from an idea in order to ensure the original creator gets suitably reimbursed for their work. However, When intellectual property was first introduced the period was only 15 years (or close), since then it's been raised a raised untill we have this situation, of whoever patents an idea first keeps it for eternity (not quite, but the rate of IP being extended is actually faster than the time is running out, so with the trends of today, eternity) Of course that trend is completely the reverse of the intention of IP, because as the economy has grown, more money can be made in a shorter time, so surely the IP laws should shorten the time IP is protected?
As for outrageous settlements for the RIAA, I have easily enough songs to bankrupt me several times over, so why on earth would I stop taking the songs now? The difference would be between a fine of $1 000 000 and $1 050 000, either way, I simply don't have that money- if I can't afford to buy the music in the first place, why on earth would they presume I can afford a fine like that. Plus the out of court setttlements aren't proportional to the songs sold.
With modern pop music, no serious critic would claim that more than 5% of it's value remains after 5 years, by then all there is is small royalties for the odd CD bought, and most of the money has been made, that's when the IP runs out. This is just a side effect of teh type of music created now, and of course could be reveiwed if some music that aged better was produced.
God, I'm going to hate myself for saying this, but, mod parent UP. This is not "flamebait", this is truth.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I think the case with books is the strongest case for IP because its not obvious how a writer would make money without protection. Nevertheless I think that even in case of books there should be no IP. And I am a writer with two books published in the Netherlands and one in the US (http://usa.tiouw.com/content/index.php?/archives/19-You-Unlimited,-mind-reading-the-masses-with-NLP.html) First of all most writers hardly get published anyway. Second of all they wont make much money on the books sold themselves. So you need an alternative business plan to make money on books. So without IP Protection you still would have many books published and only a few of them would be copied without paying the author. So the difference for most authors would be very limited. It's only a very small group of writers that would get hurt. But that hurt is also limited, because ... ... without IP protection, a new book would be more like a trade secret. Take for instance Harry Potter latest adventure. It would be launched in secret, the public would buy it en masse. Other publisher rush to copy it and distribute it, but the advantage of being the first to rush it and sell it would still make more than enough money for any individual.
So the whole idea that artists need IP protection is nonsense. IP protection is just another form of monopoly that big companies love to have. Removing IP from the world would only change a little bit. Every art form would find a new and better way of existing.
So to sum up IP protection in case of books:
1) Nobody wants to publish your work anyway
2) If you get one publisher to publish it, it still means to no one else wants your book to copy even if they could do it for free.
3) If you are a succesful author there is enough money to be made by being first on the market anyway. Sure it is less than under a monopoly, but it is more than enough.
Conclusion: get rid of IP as fast as possible.
with limited resources (when there is not enough of the resource for everyone) society has to decide who will operate those resources ( who will be granted by society to have "property" rights on that resource)
with unlimited resources (like information is because you can make enough copies for everyone to have his own copy) there is no need to decide who should be granted rights to operate it - everyone can operate his own copy...
so IP was created by greedy people to create artificial scarcity and deprive others.
Any attempt to monopolize unlimited resources and create artificial scarcity should be opposed by society
Ideas are not equivalent to tangible property because (among other reasons):
1) There is no natural scarcity of ideas. Taking a thing deprives the person it is taken from of its use. If two people share an idea, both have it and neither the less. The two outcomes are diametrically opposed, ideas are the opposite of property. They are not subject to property. Dissemination of ideas increases the sum of knowledge, whether for profit or not. The purpose of patent and copyright law is to maximize the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
2) To pretend that an idea can be owned as property suggests that one owns and has the right to exercise control over another's thoughts. This is absurd and unmanageable.
3) If an idea is property, there is no basis to suggest that ownership of an idea shouldn't be permanent and heritable as other property is. This would be an economic and social disaster.
etc.
The constitution provides a simple justification for granting a monopoly to an inventor on the use of their idea: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." This is a noble goal, one I think generally embraced be even the opponents of the current copyright regime. This suggests a simple and obvious test for laws meant to regulate the temporary monopolies: if a given law can be proven to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, we are fairly subject to the limitations thereof so long as we (We) agree with the goal of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. If a law regulating the free use and exchange of ideas cannot be proven to promote the progress of science and the useful arts it is wrong and unconstitutional.
+1
But unfortunately this kind of 'parse error' isn't rare: many claim to be rational and believe in $DEITY & $RELIGION at the same time for example.
There's your problem, you identify your self as something that doesn't exists. It's just a an insane/inept/unworkable worldview. You've got much bigger problems figuring out the world if your "philosophy" is that capitalism is good and the state is bad. Good luck in life. You'll need it.
Economic growth was highest when such an impediment to progress did not exist. The whole concept of 'intellectual property' was invented by greedy parasites.
Patents are incompatible with a right to free thought, and must be abolished.
Just because someone else has had an idea before you, means that they get 100% of the reward for that idea. Patents also create a minefield of legal problems for product development, and protect only big organisations that can afford to fight patent lawsuits, and to file patents.
u r a motherfucka
r u my daddy
Property - any kind of property - isn't a natural right. It can be enforced only by force. which either means you have a government to enforce property rights, or else that the guy with the bigger gun takes your property off you.
An anarchist society cannot survive much inequity. If people can accumulate property, what happens is that the most ruthless just grab everything, leaving everyone else with nothing. And because the ruthless started out by grabbing all the weapons, there isn't much anyone else can do about it. The word for that is 'feudalism' or 'tyrrany', not 'anarchism'.
This doesn't mean that I think you can't have a stable anarchist society, or that I don't believe a stable anarchist society would be a good thing; but you can't say 'there aren't any laws except the law of property'. That doesn't work. You need a whole government infrastructure just to enforce that, and once you've got a government infrastructure it will aggregate more power to itself - that's the nature of government.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
That was sorta what I was already wondering.
In the west we already had a concept of, basically: you bought _a_ book, you didn't buy the rights to the novel. You bought _a_ record, you didn't buy the rights to that band's album. You bought _a_ (copy of the) newspaper, you didn't buy _the_ newspaper. Etc. It worked. Most people could already wrap their mind around that.
We had a first sale doctrine that worked perfectly well with that too. Yes, you didn't buy the rights to the novel, for example, but you bought a book and you can do almost whatever you want with it. Resell it, lend it to your friend, read it to your kid at bedtime, etc.
Then came for example software and tried to handwave in the fallacy that they need completely other constructs, for something that was already solved for everything else. See, you need to _license_ software, because, OMG, otherwise you'd think you bought the rights to that program as a whole! WTH? We already had the distinction between buying a book, and buying the ownership of a novel itself. You didn't need to "license" a book, or a vinyl record, or a newspaper.
Even after the loophole of, basically, "yeah, but you need to copy the program to memory, which is making a copy, and you need a license to make copies" was closed, we got stuck with the same stupidity as a before. Nah, see, it's _licensed_, not sold, 'cause if we sold it you might think you bought the rights to Vista as a whole!
Exactly wth is the fundamental difference between buying a copy of, say, Vista, and buying a copy of Huckleberry Finn? I'll go on a limb and say that people would have had no trouble using the pre-existing concept for software too.
And then based on the license stupidity, we had increasingly stupid stuff snuck in as licensing terms, that no consumer rights law would have allowed otherwise. E.g., you can't resell it. (See the recent AutoCAD lawsuit, but also all the software where you have to use up a serial number to use it, etc.) You can resell your old book, your old vinyl records, even your old copy of The New York times if you find someone interested in that particular issue, but you can't resell your old copy of AutoCAD. 'Cause it's licensed not sold. Some presume to unilaterally decide what else you can run on that computer. (E.g., it's quite common for game copy-protections to just quit or do this and that to you, if they think you have a CD emulator running on that computer.) Or what they can do to your computer. Or what you can use it for. Etc. Everything that consumer protection laws gave you for books, records, etc, the license took away for software.
And now unsurprisingly we see the guys from the other media, essentially go, "wait, wait, you mean we wouldn't have had to give customers all those rights, if we called it a license too? Damn, we want some of that too!" All the aberrations and stupidities built on that fallacy for software, we're now seeing trickling back to, say, movies and music. They too want a DRM scheme to prevent you from reselling it. They too want to unilaterally require your DVD player to phone home and spy on you, 'cause, hey, if software can do that, they want it too. They too want a say in what you can use the DVD for, and in which devices. (See copy protected CDs which actually play a reduced bit rate MP3 instead of the uncompressed music, if you play them on a computer.) Etc.
Heck, even Sony's infamous copy protection rootkit was, essentially, just trying to get the same control over that music as they have over software. In a misguided and flawed way, to be sure, but they didn't do anything much more underhanded than their copy protection already does for games.
And methinks it's about high time to say a collective, "WTF?" Or rather, a, "No, you don't. You software guys learn to live with what already worked for everything else, instead of everyone else copying your invented loopholes. Yes, you sold a copy, not the rights to the program. We know that. That already applied to everyone who bought a copy o
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Exactly. It's Libertarian Creationism.
Yep, let's get back to doing that (in anything "anarcho-", there's no government to protect your "rights" to anything. You've got to do this yourself). So, simply put:
1. Someone takes something that you consider your property. You go find them, beat the crap out of them, take your "property" back. Alternatively hire some goons to help you.
2. Someone copies something you consider your idea. You find them, beat the crap out of them, trash their stuff, and threaten to come back to do some more of that if you think they're still copying your idea.
3. Someone does something you don't like. See #2.
Welcome to anarchy.
Then patents, copyrights, and trademarks all can go on the geometric increase in fee system. I'd base it more on e than powers of ten, though. Start at $1 for the first year. That'll give $8103 for the tenth year, which is reasonable, but $178 million for the 20th year and 4 trillion for the 30th year. An inventor or writer could probably scrape up enough to cover their best work for ten years, but only the most profitable devices or media would make it beyond 20.
And by that point, the original rights-holder should be in a position to not only dominate all spin-offs, but have the greatest experience with the original idea - who would be better placed to consult or produce the best-quality public-domain versions?
Sure, Disney would swallow their own tongue, but Hollywood in general would be too busy feasting on the 15-to-20-year-old bonanza that they wouldn't have to pay the original creators to use. They might balance each other out. Then there's the bump in business which would result from the nullification of all existing patents which were not physical in nature or were not accompanied by a physical demonstration device. Free concepts and algorithms for everyone!
Copyrighted works and ideas are fundamentally different from tangible property, thus I do -not- agree that they are equivalent, or that similar laws make sense for these completely different contexts.
The primary difference is the one we all know; an idea (or a copyrighted work) can be infinitely shared without diminishing the original one. This makes a huge difference. You cannot give me your bread without having less bread yourself. You CAN give me your idea without having less ideas yourself.
The practical result is that humanity gets richer by sharing ideas. Because they multiply. Sharing bread, on the other hand, does not make us any richer in sum total.
Sharing bread is a zero-sum game, sharing ideas is a positive sum game.
"Anarcho-capitalism"... You can't be much anarcho if you're economy is based on private tyrannies called corporations where the will of hundreds of persons (workers) are systematically subjected to a few (owner, boss, management..) "Anarcho-capitalism" or right libertarianism* is a childish school of thought stuck in the very early stage of capitalism where the state hardly existed and robber barons ran rampant, typical of the American expansion into the West, where everyone was "free from central authority" to viciously oppress others. Recreating such a society is impossible in modern capitalism which is heavily intertwined with the state, therefore the rhetoric of anarcho-capitalism equates to little more than "I don't want to pay taxes to this oppressive government", which in turn justifies more tax cuts for the rich. It is not a coincidence that "anarcho-capitalists", "libertarians" etc. vote Republican in the USA. Anarcho-capitalism is the teenager's neo-conservatism. Fortunately this confusing term is pretty much limited to the USA. *Left libertarians are; anarchists, anarchosynidcalists, libertarian socialists etc..
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
I heard something interesting once. I made it my personal view on the matter.
A free market economy intended as system of production of goods and added value services is a static system in the long run where all profits are null and incomes cover exactly costs.
Any imperfections in the system of free economy such as viscosity of prices, anticompetitive laws, lobbying, state protection and the likes can and do put the system out of balance causing less than optimal allocation of resources.
From another point of view innovations are making the othervise static economy progress constantly. In any given moment there are bystander and innovator companies, the innovators make extra profits the bystanders lose profits. So it is allready in the best interest of private investors to research for constant innovation.
The copyright/patent system is a double edge sword. On one side its aim it to grant the innovator protection for it's patent. On the other hand it actually diminishes the need for the industry to further research.
I will explain further. Lets assume a single product market, be it cereals. Assume there are 2 firms, one with a new generation product (frosted chereos) and the other with the old style one (normal chereos). If the new product is appealing to costumers and only the patent tenent can produce it then in the long run they will find a new equilibrium where the "new" chereos are sold at a premium to wealthier costumers and the old ones at a bargain price to all the others. In this situation if both are covering costs then there will be no added pressure on research! On the other hand if there was no copyright protection you can rest assured that the added competition in the long run will both bring prices down on the two lines of cereals and puch the innovator to research for a third one!
That's my point of view on the matter. Scientific research should be carried mostly in Universities and Commercial applications by whoever wants (yes, they can pay for the patents at the state)... if you want to protect anything just be sure that there is not a private interest somewhere otherwise there could be problems in the long run.
The real WTF is that Capitalism - a system ostensibly designed such that innovation leads to the cheese at the end of the maze - is most efficient when a single corporation controls every product and service. Capitalism seems to be tending towards that eventuality, & the mechanism by which this will happen may just be intellectual property laws... :-)
The keyword is 'exclusive', meaning only 1 person can use it at a time. If I use a car to drive from A to B, you cannot use it at the same time to drive from C to D. All physical property works that way, somehow.
Now for IP, many people think it's the patented/copyright work that is the 'property' in IP. It isn't - you can copy things anyway, so they're not really scarce. It is the right to determine who is allowed to make copies and when, that is regarded as 'property'. And this is exclusive. Only 1 person or organisation can hold the copyright on a work at any given time. This right is the (artificially) scarce item that is used/inherited/sold and so on. Once you understand this, IP makes perfect sense from a conceptual point of view. I don't like this concept, but it's perfectly in line with how people deal with physical property.
Where IP doesn't make sense, is from a practical point of view. Copyright may have served a purpose 1 or 2 hundred years ago, but times have changed. I have yet to see a convincing proof that the world as a whole has benefited from past IP laws. That technological/cultural progress would have been slower without it. In todays fast-moving society, it serves even less purpose. Countless patents fall in the 'obvious' or 'bound to happen sooner or later' category. Without IP laws, these things would have been thrown onto the world for everyone to use for free. Nor are there any objective standards used to determine IP protections. Protection periods aren't calculated or estimated for optimal effect, but lobbied by greedy corporations for maximum profit. As a result, society as a whole loses.
And then there's implementation. Take for example DRM: you hand a million customers identical 'black boxes' with identical locks, with identical content inside, then you give those customers identical keys, and you tell them: "now go open your box, but don't share what you find inside". Aliens would laugh at how silly this is. Or a company invests millions into development of a new drug, then brings it to the market, but not everyone profits because the poorest can't afford the high price. All the hard work has been done, the company wouldn't profit less if there where a group of 'freeriders' who can afford production costs but not market price, but still: millions are suffering because corporate greed is deemed more important than curing sick people.
If it where up to me, IP laws would be scrapped from the books, so that companies can have succes by innovating faster or smarter than the competition, as opposed to having a bigger pack of lawyers. In the mean while, I just try to ignore IP law as much as I can get away with (like so many people, whether they admit it or not).
The Stallman fans raise a valuable point: IP is an amalgam of ideas that most people consider pretty good(copyright) with a whole load of stuff that are positively harmful (patents). Ideas are not, and probably should not, be property to be bought and sold. The tendency to monopoly means the big companies will sit there and earn fees for stopping innovation ultimately backed by the capitalist state.
I think old Proudhon is spinning in his grave at the description "anarcho-capitalist". I mean to say that the most prominent anarchists throughout history have been almost universally anti-capitalist. Such people are opposed to property and private ownership. Messing around with language like this seems intended to confuse. Especially so when the OP embraces positions that are not libertarian but are pro-capitalist. A clearer phrase is right-wing libertarian (a species indigenous to US bulletin boards and absent in the civilized world). In the case of the OP perhaps a little more of the right wing and a little less of the libertarian.
There shouldn't have to be complicated laws concerning IP, it should be very simple:
* If you profit from it, you have to pay the price; if you don't profit from it, you shouldn't have to pay extra.
* You can copy it, but only for your own private use; if you give it to someone else, you're risking having to pay a price.
* If you're attracting attention to yourself (i.e. you're being excessive) then you get in trouble.
Things like P2P could be construed as "being excessive" in my book. If you're giving away music to people on the other side of the planet that you haven't met and never will meet (and who you can't even communicate with because you speak a different language even), then that might be considered excessive. If you're copying a CD for your 5 best friends then that's not anywhere near as excessive. If you're making mix CDs and selling them then you're an idiot who's being excessive and you'll get what you deserve. If you're digitally recording a TV show and burning it to DVD so your freinds who don't get that channel can watch it, that's OK. If you're compiling a whole season of a show and selling DVDs of it on the internet, then you're going to find yourself in trouble with the law. If you burn a copy of a game for a friend who can't afford it because he's a student and is scratching to get by, then what's the big deal? If you're a warez dude and you're cracking that game and letting thousands of complete strangers download it to show how cool you are, then you're a moron and you get what you deserve when they break your door down. I could go on and on but I think I make myself clear?
No. I believe that as soon as an "intellectual content" has been made public, it should be assumed that it will be copied, modified, used and abused. When released in privacy, privacy laws apply. If you want to commercially exploit a content, make sure you made the commercial deals before you release publicly your content. Yes, it means that a commercial success would depend more on expectations than on actual popularity. That would be a different, workable system.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
"do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why?" What does "valid construct" mean? If you mean if it's enforced by law the answer is yes, but doesn't depend on what we think. If you mean if I like it, the answer is no - I'll tell you why: Intellectual things, in contrast to physical things, can be given away without being lost for the one who gave them away. One can simply explain it to someone else and afterwards both can use the knowledge - nobody looses anything. But in this world it is not that simple, it's not about using knowledge to get a better live, it's about using knowledge to earn money. (You should know that, as "anarcho-capitalist", and you should know the difference.) That's the reason for intellectual property, and you met some antagonism in it, as you think about the "problem of protecting intellectual property while at the same time maintaining the rights of consumers and protecting individuals from absurd litigation". Intellectual things oppose to being private property by their very own nature. They live in the medium of language - the most non-private thing one can think of - and are universal by themselves. In contrast to that physical things don't oppose to being private property, that doesn't mean that they are private property by themselves, but they don't oppose to being made to it by humans. Therefor every enforcement of intellectual property is an absurd act, in other words: "absurd litigation", you won't get your problem solved, you simply can't have both.
I've very recently blogged about an idea for reforming the patent system, and would be very interested in feedback on the idea.
Read the full text (1 page) here:
http://www.mertner.com/morten/?p=32
Here's a recent post of mine on IP - excerpts of others follow below it.
...A sheet of paper is material property. A poem is intellectual property. Aside from the practical issues arising from ... to manufacture copies or derivatives of their own intellectual property unless they have obtained licence from the ... to a publisher. Without copyright, purchasers of intellectual property enjoy the restoration of their natural right to ... restoration of rights does not weaken respect for intellectual property, but strengthens it. There is still no right to ...
..., copyright makes people think that all intellectual property is a pretence, even private intellectual property ... because copyright is about pretending th
URL to first is: http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=116
URL to rest is: http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/?q=intellectual+property
Natural Intellectual Property Unnaturally Privileged
Potentially having high market value, an intellectual work must be regarded as property in its own right. Among other things, this is because its value, whether utilitarian or aesthetic, can be appropriated by theft (irrespective of the possibility that any number of copies may remain with its possessor).
Despite crazy definitions to the contrary, thieves do not have uppermost in their minds the concept or intent of denying a legitimate owner the use of their property, but rather the concept and intent of seizing valuable/saleable property without payment (where the effort of theft is expected to be lower than the amount expected to be recovered through possession/use/benefit/exchange of the stolen property).
One cannot simply have a statutory penalty for violation of someone's privacy right. One must also consider the market value of the intellectual property so appropriated, and ideally the cost of its return/repossession.
The fundamental flaw in most people's notions of IP is not primarily that creation confers ownership (this tends to be coincident even with a first-comer idea), but that one should continue to own one's IP even after one has parted with it (sale or gift). But for this, the legitimate owner of a book cannot be stealing its author's property by making copies of their purchased book, unless one sustains the idea that the author owns all copies of their book even after they've sold them.
So it's quite possible to accept intellectual property as arising out of natural law, e.g. you write a book, you have absolute ownership and control over that book (even without the state's support, an individual can expect to protect it). Similarly with copies: you make a copy, you have absolute ownership and control over that copy. However, the author has no natural right to control what people do with the copies they purchase, e.g. making further copies or derivatives. Privileging the author to the contrary (for the publisher's benefit) is the unnatural misstep, the state's attachment of strings that nature did not.
Copyright is unnatural. All state granted monopolies are unnatural, patent included.
However, despite the unnatural privileges granted to its creators, intellectual property is nevertheless natural. The effective monopoly over access to one's private domain and control over the material and intellectual properties within it is also natural, and thus to be protected by the state.
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/?q=intellectual+property
Restore Everyone's Intellectual Property Rights - Abolish Copyright
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=96 148 days ago
IP is Indeed Property
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Remember when we said we did great things, but it was because we stood on the shoulders of giants? IP takes away those giants, so we have nothing to stand on anymore.
While IP is great for somebody or something in the short term, it harms everybody in the long term, including the people who want it so badly.
There should be a way to both have advantage for the 'owner' in the short term and advantage of everybody in the long term.
The best way is to have it 'short term'. 70+ or 100+ years is not short term. 5 or 10 years is short term.
Companies claim they need that long term, because they need to research so much. Well DUH! That is because you must re-invent the wheel over and over again. What would you save if you didn't have to do all the research yourself? What if somebody else already had done it and you can simply use it.
See how you shoot yourself in the foot by these ridiculous long IP times?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
begin by calling them "intellectual assets" instead of intellectual property, which is misleading.
Community Donations are the way forward
I pretty much agree with the above.
#1 ... don't acknowledge the legitimacy of creating artificial scarcity
#2 ... don't know, but if we have to allow monopoly rights, they should be for a much shorter timeframe - like 7 years at most, 1-2 is more typical. We need to distinguish between sharing, which is a natural human trait, and piracy, which is an attempt to profit off the work of others.
Ideally we can reach a rough consensus on when digital data (movies, music, software etc) should and should not be shared.
Intellectual property is a contradiction in terminus and should be banned asap. Its a crooked construct to control who gets what knowladge and is on basic level nothing more then thought policing.
Patents and copyrights may have a very limited usage (where are those studies showing it "benefits" society or innovation?) but they should NEVER be called "property", and it should be granted for the smallest time possible. 1 Jear would suffice for most books and music as well as giving a patent holder enought time to get the first lead in their business.
"Predetory"? "Abuse?" Your no anarchist by a long shot. Maybe you play one on teh nets. By Abuse I somehow see Disney Corp, banning anything mousie, which in itself was a borrow from someone else. THATS Abuse. Abuse of your culture.
I have pirated, in the last hour, a few books worth collectively over $1000. They are available at my university's library, but I would like to have a copy at home; that's my sole motive. This is illegal. I understand the reasons for this being illegal.
I forgot where I was going with this.
Property is theft! All kinds of property are!
Anarchism implies mutualism, all other forms of anarchism, especially so called free-market-anarchism or anarcho-capitalism describe systems of unrestrained exploitation and supression.
Survival of the Fittest in its purst form.
I agree there are differences between IP and physical property, the former not naturally having "ware-form". Therefor scarcity has to be created artificially/by law/py power so that profit can be mde with it.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist too. My suggestion is that competing, privately produced, law, can deal with intellectual property as well.
;-)
There is no reason why there should only be one way to handle IP (i.e. why the government should decide it for everyone). There could be several ones, emphasizing various aspects.
For demonstration purposes, I came up with an example of how you can deal with IP without government intervention, and give a fair deal to both consumer and producer. A music group could provide certifications, which anyone can obtain. These certifications would allow you to attend their concerts, but at the same time would also allow them to sue you if you distribute their work or even obtain it via a different channel than official distributors. So, everyone would have a choice among:
- exchanging their music on P2P but not being able to attend their concerts
- being able to attend their concerts but having to buy their music and not being able to share it on P2P
- not giving a shit about either
No government involved, noone is being ripped off, market forces take care of the balance. This allows new and innovative business models, whereas monopolistic IP laws tend to promote existing ones, which otherwise might not be financially viable anymore.
This example was simplified, the certifications and various IP systems would not be produced or enforced by the group directly. They would be produced by specialists and the group (or anyone for the matter) would choose a preexisting bundle of laws and a company enforcing those.
There is a book that came out last year, "Anarchy and the Law". It is a collection of studies about competing legal systems. It does not deal with IP, but deals with non-government based legal systems in general.
Cheers,
Peter
"intellectual property" is the 21st century's version of the victorian slave trade and other issues.
think about the phrase "intellectual property" for a moment.
intellectual. property. information. owned. intelligence. enslaved.
therefore, "intellectual property" is the "enslavement of intelligence".
this isn't some sort of waffly joke, the words "intellectual property" _say_ so.
the implications are quite straightforward: the use of the phrase "intellectual property" has behind it just as much enslavement and disempowerment as physical slavery.
* when you sign an employment contract, your "intellectual property rights" are taken away. you are given money, as a "sop". you cannot get any work anywhere else - you cannot get any money to live on - if you do not follow the "norm".
* when you come up with an idea, which you find that nobody is implementing, you are afraid to make money from it because there might be someone who will bully you into submitting to their will because there is a "patent" - a government-sanctioned right to bully - the owner of which has been waiting for someone just like you, so they can take money away from you.
ultimately, however, "intellectual enslavement" is driven by "maximisation of profit".
fortunately, there are solutions: read muhammad yunus new book, "creating a world without poverty", in which he describes "social business" as being "capitalism with non-loss, non-dividend" at its core.
if you have non-loss, non-dividend replacing "maximisation of profit" at the core of your articles of incorporation, then you do not have to suppress or own to "make money". you can cooperate with your former competition, working towards social goals.
it's a long story.
or if it doesn't disclose anything that can be turned into the product patented, it doesn't get patent.
Otherwise, what are we, the public, paying for?
Copyrights, patents, trade secrets and trademarks were reasonably well understood. It's only with the rise of the "intellectual property" meme that accompanying despotism has become exactly as Proudhon observed.
Anarcho-capitalism: the willfull ignorance of anarchism, capitalism and reality. People like the original submitter are a huge part of the problem.
Don't allow owners of copyright to pick and choose whom they license it to. If I think I can knock together a decent Blu-Ray edition of Apocalypse Now I ought to be able to pay the same price for the rights to do that as the publisher of the DVD has paid. Same if I think the current DVD release sucks and I can do it better. Same if I think there'll be a demand for the new Neal Stephenson novel in a waterproof version for reading in the bath. Or, God forbid, paperback.
Allowing anyone to pay a set royalty to publish a given work in their preferred format would make cheaper versions widely available (movies and TV shows on SVCD, DVDs in slip cases, current top ten singles on a CD, novels on tissue paper or in HTML), which would make people less likely to turn to piracy.
Intellectual "property" is not true property because the use of it by one person does not preclude its use by another. If I take your car you can't drive it while I have it. But if I "take" your idea you can still use it yourself.
I would be happy if we went back to the original intent of copyright and patent law, which was to encourage innovation and encourage innovators to make their innovations public. Those should remain the touchstones by which all changes to IP law are judged.
If an inventor only has a monopoly on his invention for 10 years instead of 20, is he likely to decide that it isn't worth it? I don't think so. He can rack up more than enough money in those 10 years to justify any effort and risk he put into it.
And extending copyright beyond an author/artist's death is ridiculous. A corpse cannot innovate!
Remember, the purpose of these laws is to maximize the public good, not guarantee an income for artists and innovators.
So I say knock all the terms back to their original limits and be a lot stricter when deciding if a new innovation is "obvious".
-deane
1) Nope.
For all the reasons stated a thousand times by thousands of others. But in short, ideas aren't property, there is no shortage of them, they can be duplicated at no practical cost(just go to a busy corner and start spouting them)
We don't have "intellectual property" now and we never have. All we ever had was government granted monopolies on distribution, sometimes use, and license/contracts.
Anarchism is about freedom from exploitation (among others). Capitalism is about freedom to exploit. You're schizophrenic.
You mix copyrights and patents.
Neither of these concepts is inherently bad or evil.
I am a semi-pro photographer (meaning that I earn some good money from doing commercial photography) but it's a side-job. I like being in control of my work, meaning that if you want to use a photo I made, you should ask for permission - after all I had to invest in equipment and it took considerable amount of time to create that photo; if you want to use that photo in a magazine or for advertising, you better pay up. Without that protection, I may not be doing this. If anyone could copy my work with no consequences, photography would remain strictly hobby for me.
In other cases, IMO sometimes photographers abuse their position. For example, some wedding photographers would take photos at weddings for the customer, but retain the copyrights, so the client goes to the photographer each time they want a new set. A "work for hire" style of agreement would work better - the client pays a fee and then the photos (slides, RAWs, whatever) is their.
In the same vein, if I'm a publishing house and decide to print Harry Potter, it's perfectly fine for the author to be compensated. Same goes for Mickey Mouse. Things get muddy when we start talking about derivative works. If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?
Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work, but limiting the time to 2 years, requiring a working prototype, banning patents on concepts (algorithms, practices) would do wonders.
If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force.
You do not have a right to what you did not create. If you want something, you should make it yourself. It's my land, my idea, my property, and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.
Oh please don't go bleat on about having the right to food, housing or medical. Those things are important, yes, but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?
This is my sig.
What the hell is an anarcho capitalist - surely an oxymoron at best. Proudhon, the French anarchist stated that "property is theft"!. But the idea of any sort of anarchist appealing to the state to help protect their property, is quite frankly, silly!
The idea would never die with the inventor. We descendants of monkeys are very good at copying, even without knowing all the details, once we know it can be done.
And besides, even if it couldn't be figured out again, the inventor's own company to bring the product to market will keep alive the invention as long as there is profit in it.
And the ex-employees of said company will still remember it and be able to pass it on if the company dies.
The reason people were slow to invent in the middle ages wasn't due to lack of patents, but due to the resistance of the upper classes and the laws of the church. Hard to invent things if you are just a serf and struggling to survive.
Nowadays, millions of coding serfs are kept from inventing things by the resistance of the upper classes and the laws of the state.
We need a new renaissance. Seriously.
It's pretty simple. If you do not like paying for music, then do not buy it. If you do not like to pay for software, then use the free stuff. But remember the free stuff has its strings too.
Everyone complains about paying for music or movies or how it is not fair a song should not lapse into the public domain? But, why not write your own?
This is my sig.
And not even AC. Ballsy!
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19981117/32150254.html
Monsanto does own their seeds because they invested a lot of time and money in the traits of those seeds.
IP laws shouldn't be applied to plants. IP laws exist to prevent copying items & plant's only purpose in life is to make copies of itself.
person who thinks scarcity is artificial,
The OP didn't say scarcity is artificial, but instead they disliked scarcity caused by artificial means.
Now at the same time, Monsanto does not get to fly those seeds over random farms and drop them and then sue those farmers,
Have you heard of pollen? You clearly have no understanding of the issues at all.
otherwise all that scientist can do for a living is steal shit from you
What? You're saying scientists would have no way of making a living without IP protections? Dumbass.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I'm amazed that any kind of anarchist could be in favour of property rights because, on Hobbes's assumptions which may be right, it can only exist within the confines of a state or at any rate a community acting as a de facto state (and if you're going that way we'll all be Nozick's slaves...). I honestly don't think that there is any justification which can be made for intellectual property (as private property; as social property it might be ok) from first principles which is in line with justice. Most people base their estimations of property "rights" on a Lockean notion (which I suppose might be compatible with some notions of anarchy, but only from the state of nature view) but I really think that this can't justify intellectual property.
On the Lockean grounds if we start assuming that people own themselves and they can appropriate un-owned goods through mixing their labour with it intellectual property might seem justified because the labour belongs to the person and they "mix" it with the common (which in this sense might loosely be taken as all ideas that ever could be). But the real problem with this view is that the intellectual labour doesn't really belong to the person in the same way their capacity to work does. Intellectual labour is based heavily within the confines of the society and the social construction of reality. Further, given that a person's ontology is almost certainly socially defined (or confined) we can claim in the strong sense that no intellectual labour can ever be owned by a single person alone. So even if we can claim that there is a "mixing of labour" and this sho0uld create some kind of right we're really no closer to justifying IP as private property. It seems that if a "labourer" ought to gain a benefit it shouldn't be all of the benefit when they are just the last link in the chain.
I think consequentialist justifications are difficult as well. To actually hold it up as a justification to IP as private property you'd need to show that it really was the case that people wouldn't produce without strong IP protection (which is almost certainly untrue) AND that private property in IP really is a good way to ensure maximum returns. Given that you want to restrict my freedom I'd say you have the burden of proof on you.
To make an argument about respect for person's autonomy - you could have a better line of attack; but even this probably stops short of Ip as private property. Basically it seems disrespectful to people to restrict their freedom just to make others slightly more happy... but this is a difficult issue which given how much my eye is hurting I cant be bothered to explain more fully (anyway, I remain unconvinced that it's a winner).
So my question back might be how exactly can you justify IP as private property?... but then I just plain don't like private property; and neither should you.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Since anarchists believe in freedom there's little they can do to prevent non-anarchists claiming to be anarchists, though 99% of anarchists share your view that "anarcho capitalism" is an oxymoron - just like there's little that Christians could do to stop me calling myself a "Christian atheist"[1]. To be fair, though, even "anarcho capitalists" would think this idea - "intellectual property", and laws to protect it - is ridiculous, and this topic redundant.
[1] I am not now, nor have I ever been, a "Christian Atheist". I am, however, a syndicalist and consequently have some interest in anarchism.
This is where the serious fun begins.
In the real world, information, once shared, is freely passed around. There's no way to prevent this. It's natural. If someone invents some new way of doing something, or makes a work that consists of some information, what natural process exists to stop that information from being shared? Nothing. Only the conventions of secrecy, which the creator of these works have always had the option to employ. And it is up to the creator of the works to decide whether to risk releasing their idea into the world, and potentially letting other people figure it out and copy it.
The point of IP laws of various types (patents, copyright, etc.) is the recognition that secrecy isn't ultimately good for society or the economy. Many great ideas will languish in secrecy and die with their creators. And the creators of these works are stuck with not being able to recover any of their investment without risking someone else using the idea without compensation. So a bargain has been struck in law: disclose the secret for a limited period of exclusive use, and then the work eventually loses it's special status and becomes public, as it naturally would have in the first place upon disclosure.
The entire thing is an artificial construct. It isn't the natural way for information to be treated. But it creates an incentive for people to create things, because they have a period they can sell exclusive rights to use the idea, and recoup their expenses. This stimulates efforts to create new ideas and implement them. It's an important and great idea of modern society.
The problem with IP laws exists because the owners of these exclusive rights have forgotten the original bargain and the real nature of what they "own". They think they own these ideas like ordinary property. They don't own the idea AT ALL, because to "own" an idea as if it was a piece of land is ridiculous. It's like owning "2+2=4" or a really great joke. Billions of people can simultaneously use these ideas, and if I copy the idea from you, you can still use it. I haven't taken anything away from you. An idea is not the same thing as ordinary property.
What they own is exclusive rights to do something with the idea. That's all. And those rights SHOULD expire in a sensible amount of time and have limits even during their term (e.g., "fair use" in the case of copyright), otherwise they cease to be a net contribution to society. Instead, you get companies hoarding ideas and extorting money from people forever.
That's why extending copyright terms is so bad: there's no payoff for the rest of the society, only the rights holder. These terms should be shortened. Life of the author + 10 years is plenty.
And in the case of software patents, the problems exist because computer science moves so damn fast -- the ordinary patent terms for physical inventions are far too long for software. Some people think software and "business method" patents should be eliminated entirely. I'm sympathetic to that view and it would be my personal preference, but I'd be almost as happy if the terms were halved from what they are now.
I use and respect IP laws. I have benefited from them myself with respect to my own ideas, but people have become *WAY* too greedy and think they have the same rights as someone who discovered an empty piece of land and laid a permanent claim to it. Well, it isn't land, and even if it was, it would be lunacy to think you could lay claim to it forever. People can't stake out the realm of ideas as if it was yours forever. Half the value of ideas is in people taking them and modifying them in new ways.
This is really long, but here are terse answers to your questions, with the above as background:
"1 â" Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with?"
Yes, for what it actually is (i.e. government-granted exclusive rights of limited term, NOT property).
"That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property,
I consider showing off how smart you are to be a basic human right. "IP" laws interfere with peoples' ability to exercise that right.
Adelle.
hear me out, even though you might be hostile to what i have to say
i agree with you about ip, i hate it. i think ip law should be utterly destroyed. however, i object to your "i'm an anarcho-capitalist...". its your opening remark. and making it whiffs of desperation to be or feel different. i agree with your thinking, but the way you present yourself to the world is odious
your ideological self-description should be "normal". your radical agenda should be called "common sense". the point is, you are trying to appeal to other people, not distance yourself from them, and that's what you do, consciously, or subconsciously, you create a wedge, when you begin a sentence with this "i'm an anarcho-capitalist..." oh really? in other words, you're an average middle class suburban kid
do you want to destroy ip? or do you just want to tweak your ego? if you want ip destroyed, your job one is to make yourself appealing to the average joe. not drive a wedge against them. your ideology stands zero chance of succeeding in this world when you try to distance yourself from people rather than make yourself part of them. real politics trumps college aged identity politics
secondly, "anarcho-capitalism" is basically, somalia. sound superior? i thought not. so stop embracing ideology which appeal to college age kids with far too many textbooks and far too little real life experience. it is possible to destroy ip without becoming somalia. really. so lose the college age naivete
much like the college age girl who describes herself as a polyamorous bisexual and then becomes a suburban housewife with 2.3 kids and a dog in 10 years, you will be a cube dweller in 5 years if you continue calling yourself a bullshit label of "anarcho-capitalist". its not a real or valid ideology. its intellectual ephemera, fetishistic esoteric ideology, art house insularism. "anarcho-capitalism" is not a real, working valuable set of ideas. really. lose the bullshit label
i know you are going to be hostile to my words. i apologize if i sound too rough. i'm actually trying to be helpful and i don't know a softer way to say it. i think you will appreciate what i am saying one day
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. No, it is not real property.
a. Nothing is truly original, all 'intellectual property' is inspired or influenced to some degree by other 'intellectual
property'.
b. Real property can be stolen - that is, someone may use it only by depriving someone else of it
1. So-called intellectual property may be reproduced basically infinitely without ever depriving the original 'owner' of it
Remember that there was every kind of 'intellectual property' that was technologically possible to produce long before there was any concept of 'intellectual property', and somehow artists still painted, sculpted, acted, wrote, etc. Profit motive is the only reason for the existence of 'intellectual property', and while I am certainly not saying that it's necessarily a poor motive, it certainly isn't the one most often expressed. Generally, the cry is, 'It's all about the artist!' It would seem, however, that it is primarily about the large company instead.
http://xkcd.com/386/
The present regime lays very heavy enforcement costs on the general public, through the power of subpoena used to investigate suspected breaches, and most significantly in the restriction of "circumvention devices". There is no way to justify such restrictions in an anarcho-capitalist worldview.
I would see "intellectual property" as a contract right rather than a property right. That would mean that the costs of enforcement would fall entirely on the "intellectual property owner", and in practice would amount pretty much to the abolition of copyright and patent.
You should try to find papers by Stephan Kinsella - an opponent of IP who writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and others, and also Tim Lee, who takes a more pragmatic (but very informed view) and has written for Cato. He blogs at "Technology Liberation Front".
StealthyRoid's opening proposition is just nonsense, so of course he's quickly going to end up in a philosophical bind. Calling yourself "...a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual..." is like announcing that you're "an enthusiastic advocate of human rights, for both real people and ghosts."
You then discover that the laws that try to maintain human rights for ghosts have got themselves into a terrible tangle. Surprise.
"As an anarcho-communist"
Ok... IÂll bite.
"I don't acknowledge property rights. Why? Because property rights boil down to "I was here first, I stuck a flag in it, it is mine","
So you wonÂt mind if I take your apartment, your car, your TV, your first newborn? Maybe you donÂt have that, but anything you have, I can just take?
Excuse moi, but property is a concept as old as civilization. When youÂre dealing with 5-20 people in a scarce environment, sharing is needed and effective, but our spiritual evolvement today is far beneath for what is needed for sharing in a huge, abundant society. If you want to complain, complain about lack of spiritual education. By spiritual, meaning anything that makes diverse people uniting in harmony, is spiritual.
"and everything had a flag stuck in it before I was born, and I refuse to acknowledge a system that considers all of this to be someone elses property."
Contrary to your belief, _someone_ was here before you. The world does not revolve about you. Get over it.
"It is my birthright, to share with others of my generation. If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force."
So, by lack of actual reasoning, power and conviction, you will compensate by using or threatening to use force, exactly what is the difference by this methodology and every other on the block (used in USA, USSR, China, terrorists, etc?) You yourself argues against force below. Is it just because "they" are stronger than you? Is harmful force against someone somehow acceptable because you are weaker?
"As far as intellectual property and creative works are concerned, there are two ways to measure the value of those."
No, there is only one, beside from the bullshit ones. What other people are willing to give for it. ItÂs called market price. If you charge too much, it wonÂt sell. Too little, and you increase volume sales. Etc.
Say I have a Coke. I wonÂt sell it to you. ItÂs my choice. You canÂt force me to sell it for even 1 billion dollars.
Say I am willing to sell you a Coke for 1 million, but another is selling Coke for 10 pops. You obviously choose the cheapest one. You see how the responsibility of the deal is split between the two parties evenly?
ItÂs called market price. Look it up. ThereÂs written volumes of books on economics by smarter people than us combined, and they knew all the different philosophies and concepts much better too.
Nobody is arguing wether we need intellectual property in todayÂs society. But in what form is what is interesting, because we constantly need to shape our society to where we want to go. There is no doubt copyright shouldnÂt extend idefinately, and patents shouldnÂt cover algorithms etc.
I gather you watch movies now and then for example. Would you rather like to watch YouTube flicks (which is royalty free), or some bigger blockbuster movies? You have the royalty-free option now. With technological advancements, we have more options than ever, but still we need commercial enterprise in most parts of our lives.
What you are arguing about is a completely different society. This leads to frustration, because youÂre not dealing with the society weÂve got. YouÂre not helping at all, until you accept what youÂve got and be grateful for it. There will always be changes. If you work with them, you become more powerful.
Oh, you want a violent "revolution"? I tell you, this idea is sooo old. See how far they got with that in ALL the countries, leading ignorant people into newfangled ideas about how to distribute wealth "evenly". ItÂs fools gold, and violence give more problems.
Nothing is completely absolute. If property rights were completely absolute, then, western society would not exist because, a few hundred years ago, all of the land belonged to the King and the King had an absolute right for commercial enterprises as well. In western society, ownership of land became more decentralized due to a wide variety of forces - ranging from wars that weakened monarchs, to a demand for the king to actually act something like the religion he claimed to uphold, to political and revolutionary reform. But it is fair to say that decentralization took place because the crown's sheer greed made it necessary for the crown to begin to share power with other people in the form of king's charters and patents and grants, where the king got a cut in exchange for a transfer of ownership from "public" to private, and from that, we have the idea of taxation. The king still gets his or her cut, but, now, the ownership is private.
IF other countries haven't had that sort of chain of events take place, then, they aren't going to have that. In Kenya, for example, all of the good land is locked up by giant estates that are descendants of their colonial forbears. This arrangement was set up by the imperial powers to create products for export back to the mother country and on the cheap. So, in Kenya, you have thousands of acres of the very best farmland growing coffee for export to the West, all owned by a handful of people, while the vast majority of the country starves. The problem in these countries, is that, what happens is that a marxist revolution takes place, and the "people" wind up owning the land, but in practice the people are just another small gang of thugs and for the average guy, the situation hasn't changed at all, except what little he did have was lost in the revolution designed to liberate him.
Quite honestly, in those countries, what is needed is a redistribution of land into private ownership. You can't have an equitable system of property rights without everyone being able to own some sort of property!
This is my sig.
So you (and the moderators who modded you up) oppose the concept of inheritance? And what should happen after you die to the property that you created?
I think the essence of the disposition of a man's estate after his death is to ask, what's best for the people. I do not see property rights as an excuse to create a nobility, but I do think it is right to want to give your children -something- extra. So, could a man that builds a small company be able to pass that to his kids? Yes. But, should the likes of a Bill Gates be able to enshrine his or her children? ER, no.
Property is a muddy concept at least, and one-liner generalizations like "You do not have a right to what you did not create" (or "Your are just totally wrong") don't describe it with justice nor can't be used as moral guidelines, at danger of making a radical out of you.
Nothing is ever absolute, but when confronted with a radical threatening to hang people, then you need to be able to make polarizing statements back.
This is my sig.
Unfortunately that won't work; if it's necessary for the invention to be in production within a time limit, the potential licensee can just wait out the inventor and pay nothing; a free market is only free if both parties are able to walk away from the deal if they don't think it's worth the candle.
Any attempt to fudge around that is going to create an enormous legal or quasi-legal bureaucracy that's likely to be worse thatn the problem it's intended to solve.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
IP owners are stealing the rights of others to create similar IP themselves, independently. That is just wrong. There can be no peace until this is fixed.
You forgot to mention that you should, by all means, avoid having any plants on your field being pollinated with pollen from Monsantos plants, because if this happens, one or two of the following might happen: 1) you get slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto for infringing on their patented stuff, 2)
Well, now, THAT situation is totally wrong, and the wise course of public policy would hold that whatever Monsanto pollen did to your land, that pollen is now yours, and Monsanto has absolutely no right to go and block you from not only planting their crops, but reselling YOUR seeds.
So, if a guy next door to you plants his Monsanto seeds, that's all well and good and he and Monsanto are entitled to the proceeds. But, if your neighbor's pollen somehow alters your crops, you are either entitled to damages from Monstanto, and in ALL cases you are perfectly entitled to regrow and resell whatever seeds you have.
Any other outcome would be unjust, I would say.
This is my sig.
The land is still not yours, you just own a piece of paper that the King will use violence to enforce on your behalf
Actually, I'm an American citizen, and as such, have a -natural- right to possess guns. I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights, and by my act of agreeing not to shoot the "king", I consent to be governed and live by the laws of the USA. Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
This is my sig.
I wonder why you ask "why" only if the answer to question 1 is "no".
The problem with the concept of intellectual property is, that the term doesn't have any boundaries. Property has very well defined boundaries: The real estate boundaries are drawn down in maps, the house has a wall, the car has a tangible surface.
Everything intellectual is missing exactly those boundaries that separate the "owned" part from the "not owned" part. Mark Twain once told the local parish: "Your sermon today was magnificent, but at home I have a book that contains every word of it." The priest was offended, until he saw the book: a dictionary.
So what is the "owned" part in that sermon? The words are not. The sequence of words maybe? It surely contains lots of quotes from the Bible, so those quotes are not owned either. Many of the sentences have been told by other people too. Many of the conclusions were drawn by other theologists. The priest might have used the book of a philosopher or theologist as inspiration. So those parts are not owned either. What is owned is at maximum a certain individuality, of which we aren't even able to tell which part is just random chance and which part is the actual work of the intellect.
So in every piece of intellectual works we have layers and layers laid upon each other which are not owned by the intellect who created the work. 99% of every work is in fact owned by others. That's the famous sentence in the correspondence of Newton and Hooke: "If I've seen further than others, it's because I was standing on the shoulders of giants" (which itself is just a quote of a quote of a quote).
On the other hand intellectual creation is larger as the work itself (you could call it 'greedy' in the regular expressions sense). It doesn't just put well defined building blocks together. It redefines the building blocks themselves. A word once used in a famous quote will always have the connotation of this quote attached. So somehow this word is not fully in the public domain anymore, it has now an individual character thanks to the intellect using it. Case in point: No nerd will ever be able to use the number 42 anymore without having some Douglas Adams associations. So somehow the once public 42 is partly owned by Douglas Adams' intellect, even though he never invented the 42, and 42 is definitely not his work.
So there is no definable property in the intellectual work, because property is a way to define boundaries: Here is yours, and here starts mine. Intellectual works are missing exactly those dichotomy between yours and mine. Intellectual works are "blurred in the property space".
So I don't think the concept of
All forms of property are constructs by society.
All sorts of different rules have been tried through the ages by different governments. Most of them have been found to be extremely inefficient, which is why we have the current system for real estate and for "stuff".
For the various forms of IP, very few models have been tried at all, and the trend from the start has been to strengthen the rights given to the IP owners. Trademarks are not really problematic because they are very limited in scope and giving people strong protection does not limit the improvement of society.
Copyrights are inefficient, because so much of what is being produced is buried and forgotten because copyright law ensures that society can't get free access until the work is obsolete and has negligible value to anyone. A world where copyright lasted for 5-10 years would produce much more value to society in the form of derivate works, based on texts that are still current.
Patents have negative value to society for the most part. They are an effective way to hinder progress in most fields. We have found that awarding monopolies create inefficiencies in all forms of trade and yet we hand out monopolies in the form of patents all the time. It used to be that patents were useful to get the inventors to divulge how they did something, but these days it is enough to know that someone did it to be able to reproduce it. For instance I know of no-one in the software field who reads patent applications to pick up ideas for how to solve problems. The exercise is totally pointless, because the patents serve only the purpose of setting up a barrier, should you come up with the same idea as what is covered by the patent. (Ok, it serves as protection against others trying to patent your idea as well, but that is normal terror balance stuff.)
"1. Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? "
No
"That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? "
Illusory.
"If not, why? "
Unlike physical property those whose intellectual rights are violated haven't lost anything.
If I steal your horse you can't ride. If I use your idea for a better cart, you can still build your cart.
Stealing an idea requires surgery of some kind.
"2. If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?"
N/A
In order to combat the criminalization of fair-use we should make a system for mass-civil-disobedience. One possible solution would be for Wikileaks, or the EFF to post a bit of HTML on their site that allows other website operators to embed a portion of "critical" information on their sites. This could be a piece of copy-righted work, or a leak, or... anyone else care to add to this idea?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Why does your right to invent and prevent override my right to invent.
Why do you use prior art to make your trivial incremental changes and then prevent others from using your "art", similarly.
At what point do you recognise that your idea is worthless until other people are using it.
Do we really believe a focus on litigation is "good" for the development of better ideas, and better living.
The problem I see with the *AA*'s, is trying to label music intellectual property, and somehow thinking the artist and (mostly) themselves (the corporates) should be paid for every person who listens to it. An abstract thing like a song, existing in an age of computer digital media, trying to prevent the very thing computers do best (copy bits of information) is simply absurd.
,requires a manufacturing process and reverse engineering, etc, in which you can then sue the manufacture for copying that item. These forms of 'property' exist and always have existed in such a way that can be duplicated by most anyone at will.
This really applies to software and video as well. A clash exists between so called intellectual property which exists in an abstract form. It isn't like a gadget in which to be 'copied' or duplicated
Sorry, time to wake up to the reality of the age. You can whine and cry all you want, well the artist, actor or programmer must get paid! (And I'm a programmer keep in mind). But they did get paid, by the employer or contractor or by wage, etc, upon making the material in the first place. And the corporates also get paid by the sale or showing or usage of the media in all forms they can think of to make money off of it. BUT.. it's going to be duplicated by everyone who likes it...
Period. Regardless if they want to accept it or not. So why fight it? Embrace those who like your work.
But don't really think your going to stop people from making a copy of it, you'll only be fooling yourself. If you don't like it, to bad, find a different line of work. The laws need to conform to the reality of what is at hand. Digital media is going to be copied by anyone who wants it, and that's not going to stop. Ever.
Just something to think about - we now own & trade land and laws exist to protect such ownership, should we do the same with Air ? If yes, what happens to those who don't have any air? If no, why do we own IP then ?
IP laws shouldn't be applied to plants. IP laws exist to prevent copying items & plant's only purpose in life is to make copies of itself.
You're very ignorant of plants. Where do you suppose seedless grapes, oranges, grapefruit and other plants come from? Most nursery fruit stock is derived from grafting, not planting.
Try this. Take the best orange you've ever tasted and plant its seeds. Lemme know how inferior its offspring are. Plants do not reproduce in the manner you think.
This is not a pro/contra argument. Just my $0.02. Monsanto creates higher yield per acre by making the plant grow more grains and make it more resilient. With higher yield, all other costs being constant, monsanto farmers can sell their crop at a lower price. Or, alternatively if there is shortage of crop, they can sell more at the same price. IIRC there is an actual grain shortage in the world, so at the moment it seems to be a win-win situation. Traditional farm management methods can not stay the same, when the world around them changes. Accept the new facts of life and make a profit or perish!
Lone Gunmen crew.
is the basis of _all_ freedoms, something marxists can't seem to comprehend:-(
a so.am. economist saw proof of this in the fates of shantytowns separated by a stream/political boundary: on one side, the inhabitants had no property rights; they continued to bring tvs & refrigerators home in their pickups to their tarpaper shacks, living in squalor & fear that bulldozers would someday flatten everything they couldn't carry...
on the other side, activists had secured titles to the land: shacks were replaced by brick houses, secure that they had the right to be there, that it couldn't arbitrarily be taken away.
funny how marxists can't explain how evil capitalism oppresses only on 1 side of the stream;-)
I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual.
I'm puzzled why an anarcho-capitalist is so quick to embrace monopolies handed out by the government to private entities, which is what IP is. Myself, I'm more supportive of free markets where anyone can compete.
I thick government-granted monopolies is something a Guild Socialist should support. Or maybe a Mussolini Fascist.
)9TSS
A lot of people I know have taken to the "if it's not free, I don't like it, i won't use it" realm of stupidity.
RMS isn't to blame for personal decisions, but I feel the aura surrounding modern IP protections, the perception of the laws that regulate and protect IP, combined with this Jesus-like figure who's opinions are compelling and often desirable, is automatically damning of anything restrictive.
Lessig's book, Free Culture, is a fantastic introduction to the law for a non-lawyer. It is rather repetitive in some instances, but it does stress the important diversity of protection we have, and protection that is beneficial.
For example, when I see someone say, "I don't like IP laws, they're not good", or "I love IP laws, they protect my job", I automatically begin to dismiss this person as ill-advised or out of their depth. My reasoning is simple: there is no such thing as "IP laws".
Intellectual Property is form of non-corporeal asset that we give good legal and equitable title to, because we believe it deserves recognition beyond a physical form - almost always because we can't represent the physical form as to control it (a patent), or the physical form has no established representation to make it distinguishable as to offer it protection (think one CD to another CD).
The legal definitions are more precise than this, but consider, for an instant "IP laws" don't exist. So what do we use to enforce IP? We use a collection of laws that protect IP - on the battle's front-line we have copyright and we have patent. There's nothing special about either copyright or patent. They're not there to represent IP and perpetually protect it like we would land. No, we instead offer "limited protection" (or a "limited monopoly") for a specified period.
Unfortunately some people are greedy and capitalism does as capitalism wants - because it can. We elect an "elective dictatorship" which take legislative queues from those in a position born out of their money. Those with the money ultimately strive to control their assets as to protect this money. We see big name companies push and push for longer extensions for their monopolies simply to protect their status rather than fall. It's the way the world works - it's not going to change any time soon, but we can limit the control.
Unfortunately more and more people seem to echo the same voice, "I don't want to reduce copyright/patent, i want to abolish it, I believe everything should be freeeee!11". You people are detrimental to the cause. Abolishing IP will destroy R&D. If IP was outlawed over night, companies would stop working with one another and stop producing new technologies that require immense resources and financial investment: why bother when you can copy something and resell that? Why bother when all the money you spend on some research is for naught when someone takes apart your product and copies and reproduces it at a fraction of the cost since they don't have to account for the financial cost of research?
The solution to the problems we face is actually to extend the breadth of copyright and patent. Preserve what we have now (arguably what we had in the 90s). This is not the same as extending protection periods - I'm largely against that. But we should focus on remedying individual legal issues while appling an element of proportionality.
Proportionality is a big thing in law (tm) - especially if you're an EU citizen. Proportionality and interpretative application allow issues that would normally be wrong doings a measure of beneficial application. Without confusing myself, it is to say that you don't have to find something utterly illegal because the law says it is in black and white - times change and and future developments are rarely well envisaged, and proportionality allows us to accept transitions in the law.
Lets look at an example: check out this recent Podcast on scraping. The problem is a grey area with Copyright. The remedy is not in "IP l
'bound to happen sooner or later'
Now there's a good phrase. Easy to say too, after that other person had the idea and did the work to make it happen.
Without IP laws, these things would have been thrown onto the world for everyone to use for free.
Uh, no. Those "things" would not have been created because the people would have been working at earning food and shelter. Those things come first.
People need to eat. Your idea would only work if society supports those who make ideas. I'm all for that, by the way. I write. I would like the gov to simply mail me checks because I write, not because people want to read said writing. And therein you have the failure of that system.
If it where up to me, IP laws would be scrapped from the books, so that companies can have succes by innovating faster or smarter than the competition, as opposed to having a bigger pack of lawyers.
Then, I take it, you're for large companies ripping off the little guy? Because that is exactly what would happen. You personally have a great idea? Good. Now you work in secret with every penny you have to.... Oh, it takes more money than you have. OK. Now you to to talk to someone about funding.... Oh, they stole your idea and did it on their own and now your screwed? Oh well, too bad.
I also think it's interesting that IP (generally) has absolutely nothing to do with birthplaces, birthrights, etc, and has not been completely staked (not even close). I.e. it possesses none of the characteristics that turned you away from property, yet you still oppose it. Why?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
another typical marxist strawman: advertising makes you buy things you don't want...guess that's why we're all driving around in edsels, eh?-)
I believe it's time to scrap ALL copyright and intellectual property rights. It can't survive with current technology. Today you need to continually innovate, get out there first, and execute. To protect the past is to slow progress.
2. You speak of Socialism, not Communism. Communism is a form of government with power centralized to one group or one person - not an economic system. I'd link to Wikipedia, but they're all wrong.
>>1 -- Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property.
I believe the granting and enforcement of limited intellectual property rights for the purpose of encouraging art and science is good and probably necessary. Equivalent to property-- NO. The US Constitution plainly puts rights to "life, liberty and property" in a different category than intellectual property.
IP rights need to be based on what benefits the public not maximizing the profit of the holder. Obviously it needs to be severely limited from the way it is currently implemented.
The whole "I created this idea from nothing" is a facade. All intellectual property is built from and has a debt to what came before.
The U.S. Constitution is written from the point of view of protecting natural rights from government predation.
Copyright is different. It is a created "right." Really, it is more like a "deal" than a right: It is a limited term grant of exclusivity. No real right works that way, and no other right is explicitly created - they are assumed to exist with or without the acknowledgment of the government.
Therefore you do not need to be an "anarcho"-anything to reconsider copyright. The Founders themselves considered it less than a right.
Copyright isn't even a contract. It is a kind of charter that can be revoked or modified at the whim of the granting party. So reducing a copyright term isn't even a "taking."
Copyright was created by the government to benefit the people. If it stops working that way, copyright has no purpose.
I wrote parts of this stuff
The only reason for labelling ideas as "intellectual property" is to create a false equivalence with the pre-existing concept of physical property.
To turn the argument around, what on earth is the justification for labelling ideas as 'property' - especially when it is so likely to mislead?
Even if we assume that IP refers to a variety of government-created business monopolies (which is what we are normally talking about), the term is still hopelessly misleading.
Better to do away with it altogether.
I don't think IP is illusory, but it is clearly not equivalent to physical property. The low cost of reproduction is the difference. When you can fax me a piano or email me a lawnmower then we can talk about equivalence.
The main problem I see with IP rights is that the products are all, without exception, built on the combined achievements of the human race over many thousands of years. In the case of biological patents they are also based on the achievements of natural selection. No one individual or company or group of individuals owns these achievements.
No book, song, program, drug, seed, invention or production concept is possible without the information, knowledge, education, systems and resources that preceded it.
The combination of all human intellectual capital in the public domain is the birthright of the entire human race, collectively and individually.
Therefore, profits from products created using our collective intellectual property and based on the artificial scarcity engendered by IP laws should be taxed at a much higher rate, say 60 to 70 percent. This public income stream should be earmarked to fund public support for R&D. This won't, and shouldn't, eliminate private R&D. Private corporations should be eligible for R&D funding, but resulting property rights should still be taxed at the higher rate or put in the public domain. Think of it as a public private partnership.
I wouldn't mind if authors, artists and musicians could be eligible for a bit of an R&D stipend here and there, but the most pressing need for this reform is in the pharmaceutical industry. A system that holds lives for ransom based on pharmaceutical patents seriously flawed if not criminal.
If you don't want someone to use your photographs, you shouldn't give them your photographs... You don't need copyright laws to achieve that effect.
You've said it yourself. A "work for hire" style of agreement works just fine. Someone wants a photograph, he pays you to make it. No copyrights needed at all. You can even make a contract over how they are allowed to use said photographs, so you can use ordinary contract law to protect your photos in those few cases.
IP isn't just an assault on free speech rights, it's also an assault on real property rights.
ONE MUST AT ALL TIMES HAVE IN ONE'S MIND A CETERIS PARIBUS COMPARISON TO THE ECONOMIC RESULTS WHICH WOULD EVOLVE IF REAL PHYSICAL TANGIBLE PROPERTY COULD BE COPIED AND EXPANDED AS EASYILY AS IDEAS CAN BE COPIED AND EXPANDED.
1.) Poverty would be eliminated.
2.) Inequality would be eliminated.
3.) Innovation and creative change would not be eliminated, as that is all anyone who was not lounging around in biblical garden of eden paradise would be doing, thinking of how they would want something better, even though it could be infinitely copied. Innovation and artistic creation would become the sole economic production activity, and remuneration would consist 100% in extremely valuable fame.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
I mostly agree with you, except on one thing:
;)
You talk about IP. You shouldn't, as they mean copyrights, patents and trademarks.
You're right when you mean patents and copyrights, but trademarks make a lot of sense, as there is no advantage in letting someone pose as someone else.
Of course trademarks cases should be reviewed and handled with care, no trademarking the colour red in general
... with caveats. Your argument makes a nice soundbite, but falls flat when you look at actual implementation. Only some kinds of information can be owned under current laws, which are geared towards keeping personal exchanges free. Even if owned information can make its way into personal exchanges, and there isn't some exception/grey area (e.g. fair use), then the damage caused by such exchanges are very limited, and hence they are not worth enforcing. Danger of totalitarian society is still minimal.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Whether its air, water, oil, real estate, donuts, trees, gold, or any (such) commodity they all belong to humanity, not individuals or corporations or any government or country or political or power group. Same with intangibles. That ugliest of phrases 'intellectual property' is an intangible. Whether tangible or intangible these commodities can be distributed in a fair manner, ie those producing/growing/extracting the commodities can be 'paid' for their efforts/resources. How this distribution takes place can be done by consensus. That wonderful entity called the internet provides consensus. Lets start taking our resources and enterprise back from the avariced, power hungry and entitled individuals who, besides destroying the planet, are making life miserable for the worlds populations. FOSS is an example of resource/enterprise firmly back in the hands of no-one and everyone. Likewise Creative commons. Even lawyers, politicos and the ilk are getting on board. The IP goombas are running scared. Lets make sure they keep running.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
Great way to frame a debate - rule out all of the options other yours and a strawman.
The correct answer is going to be legal recognition of intellectual creativeness is nothing like physical property. Using the property word immediately heads you off into the wilderness.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
What the f**k is an "anarcho-capitalist" ?
/. bod who wants free music for their iPod, pulls GB of data daily off the intarweb thingy killing everyone elses connections and forcing Comcast and the like to "shape" their traffic, and will use ANY justification to avoid just actually PAYING for the bloody song ?
Someone who expects to get paid for doing their work (i.e. the capitalist bit), but quite happily steals the food from other peoples mouths by refusing to pay for THEIR work (i.e. the anarchist bit).
Does this mean you are just another
Or perhaps I read you completely wrong ?
I will believe in Intellectual Property when:
I copy a file and you can't still use it same as you always did.
The word steal indicates removing an object from your reach and keeping it for myself, this is not the same as making a copy of something someone published publicly and letting anyone who wants to listen/watch/play peruse it at their leisure at no cost... not the same at all... you still have your copy.. i didnt steal it... I also didnt sneak into your house and remove property to gain it... you published it.. I copied it.. you still own and posess it.. there is no theft here.
I just watched a nice television documentary about DNA. It featured a Swiss scientist who wanted to add vitamin A to rice to freely give this strain to farmers in Asia (where lots of people only eat rice, and therefore have a vitamin A shortage). He deliberately did not use any private funding to be able to spread the strain for free.
When he had finished, he got 72(!) claims for patent infringement, and he was not aware he had done anything unusual. Due to the patent claims, there was no way he could freely spread the strain.
Eventually, he was forced to sell his work of life to a big multinational who had enough funding to pay the licences.
This was what gave me a valuable insight. A patent is not the claim of property, a patent is a claim on somebody else's property. A patent is blackmail, enforced by the government and the law system.
I am fully aware that patents are not MEANT to be blackmail, but most patents that are granted are so obvious that they effectively are. And in the USA people seem to be able to get a patent on anything. That is what turns it into a blackmail system.
By the way: the same documentary told about an arms race between British scientists and an American company who wanted to map the complete human genome. Only the American company wanted to patent it, so effectively making it unavailable for research. Off course, the big problem here is that Americans WOULD grant a patent on the human genome, which is too absurd for words. Nobody can own the human genome, but a property certificate on it is a perfect blackmail tool.
Plants do not reproduce in the manner you think.
*sighs* The fact that some plants reproduce asexually as well as sexually reinforces, rather than contradicts my point. Life attempts where possible to produce copies of itself.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
... wants to have the cake and eat it, too.
These arguments have been used since the the beginning of civilization to rationalize theft. Arguments still stand. If you are a thief. Society falls when the notion becomes generally accepted. See HUMAN HISTORY. One of the better "Ten Suggestions", that are generally not accepted these days. See BILL CLINTON.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
Due to the differences between mechanical inventions and medical inventions (drugs), keep the two separate. And get rid of software patents.
1- no software patents
2- Leave 1st to invent as the rule for other patents
3- If Drug industry needs new method to protect IP then, figure that out on it's own with it's own tracking system.
4- creative commons copyright licenses (however for software copyright have a protection time that is more inline with the trend that software changes quickly and so protection would be only for 7 years, period.
I think you better turn in your hippy badge, you're -WAY- too confused. Go look up what anarchism and capitalism actually mean before you decide to give yourself some sort of trendy political "label."
Actually, they can and they do.
but dammit you fools, don't think some scientist in a lab didn't work their ass off to create this amazing thing. And dammit, they better make some moneySo now that some scientist worked his ass off, farmers that don't want or buy their GM product are no longer allowed to save and replant seed exactly the same way they've done for all of human history?
That scientist's work is based on the intellectual property of the farmers. Have you ever seen natural maize? It's not all the same color like that corn you by at your grocery. Just because they aren't in the lab splitting genes doesn't mean their crops aren't GM'ed already.
Need a more recent example? When the US Govt started dropping Roundup in Central and South America to wipe out cocaine crops, guess what happened? Farmers bred roundup ready coke faster than Monsanto's scientists could have in the lab.
The implication is that the farmers' decentralized system of disseminating coca cuttings has been amazingly effective - more so than genetic engineering could hope to be.All Monsanto has done is step into an open source project and close it. Monsanto is the one trying to change the rules. Fuck Monsanto and fuck their scientists. Farmers will do just fine without them.
There is no such thing as intellectual property. You cannot own an idea. Someone cannot steal an idea from you, because theft assumes your loss of the use of an item. Someone else's use of knowledge in no way undermines your ability to use knowledge in order to prosper. Exactly the opposite is true. You can share an idea with every human and instead of being poorer, that will return to you 10 fold and enrich you.
This was the original concept of our patent system. A very short time for an inventor to earn a profit from an idea, while making sure that idea was preserved for all time for everyones use.
But this original idea has been perverted in my lifetime into the imaginary and hurtful concept of ideas as property.
To try to limit the use of knowledge is insanity, because everything we know today is built on the knowledge of every generation that has ever lived.
To partition off all knowledge and fence it in so that a small group of people and only their descendants can profit from that knowledge, when the knowledge belongs to all humanity is inherently unfair.
I make my living from "oppressing" you, I guess.
Fortunately I have a simple answer in this case: You don't *need* the stuff I produce. So if you wind up with it in your possession and you haven't paid for it, it's pretty clear cut: You have no *right* to my work, and if it's clear that you've ripped it off I'll feel justified suing the bollocks off of you.
Everything else is details on how this is accomplished. I agree that SWAT teams and a patent system that makes patent trolling easy are bad. But if you're "trading" music or software, I have no problem with hauling you to court, and technologies that make ferreting you out easier are just dandy with me.
Strutting around arguing that you are somehow entitled to the fruits of my labor just because it is easly copyable is simple greed. Copy protection systems are the speed-bumps that get lazy oxygen-wasters like yourself to occasionally pay for the stuff you would otherwise steal. The fact that copy protection systems need to exist has more to say about *your* morality than my own.
I owe you nothing. Go to Hell.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
You cannot be an anarcho-capitalist and be in support of "intellectual property" at the same time. IP requires enforced scarcity, which implies coercion against peaceful exercise of your rights (in this case, copying something at your own expense, by definition a non-violent act) by a third-party, i.e. government. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
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I'm not very good at explaining things. However, this is a much deeper question than initially hinted at. In today's world isn't not solely about IP, but about general economics. In the end, economics says the product will reach its replication and distribution costs. For digital medium, once it's created, it's $0. It's a whole economics between scarce and non-scarce goods. But, like I said before, I'm very bad at explaining these things. Check out TechDirt (www.techdirt.com) and Mike Masnick's posts. He's covered this in great depth (and even offers personal one to one discussion on the topic) far better than I ever could.
To be honest I'm not certain there's a difference.
But, there is a difference. I didn't kill anyone, and Shew0lf is trying to kill my entire family. See, Shew0lf is committing a crime, murder, an invasion, of sorts. That's today, and you see, the only way he can rationalize it, is by inventing some past ancestor to "even the score".
If you believe in property rights, now is the time to give the whole of the territorial United States back to the First Nations, because, with the exception of a very few small enclaves, they were there first and they didn't give it up voluntarily (and before you think I'm getting at Americans, the same is true virtually everywhere else on Earth, too
Absolutely not! First off, what does the past have to do with anything? The people, their cultural framework, everything about them, are dead. We can have a few historians tell a few stories about them that entertains us, but such histories will always be through the viewpoint of our culture. The only way you can deal with property rights with any sort of intelligence or consistency is to look at what property is today.
And if it's actual possession, when's the date from which we say property rights apply? Is it before 1948 or after? I'm not picking on the Israelis particularly here, either
Well, again, you are confused. Property rights exist today. You are either killing someone to take their land, or you are not. The past is entirely irrelevant. Honestly, if you wanted to take this silly "past" approach back, I can always go further back in time. You see, if I have the first oxygen atom in me, that was ever made, and, so, everyone has stolen everything from me. Therefor, I should be Emperor of the Universe.
This is my sig.
There is no solution. Intellectual Property is a fantasy. Here's a great example: giving a speech. We call it "giving" a speech, because after you've said it, it's not yours anymore. The same is true for a performance - we "give" those too. You can't give a speech and then take it back, nor can you publish a book while keeping it to yourself.
If you want to control your "intellectual property", you have to keep it to yourself.
Do people now feel OBLIGATED to send money to the heirs of the Shakespeare estate every time they quote the Bard? Do you send money to the heirs of Volta every time you use a battery? No? If you don't then you are a sanctimonious hypocrite.
I've had this discussion many times in academic circles. The discussions are typically rational with well-founded arguments. Then I talk to business people and lawyers. They don't see their actions as hypocritical because their actions are legal. As difficult as it may be to understand, there are people who are only guided by what the law allows (or doesn't), and not by intellectual honesty or fairness.
They believe that it's not hypocritical to require their posterity be paid by those who use their IP, while they don't pay Volta's family for the battery because there is no law requiring them to pay.
It's the most frustrating thing to talk with people about the way it could/should be (and was) only to have them re-explain the way things are.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
That is to say:
Who invented it, anyway??
IP was made up in a season with certain technological properties, and of course (like almost everything, from money to burocracy) was built to "dodge" a social misbehavior devised from a technological limitation, or to "gain" some "good" for the society, again, around a particular technological condition.
To put it simple:
Communication and information spread was very, very limited by the time, so if you came up with something 'new', it was likely than some other guy 'steal' the idea from you, or 'take' property of what you just created (name it a book, or an invention) and go somewhere else far from your 'neighborhood' and 'sell it as his own'
That is why, in order to promote innovation, or to protect you from just injustice and unfairness, a 'central record' called 'ip' was created.
you put your 'thing' in this 'central record' first, and you could always come back to this 'central record' to 'prove' the idea -or whatever- was yours, no matter the stealer is 10.000 miles away 'selling' something that should be granted to you.
Nowadays, a complete redefinition is needed, just because our technological paradigms are completely different
By instance, you can create a book , or some blueprints. You don't need to 'patent' , given that you publish it soon enough, because publishing it (in a blog or anything) makes it widely known. everybody knows now that it is yours, and it's very easy to 'probe' it later (in case you need it).
But what is more important: all the interest you may have in making sure people knows that 'that idea' is yours, are the same interests that the people who is willing to pay for it have.
If they want what you produced, they want it from you, if they take it from an hypotethical 'stealer', they may enjoy that 'issue' of whatever it is (since it's really yours), but when it comes to 'getting more', they just find out that this 'stealer' is not worth it
The will want the 'real thing'.
You just need to worry about making publicly available to everyone that 'you made it', and if what you made is good, or somebody wants it and is willing to pay for it, be sure they will make sure they come to you
The problem with fame is that the environment needs to facilitate it. If there were no academic journals and no academics, Einstein wouldn't have anywhere to publish his paper, and nobody would bother reading it to establish its quality. Einstein is made famous because his fame is the basis for taxpayers and parents of college-age kids feeding the institution of academia. Only fame would degrade the standards in arts to the least common denominator. While DiCaprio and Cameron could get some fame for Titanic, how would they pay all those who edited the film, polished the script, cleaned the toilets? Fame isn't enough to create great works.
If you're an anarcho-capitalist you DO NOT believe in Government. Therefore you believe the market provides solutions to intellectual property and physical property.
You can not design a system that works better than anarchy.
If you believe in anarcho-capitalism you do not believe in inherent rights, but rights that make economic sense. In most cases intellectual property does not make economic sense (total surplus is always less under any monopoly).
You don't really sound like an anarcho-capitalist... I should know, since I am one.
Also, if you want to ask this sort of question then there is a whole fucking forum devoted to it with really smart, responsive and helpful people here...
http://austrianforum.com/
Being an anarcho-capitalist... YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
as in, lacking a government. as in, look what you get in the real world
i appreciate your sarcasm, but then, not talking to you but talking in general, if the fruits of anarchy are so obvious, why do so many people think describing themselves as anarchists or "anarcho-blahblah" is supposed to make them look anything but utterly foolish or ignorant or stupid. or, more accurately, suburban middle class wannabes without a clue
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a caveat, I'm drawing this from a USAdian background as the USA is where I'm from and seems to be the world's IP big dog, loose cannon, whatever.
What's under discussion here should not be called intellectual property. That's a name thought up by someone who held a bunch of copyrights and wanted to hold them forever. It's not property, it's a copyright or a patent or a trademark. It is not owned: It is held.
But the dream of corrupting the debate by introducing a biased term has come true, and even so-called anarcho-capitalists are now calling copyrighted material "intellectual property." Entertainment lawyers FTW.
The very first step in drawing back the madness, the very first one, is in a courtroom: The moment some suehappy company's lawyer says "intellectual property" in front of a judge, the defendant must object that the term has no real meaning and must be suppressed and never used in any court anywhere ever again and its use in the presence of a jury is grounds for a mistrial.
And if that doesn't work, hooray, because if it's intellectual property, then it's property, and property can be taxed.
So long as a company (or person) insists it "owns" an intellectual property, its value shall be assessed shall be taxed annually at a rate of one dollar plus a percentage of gross receipts the highest-grossing of the last five years. Make a billion dollars on it, be taxed on a billion-dollar estate. Tired of paying money on a billion-dollar estate? Place it in the public domain and it is now part of the creative commons. Forget to pay money on it? Public domain. It's been ninety years since it was published? Public domain -- and ninety years is simply insane. It should be fifty, or life plus twenty, max.
Copyrights and patents expire for a reason: By protecting materials for a period of time, the Constitution creates temporary monopolies as economic stimulus for creative efforts. By having copyrights and patents expire, The Constitution provides economic stimulus to the nation as a whole: copyrighted and patented materials become part of the pool from which new ideas and inventions can be derived.
This is not my sandwich.
Then you can work out the cure?
Problems I can see:
1. Patents and IP laws were intended to help the small inventor or startup company protect their ideas. Problem is these laws are often used by patent holders who have no product.
2. Media companies use the laws to stop fair use. eg. Singing along to your favourite song and publishing that to YouTube gets you sued?
Physical property can be subject to taxes - make intellectual property the same. If you want to be able to enforce protection on them because they are so valuable, you'll need to pay taxes on them accordingly. If you don't, then you won't have to pay...
As one poster already suggested, part of the problem is that we have gone to far. Copyrights have been extended to an unreasonable time and cover too many trivial expressions (posts, emails, letters, etc.) Patents have been extended to copy math, software, business processed and other "pure idea" type areas. We should roll back the times for copyrights and areas for patents. Then as an additional approach to reduced expansionary tendencies, we should tax them. A basic idea of taxation is that it discourages things. I have no particular desire to discourage income, so why base most taxes on it. We should tax things like IP that are government granted monopolies and items we'd like to discourage (like carbon emissions).
I absolutely deny the validity and existence of "intellectual property". It is a metaphor stretched beyond breaking point to reach a bunch of invalid conclusions. The "intellectual property" metaphor falls apart because, as others have pointed out, it is the physical nature and consequences of same - uniqueness, scarcity, nonduplicability - that provide the underpinning to any meaningful notion of ownership rights over same that we call "property rights". If I steal your physical property, I deprive you of the use of it. If I "steal" your "intellectual property", you still have it. The information regarded as "intellectual property" can be replicated, perfectly, (and at essentially zero cost); because there is no limit on supply, there is no basis for an economics of supply and demand, and hence no grounds to support a system of proscriptive rights over it.
If physical property was like that, would we feel the need for physical property rights? Most likely not, or they'd be something entirely different from what we currently thnk of as property rights. If I could walk up to your parked car in the street, press a button, and drive away in an exact duplicate, and you still had your car right there, would you feel robbed? I don't see how you could claim to have lost anything. You couldn't even claim that the value of your car had diminished in some intangible sense owing to the increased supply that existed because of my copying - remember, to truly compare physical property to "intellectual property", we have to imagine we're living in a Star Trek-like future world with matter replicators and an unending abundance of all material goods; nothing would be scarce and scarcity would add value to nothing.
The current "intellectual property rights" movement is more like an act of enclosure of the commons by a gang of rent-seeking feudal lords. Information is not like objects that can be owned as property, because you can't hold an intangible. "Posession is nine-tenths of the law": your rights of physical property ownership depend on and arise from your ability to physically control the object in question, to keep it in your posession and deny access to others by force if necessary. You simply cannot do that with an intangible. The intangible realm of information is "Terra nullius", a new and unclaimed land, and it is meaningless nonsense to say you can pace out boundaries and stake a claim to an area of it; your fences are non-physical, your barriers to entry do not exist, and you cannot keep people out, as a simple matter of fact; you are unable.
Rather than attempt to overturn and deny this reality in pursuit of an illusory comparison with physical property, the law should accept this difference as being definitive of the fact that intellectual property cannot be owned.
Whoah! You managed to discredit yourself in the first line. Anarcho-capitalism? Has that ever existed outside of comic books and movies and places like Sierra Leone? Does this mean that you watch movies like Mad Max and Waterworld to get your political ideology?
Wait- I've got to go to the store to pick up supplies- I better strap on my six shooter and bring toll money for the bridge across the creek.
The answer to all your problems is to move to trouble-regions in Africa or deep rural South America, where laws and government intervention don't exist.
The abstract solution to intellectual property in the political system that you believe in involves belonging to some sort of clan or gang or threatening someone with a gun or explosive. It is not possible to have enforced intellectual property rights in anarcho-capitalism without targeting peoples' lives, food supplies, or shelter through the use of force or exile. I would recommend looking into the way theft was dealt with during the dark ages. Of course, under anarcho-capitalism you could always just bribe the "cop" or tribal enforcer with some gold or perhaps a loaf of bread if they might come after you for stealing someone's "intellectual propery".
It might sound like "LYNCH HIM, HE STOLE MAH IDEAS."
Of course, if we should take such an economic turn, we will be a Russian, British, or Chinese protectorate so fast that we won't even need to worry about solving this problem. Cheers! TWO COME IN ONE COMES OUT!
IMO Intellectual Property is a term which should be avoided, as it is used for way to many very diffent things!
As I generally tend to differ with RMS I think he is right in this case. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for a very detailed article on this Topic.
See
The first group has years of overhead to recuperate, the thieving group has a couple weeks.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
An Anarco-Capitalist would not consider any of the current government systems in place to protect property rights and IP rights to be acceptable in any kind of incarnation. Try looking at corporatist. Bending the government to do the bidding of corporate interests through laws thus making it a fascist system.
Respect other people's rights.
Oh, wait, I forgot. This is slashdot where the only rights that matter are those of the poster.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I can only speak for copyright law here - what I know of American Patent law suggests that it is quite out of control, but I'm no expert. Copyright law, on the other hand, I know something about.
Frankly, copyright law as it stands according to the Berne Convention is fine. It strikes a balance between the rights of the creator and the rights of consumer, and it also has safeguards to prevent ideas from being monopolized. DRM is being taken to some fairly silly lengths, but that's not a legal issue, and I'm going to stick to the law.
(VERY important point - you CANNOT copyright an idea, only the specific implementation of one. There IS protection for derivative works built in to the Berne Convention.)
The problem is that the law is being abused. The solution is to penalize those who abuse it. My understanding is that there is a charge of "malicious prosecution" which is designed for precisely this sort of thing.
A class action suit against those who abuse the law, such as the one that is already happening against the RIAA, is a big step in the right direction.
Frankly, copyright law is something that needs to be protected. It provides the legal framework that allows creative artists to deal with distributors, or distribute themselves (Open Source is make possible by copyright law in the first place). It also defines the public domain - a fact that "abolitionists" tend to forget.
And, sometimes copyright needs to be protected against those who would abuse it, the members of the RIAA being prime examples. The only way to really protect it is to nail the offenders. Let's just say I'm rooting for the class action suit against the RIAA right now.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Maybe the **AAs of the world would be less inclined to lobby for harsh copyright regulations if millions of people around the world would stop stealing copyrighted material in the first place. Content producers aren't spending millions of dollars on lawyers and lobbying every year because they enjoy it, they do it because the world is full of thieves who think nothing of stealing intellectual property and then passing it on to all their thief friends. Do something about that, and maybe the content corporations will calm down and call off their dogs.
"for no reason whatsoever"
Control over finite resources == survival in hard times, for example both sides of this (remarkably civil) thread are willing to kill to defend their 'rights'. What they really mean by rights is access to basic needs like food, water, shelter, sewerage, electricity,...,playstation,...,where does 'basic needs' stop? Who dies if there is not enough water for everyone? - How much is 'enough'?
Nature rewards survival, the two opposing forces of competion and co-operation explain much of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"If the US federal government up-and-disappeared tomorrow, it seems without question that the US would not devolve into a Somalia-like system of warlords asserting local totalitarian control"
this statement is the very height of ignorance, lack of real world experience, naivete, lack of familiarity with human nature. you are a severely insulated, naive person. please, leave your suburb and your well manicured lawns, become familiar with say, your average garden variety gang or mafia. ask yourself what would happen were there no govt to keep these kinds of forces from metastasizing
you are a fool and a moron if you really believe what you wrote. you haven't the slightest idea about how your world works, how human nature actually functions. you are a sheltered buffoon
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
there are two likely futures we are all collectively hurtling toward. one in which all of our culture is tied up with various so called 'rights' by a small number of intellectual property holding companies or the future in which all people are free to share any bit of information with their fellow human beings that they like. my kids are heading for the latter one.
While I could even join you in lamenting some of the shortcomings of unchecked capitalism, I think that some things you pick on are more like human nature/culture than inherently capitalistic.
1. Demand for useless things, just for status symbol value and/or keeping up with the joneses: you'll find that it dated long before capitalism.
Purple in the ancient world, for example had the _only_ value of being a more expensive dye than gold. Demand for it was as high as to create massive fortunes for the phoenician traders. Whole colonies and mercenary armies (e.g., those that the Romans clashed with in the Carthage wars) were at least partially paid for by that trade. In Rome purple eventually became a synonim with power and rank, with the all-purple robe being reserved for the Emperor only.
Silk in Europe, wasn't that horribly practical a garment, or not to justify its horribly high price. It was an item of fashion, for rich women to show off their wealth. (And apparently at least in Rome for some of them to show their body through a semi-transparent silk dress.) We know not only how huge fortunes the Silk Road created for China and for the states through which it went, but we also know that at some point Rome was starting to get bothered by the huge quantities of gold it shipped as payment for silk.
Later the fortune of Byzantium and one reason (out of several) why it did so well when the rest of Europe was in a complete collapse, was that they had managed to steal a few silkworms, and built their own silk industry. You can also see a first example of artificial scarcity there: both China and Byzantium were outright paranoid about keeping it a secret, so others would have to buy from them instead of making their own silk.
2. War. This one goes all the way back to _stone_ age. As soon as people invented the bow and arrow, I don't know what changed there, but suddenly we have depictions of formations of archers shooting at each other. And mass graves with stone tips embedded in the bones.
Some of those tribes were as far from capitalism as it gets. Some hadn't even invented a proper barter economy yet, or not past the most primitive stages of it. (See ancient Egypt for how complex a barter economy can get.) But it didn't prevent them from fighting over hunting grounds. Or just to steal each other's food and women.
So blaming war on capitalism, seems, no offense, a bit silly.
3. Crisis. Again, we have plenty of historical evidence that crisis events existed long before capitalism. In fact, long before our era.
The most common one went like this: some city had grain, and some trader came and offered a high price for it. Said city then got greedy and sold so much grain, that they starved in the coming winter.
The (arguably premature) transition to Iron Age in Europe was caused by a massive crisis. The tin trade at some point simply collapsed, leaving most of Europe and the Middle East without access to weapon-grade metal. That's why everyone rushed to switch to iron.
Etc.
Again, I'm not saying capitalism is the best system imaginable, nor flawless. But methinks that the evils you ascribe to it, existed _millenia_ before capitalism.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There are really two different issues when you look at and think about Intellectual property. You have inventions, which may take time to develop, and you have music/video.
When it comes to an invention system, the current patent system is very broken, because those who file a patent first are generally the ones who are awarded the patent. This precludes those who were working on the same idea or something very similar at the same time. The real problem is that if you file a patent, it lets others see your idea, which lets people copy the inventions of others for profit. Those with a lot of money can bring the product to market faster, hurting the ability of the inventor to make money if the inventor does not have access to money. This is why the system awards those who file first, but does not protect those who are developing ideas but just have not filed a patent application for it.
The only good solution to this is to change how filed patents work. Unless you have a product ready to go, if you have an idea and file a patent, that application should NOT become public information, meaning that others can NOT look at your idea and work to implement it. Instead, others can come forward and file for the same idea. Those who have filed for a patent before it becomes public(when the company is ready to sell products based on the idea) have evidence at that point of prior art, so never need to go to court over the issue. Those who do not have a product based on said invention also do not get the rights to file a lawsuit about the idea since they have not invested the resources to develop the idea in the first place. This would stop the patent trolls who never plan to implement patented ideas. If during the "blackout period" where filed ideas are not made public there are over 8 different non-connected entities who file for the same or similar idea, said idea is obviously an "obvious" invention, so the patent for it would become public. This again prevents obvious ideas from ending up patentable.
Now, on the issue of music and movies, this subject ends up being split. Can someone come along and just duplicate the efforts of others? In the past(centuries ago), if someone heard a song, they could play that song, and as long as they do not claim to have written the song themselves. This goes along with the idea that you can not copyright a concept, but you can copyright the individual words. So, you could in theory hear a song by one music artist and "cover" it, as long as credit is given. The actual playing of the music is done yourself, so it isn't the same as just copying the work of others to make money. The problem is when near-perfect duplication becomes available, at which point people without any talent can suddenly make money on the work of others without doing ANYTHING to facilitate the making of the original music.
The primary solution here is to make sure that people do not make money on the duplication of music. That idea of making money includes those who facilitate the copying of music that they do not have the rights to. So, there should be no penalties for making a copy of a song or songs for a friend as long as no money is charged. This helps the spread of music, which in turn helps artists become better known. There may be money lost in the short term for artists, but in the long run will tend to increase the popularity of the artist, so will make the artist more money. Think of it like radio, where the radio stations can play music without being charged for it because of this idea that "air time" is good for artists.
The big question with this approach is how P2P comes into play here. They facilitate the copying of music without making money from it, and the copy of music from person to person really doesn't go THROUGH their servers, so they are not involved in the copy process. It's just that they provide a way to help people search the shared content of the users. As long as the end result isn't to allow people to sell
Sweden does something interesting with property. The property you own, that your house sits on, any can cross, even camp on, as long as they keep a respectful distance from your house. But they can't go in your house, let alone help themselves to your stuff inside. This appears to work well. The landscape, while in large part "private property," remains accessible to all at no cost. It is recognized as a common heritage.
So why not extend that model? Cultural "IP" can be our common heritage, of which private individuals can own some - you can't go into the recording studios and help yourself to the master recordings - but the public can cross the private land without hindrance. Movies, music, other cultural IP all draws heavily from shared cultural heritage. The IP owners have plenty of ways to enjoy their position as artists, or more often as those in special proximity to artists, without requiring any right to lock all other people off their "property," or charge fees for those crossing its boundaries.
After all, when the hikers have broken camp and trekked on, the Swedes still own and enjoy their property - nothing has been taken. To see the vista from your hill, or to listen to your recorded song, increases the wealth of our shared culture, but takes nothing from you. Without the shared culture, or the shared nation, you'd have no song, and no land. Sharing back should be part of the basic social contract.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This is an immense topic, so I'll focus on a few things which I've mentioned before.
1. "Real" Property encompasses those things which are truly economically scarce. By that I mean "things that can only be used simultaneously by a small finite number of people." For instance: a piece of land, a particular tool, a book (the physical object), etc. Real Property rights make sense, because it is possible to enforce by virtue of the location of the object. Note that a consumer/user of physical property has some typical social grants also: right of first sale, the concept that if you 'buy' the object, you can use is until it breaks with no additional compensation to the manufacturer than original (you don't pay annual license fees on a hammer for instance). (Note: Things like leases are different, because in those the 'customer' pays less than the "ownership" amount for a temporary use of the item. Observe: you can both buy and rent tools from stores like Home Depot - a large "consumer" construction supply store for those not familiar with it - you buy a tool it's yours, you rent it you have to return it later, but renting is far less expensive for a few days than buying a tool.)
2. "Intellectual" Property has some problems that current legal and social constructs do not address. The first is that currently the system tries to protect the work as the economically scarce item - the copy of the music, book, software, etc. Those things are not economically scarce though, because there is no loss of use to any number of individuals which may be utilizing an idea. Until the rules protect what is actually scarce - the people coming up with and implementing the ideas - then the system will be broken. Rather than strange licensing rules and copyrights and such, I would rather see forced "attribution rights" (for lack of a better term). That said, the only thing that really troubles me about "intellectual property" is the ability of people to continue to extract economic wealth from others for work that was done in the past without adding new value - things like forced annual licenses for software when a version that's three years old is fine for a particular need, or making tons of money off a song that was written thirty years ago. I don't have problems with artists making money off new performances (performances are a scarce economic good, so those fall under the "old" paradigms). This is why, of all the current forms of intellectual property, I think Trademark is the most sound as it is simply what I meant by attribution "rights" - it ensures the consumer that a particular product was created/developed by a particular entity and establishes brand image and gives real value to both the consumer and manufacturer/creator. It also allows for vast competition in a field - I can by a brand X widget or a brand Y widget depending on my tastes.
So what's the solution? I admit that I am not entirely sure, because there are problems with the current implementations of both real and "intellectual" property rights. What is really needed is a thoughtful consideration of the social goals of the concepts, and how to ensure that people remain free to think and tinker and make a living off (which is a distinct difference in my mind from "profit from") their works. Having any entity, even a government, tell you that you cannot implement an idea because someone else implemented it is a not-so-subtle form of slavery.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
i'm not arguing with you. an argument presupposes an exchange of ideas between two equals and involving two coherent positions. the only thing that is happening here is called condescension and patronization. you can find those words on wikipedia too (snicker)
you are trying to tell me anarchy is an actual valid concept to consider. its like you are trying to take a perpetual motion machine seriously. its like you are telling me that the government is poisoning us with chemtrails (contrails left by airplanes, some wackjobs actually believe that)
if someone tells me about chemtrails, and i can't suppress my laughter, then what? that person accuses me of an appeal to emotion and walks off in a huff for not being able to engage in an intellectual debate with them. well, maybe that person who believes in chemtrails is a wackjob who doesn't deserve to be debated?
now you know how i feel about you and the idea of anarchy
anarchy isn't a valid concept. to explain to you why, to impress upon you the basic building blocks of simple human nature and the real world around you is a level of intellectual charity i am not willing to stoop to
anarchy is a concept embraced by naive insulated suburban teenagers who haven't the slightest fucking clue how the wider world functions or what makes the human beings around them tick
so yes, i appeal to emotion. all i can do is laugh at you. there is nothing respectable about your beliefs. wouldn't you lauch when someone presents unworkable ignorance at you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What you're saying is that some scientists can make a better living with IP protection.
The OP insinuated is that scientists will have to rob others if deprived of IP protection.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Not to go quoting Fezzig here, but I have never heard of "inalienable property rights". The "Law" alienates me from my property more than any other offender. I mean, they alienate everyone from "Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit Of Happiness" all of the time, too, (but pretend not to). But man, most of the business of the courts is some asshole alienating some other person of something.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Anyone find it funny that all these comments about why IP is illusionary are preceded by the message "The following comments are owned by whoever posted them"
Mickey Mouse is reasonable to hold as IP. DRM schemes are sufficient to keep most consumers honest. Software patents are ridiculous. Pretty much any patent for a process, widget, program, or chemical is a continuous strain on non-obvious.
You really want to make IP simple to protect, pass some sort of law where if you're caught pirating something the company can send you a bill for the price of the item (or maybe three times the price or some such). That'd cut down on frivolous piracy without becoming tyrannical.
In the past I have written many custom programs for various industries using techniques I have seen in text books and some I developed myself. I always copyrighted these works and would have never thought to put a patent on any of it since even my new techniques, or at least new to me, could have been discovered by any number of code floggers out to solve a similar problem. But the total program was my work and had some value to the clients I developed it for.
Too lazy to create a sig...
This doesn't mean that there are no copyrights or patents. What this means is that the material covered by these are not "property". The property, the copyright or patent, is the temporary monopoly over the distribution of that material, created to provide an incentive for the production of that material. The strength and duration of that monopoly should be based on the resources needed to profit from the production, distribution, and sale of that material.
What is happening is that these costs have been massively reduced, particularly for music.
The capital costs of music production have been cut by the development of good inexpensive digital mixers and sequencers like Garage Band... something that has been going on since the '70s, really, and which really started to take off as early as the late '80s. You still need a studio, and people with the skills to use these tools well, but you don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to create studio quality masters.
Distribution costs have gone down almost to zero.
And sales costs have been reduced, since you don't need to maintain any inventory.
So the costs and risks involved in producing music for mass distribution have gone through the floor, and the industry that has evolved to manage the former high risk is going through a massive shrinkage... and trying to use the copyright laws created in the earlier period of high costs of production to fight one of the side effects of these changes.
But this has nothing to do with "intellectual property".
the solution to "intellectual property" is to recognize that it's a metaphor, and concentrate on the goals of the copyright system rather than treating it as something that's inherently important.
I think circletimessqaure's point is that there has never been a stable, effective anarchy in the history of the world. Although many anarchic utopias have been described (Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossed," Erik Frank Russell's "And Then There Were None," for example), the simple fact remains that anarchy has never to this point resulted in a stable society. That doesn't mean it's not possible. It does suggest it's highly unlikely to work.
As it is, any organization willing to use force is likely to subjugate those who are not organized. You could probably set up a minimal social contract whereby everyone is obligated to come to the defence of those who are being subjugated, perhaps. But that requires dedication to the social ideal of anarchy, which would probably require a dramatic shift away from drastic consumerism.
Anyway, even apart from the whole discussion of anarchy as a non-government, nobody who supports intellectual property rights can call themselves "anarcho-" anything. They are definitely archists, as all IP laws are predicated on governmental regulation.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Ah, yes. Increasing overall wealth by sharing. A simple concept, really: a rising tide lifts all boats.
The point of "IP" law isn't to increase overall wealth. It's to increase individual, personal wealth. Those who support IP support the effective exploitation of shared and common heritage for their own gain.
The point of capitalism isn't to share, or to create the most overall wealth. It's to create the most personal wealth.
Sweden sounds like a good place.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The issue of intellectual property as envisioned by the founding fathers of the United States boiled down to the greatest good for the greatest number. If there were no copyright then anyone could freely copy works and society would benefit. They believed there should be some *SHORT* period of time where the work was protected so the author of the work could make some profit from it. They tried to balance the benefits to all. Our current system came about as the result of lobbying by Corporations to extend the protections. Senator Oren Hatch, a supporter of IP, is a perfect example of how corporations lobbied lawmakers. If you research a little you'll see why he's such a supporter. He's selling music over the internet. A corporation doesn't care about anyone. It's only mandate is to make money for it's shareholders. If you really want to fix what's wrong with the United States you'll figure out how to change that. There are a LOT of horrible being done because of the unrestrained profit motive of corporations. The IP issue will take care of itself.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
To clarify, IP requires an initiation of force (coercion) to be implemented. It cannot be achieved through voluntary means. It does not arise through nature like real property and the concept of property rights. Without government and its special "right" to employ coercion, IP has no chance of being implemented.
On the other hand, anarcho-capitalism outright rejects the idea of a special "right" to employ coercion. That is what defines anarcho-capitalism: the lack of such a right, and consequently, the lack of government.
Yes, the original poster is a bit confused. IP simply cannot exist under anarcho-capitalism. It's not compatible. If you can't prove real damage to your business, in terms of real property rights, then you wouldn't have a case.
Either you are an anarcho-capitalist who does not understand copyright law well enough to know that it is a creation of the state, or you do not understand anarcho-capitalism, and should learn a little more about it before you presume to wear the name.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Stop calling it 'intellectual property', and refer to things with the proper terms such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks. That way the proper law can be applied instead of the pile of Neverland crap called 'intellectual property'.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
The problem with "intellectual property" is that, when compared with the other governmental abstractions we use, such as copyright and patents, it is extraordinarily hard to enforce. That is why the United States constitution gives the federal government the right and responsibility to enforce both--but notice there is no mention of intellectual property. But let us compare the two:
* Copyright acknowledges that when you buy a book, you are buying two things: the physical book with letters on it, and the right to a copy of the information expressed by the letters (since copying is increasingly trivial). It is up to the government (and in a democratic-republic, the legislators and the people represented) to determine what rights the holders of a copy of the work have.
* Patents acknowledge that once you know how to build something, it is just a matter of technology to recreate it. That is why you give the public a full description of how you built it in order to acquire a patent, in exchange for exclusive rights to produce the thing for a period of time.
And then we have property rights, where that item is not trivial to copy perfectly (we don't yet have replicators) and all rights are exclusive to the property owner. The problem with intellectual property is that it pretends that information is not trivial to copy, and also keeps all rights for the copyright owner. But in a fundamental way, there must be copies made along the way, and to say that the recipient of that copy has no rights not explicitly granted by the copyright owner is unfair, since not even the copyright owner can control what the person does with that information once it is absorbed in the mind. And so we inevitably have fair use in one form or the other.
Essentially, all the people insisting on intellectual property need to suck it up and deal with a world where it is trivial to copy things--they can't have unlimited rights AND distribute copies of their works.
The more a law or set of laws is broken, the more it loses its legitimacy. In the case of copyright, the law lost all meaning years and years ago. If there was any real meaning to the copyright law in the US, court outcomes would be somewhat consistent, punishments would fit the crime, and one violating party would not get off scott-free while another violating party is ordered to pay $220,000 in fines.
If you want to maintain control of something, don't make it public.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Well, an anarchist who believes in capitalism is bogus anyway.
Property in itself is imaginary. As a secret between us,, it STEALS more attention to pin and shade the ideas of POSSESSION. Now don't get me wrong here, go a ahead and spend your time how you dream. Sketch energy, matter and information to a shape of idea with you the maintainer. Or is there some other thought you had that gives you the sensation of ownership? I guess all's I'm saying is that there is no such thing.
Land is without value until a human does something with it. Sets it aside as a park, parks a tank on it to keep Anarchists out of the park, grows a garden beside the park, digs a mine under the park, or otherwise uses the land.
To avoid running short of urine and feces, humans have invented various methods of marking territory. "Nebo, protect my boundary stone" is the meaning of the name "Nebuchadnezzar." Moving a boundary stone was punishable by death!
This was an early and brutal reflection of a fundamental truth, good fences make good neighbors. The fences don't have to be physical unless some agents human or animal cannot respect Property.
Even the Berlin Wall was built to make people respect property rights: the State owned the people and could not have them wandering away like errant livestock.
The alternative to Property is the alternative to Civilization, that is constant warfare and death liberally strewn with urine and feces. Purely animal existence.
It should be legal to shoot adult Anarchists. And obviously I am talking about the capital-A variety not jazz musicians! Children should at least be exposed to History to prevent their becoming dead meat^H^H^H^H adult Anarchists.
anarchy has been tried many times
it is an unintended consequence of various government collapses throughout history. whenever anarchy exists, it leads to warlords controlling various parts of the countryside. china in the 1940s, somalia today, afghanistan at various times, etc.
you think this would not happen in the usa? the usa has magical anti-anarchy properties? i thought the usa was composed of human beings. but i guess you go north of the rio grande and (cue harp) people are suddenly magically different
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Suppose instead of killing you, ShieldW0lf would wait after you naturally died, and only then take over your former (now unowned) property. Absolutely no crimes, no violence.
Hmmm, that could be plausible, but then, if my use of the land produces economic growth, then, you would have to weigh his desires with the desires of the society as a whole. Like, what if I built a factory that employed 1,000 people with good, high paying jobs and raised up a people in my community into the middle class?
See, that's really what it boils down to, is that property is something whose ownership implies a desire to use that in a way that is consonent with enriching society over all. We try, through a bizarre mix of partisan politics, to create a property system that not only incents productivity, but requires it.
So, for example, if I am an estate holder with 1,000,000 acres of land doing nothing, and then, thousands of people are packed into cities, then, we have laws in place that tax me enough to require that my land be productive. This, in turn, would force me to divest that land to people, who might be like ShieldW0lf, who would do something productive with it, and so forth.
Now, let's leave aside the obvious environmental problems with that. For example, one being that if wetlands were privately held without property taxes, then the public would not have had to spend billions of dollars of public funds for Katrina clean up. Since there are no known consequences environmental to IP, the idea of enforced productivity for social benefit needs to stand.
So, really, what it boils down it, is, yes, one could envision a regime where copyrights and patents could be owned, and perhaps even indefinitely, but, we could avoid the problems of an enshrined nobility by having a property tax on them, and by varying that tax rate, we can achieve a balance between incenting a public service by requiring people to work, and preventing inequitible distributions of wealth and the meritless nobility they inevitably create.
This is my sig.
The anarchists had a meeting, no one showed up.
With all do respect of us believing in this thing called "property." According to my sister, when I am walking within the airspace of her property, she owns my being. What are you being a slave to? And, why? Perhaps, I am mistaking this for loving.
My ego, yes I own my ego, it's my property, it's all mine! And, my ego wants to think that I am an intellectual.
(free excerpt provided by permission, any other uses are strictly forbidden)
1 - Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with?
No. As a rabid libertarian, I used to, before RMS's arguments convinced me - although if he had not, I suspect the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney would have anyway.
The fact is simple: you cannot, and should not, lay claim to own something in someone else's mind. It's as simple as that. Intellectual "property" is nothing of the sort. The moment you introduce the idea that an idea itself can be "property" you automatically bring to bear the social mechanisms of enforcement of something already in the mind of another person. In other and simpler words: Thought Police. That is no definition of "liberty" that makes sense to me.
The idea of "property" was invented as a means to control access to and use of scarce resources. Intellect, despite the example of politicians all over the world, is simply not scarce.
Reasonable people can talk about the problem of compensating creators of new intellectual "property" - but only after they have rid themselves of the destructive meme of forcing it into the real estate mold.
There are plenty of tribes that have continued well into the modern world.....Saying that they are all dead and their culture is little more than a legend is just an easy way for your greedy, white culture to continue to comfort itself.
And what did your culture do with what it had?
Absolutely nothing.
Were it not for Europeans, the USA would still be in the stone ages and the people that live here would still be worshipping rocks and trees and the great spirit. You know who is greedy? It is the native American that continues to claim that they are entitled to a continent that they utterly wasted so they can prance half haked in the wilderness and feed a few million people eating wild animals and berries, rather than the billions of people that Americans now feed. Was it wrong to steal the land from native Americans? Yeah, it was, on some level, but, the world is infinitely better off that humanity did. Americans have cured numerous diseases, made advances that have brought clean water and plenty of food to a planet, persuaded the world to adopt an economic system that has, at long last, promises to abolish poverty -planet- wide. And you want to take that away, so you could do what? Native Americans didn't even have calculus when they were discovered, and couldn't even make cast iron, let alone steel.
This is my sig.
It is not a natural right - it was dreamed up by the guys who wrote your constitution. To be 'natural' you'd have to be born with it and even in the US I don't see babies being born with guns in their hands.
I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights
Right - so if say a foreign government invades to steal your land you and your gun will happily be able to see them off without any government help? No I didn't think so. You do need a government to enforce your property rights otherwise another government will come and take them away.
Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
The rights of your government come from exactly the same basis as all of your rights. They are written down in the law of the land. The same laws that give you a right to bear arms give the government the right to pass laws over you. To say that your government has no rights is to say that you have no rights.
Yes, patents, copyrights, and trademarks have a place in modern society. No, they're nowhere near equivalent to physical property, simply because they are intangible things that can be duplicated easily, even just by looking at them and committing them to memory.
To fix the injustices surrounding patents and copyrights, there are a couple of partial solutions: One, decrease the terms of patents (by a bit) and copyrights (by a whole bunch). And/or two, make them nontransferable, even as a matter of creation as a work-for-hire (which doesn't preclude individuals or groups of people licensing their works-for-hire to their employers).
The answer is simple. We use property taxes to ensure that land is kept productive in the USA, otherwise, the property is confiscated by the state and auctioned off to someone who will enforce that claim. Or, the owner may transfer the land to the public domain - usually the county or state. For example, Annenberg donated a large part of New Jersey's natural woodlands for this reason and now they exist for the public benefit.
The same should be done with intellectual property. If someone files a copyright or a patent, have them pay taxes on it, annually. If they can't pay the taxes, they are not entitled to the claim, and they can either have the IP confiscated by the state for auction, transfer ownership to a charitable organization, sell it, or give it to the people in the form of public domain.
That lets people get stinking rich off of new ideas, which encourages innovation, but also discourages rent seeking, which promotes stagnation.
I'm surprised that liberals have not thought of this already. Of all great ironies, here it is the conservative Republican reminding you liberals of actually why property taxes were invented, and you invented them. They solved the problem before, and can solve it again.
This is my sig.
That sort of reasoning makes me, as a Mexican, want to go and grab some acres at downtown Los Angeles. After all, it was taken by force from my kin, right?
But then again, as a Mexican Jew, it also allows me to kick an Arab out from his property in current Israel, right? After all, a very wise and fair God granted me (well, my forefathers, but explicitly with inalineable, irrenouncable hereditary rights) all fo Canaan (which is allegedly quite larger than current-day Israel)
That's the evil of _every_ property based system, be it communitary or private. The State believes it has right to do whatever it pleases with what it administers, no matter its history. Go ask Sitting Bull and his friends...
BTW, most (I don't know if all) Communist regimes _do_ honor private property (i.e. my house, my belongings) as far as it is a "fair" (for an arbitrary definition of fairness, of course, bah...) share, not much above what everybody has.
I had to look up what the heck anarcho-capitalism is ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-Capitalism
"It advocates the elimination of the state, the provision of law enforcement, courts, national defense, and all other security services by voluntarily-funded competitors in a free market rather than through compulsory taxation."
Does this mean if I need a cop I have to rent one? what if I am poor I guess I am SOL... or does it mean that the rich own the cops and you have to do what they say? - same goes for the army. Only one rich fuck would come up with such screwed up piece of garbage - equal rights? only what you can pay for... the good news everything is tax free, but your "government" is owned by the local robber baron or monopolist or militia - actually it does sound familiar... I am sorry but anyone who advocated "anarcho-capitalism" is a billionaire or an idiot
IP is a great farce, thats all. If your idea can't be turned into a product, to be sold, then what exactly is IP for?
Companies are already protected by their trademark and copyright law, the idea of making an idea or a thought somebody's property is simply ludicrous, either actually sell a product or don't. The theory that you can 'licence' a product is just an elaborate way for corporations to avoid actually selling you a product and thereby dodging all the consumer protection laws in place.
I dare anyone to come up with one good reason for the protection of so called intellectual property without being reduced to spouting catch phrases and platitudes.
Copyright isn't supposed to cover ideas, its supposed to cover a product, to encourage the sharing of ideas. Thats why theres a dozen different car companies, all using the same basic idea (for just one example).
The length of term in copyright now is the major stumbling point to its usefulness, at 120 years a corporation can come up with one good idea (mickey mouse) and live off it forever, suing the shit out of anyone who even looks at them funny.
With a shorter term corporations would be forced to innovate more often since their goods would become public domain sooner, they would still have exclusive rights to produce a product for a time, and even when that was up they'd still be the 'official' to everyone else's knock offs, but the shorter term stops them from just camping an idea.
Ditto for all the patent troll companies, Imagine if instead of waiting 120 years, a patent troll company's portfolio went public domain in 20, or even 10 years. the problem would rapidly solve it self as all the troll's weapons became public domain, thus providing handy prior art for anyone trying to follow in their foot steps.
But as long as I'm dreaming about things that will never happen, lets also get some ISP's who simply serve the internet and don't fuck with our connection to it, politicians who pass laws benefiting everyone instead of just the rich people, break ma bell back up again, do the same to Microsoft, cut the price of gas in half, and find me a set of teenage twins who don't know how to say no, red heads preferably.
So you are saying it's OK for a Hollywood producer to take a book somebody wrote six years ago and make a $100M movie and the writer doesn't get a dime?
You are too busy knocking corporations to realize that some artists are freelancers. Should the corporations be allowed to take the freelancers work and profit from it after five years? Some examples:
-Indie bands
-Freelance Photographers
-Writers
Is that ${random_neighbour} plants Monsanto seeds (say, non-terminator Monsanto seeds), they grow and have their own seeds, the descendent seeds fly as they have done for a couple million years and land in my yard. They grow. Now I am a criminal and must pay Monsanto.
I don't really care about this story, but just wanted to say that anarcho-capitalist is an oxymoron of historic proportions. Try running a capitalist system without any societal rules and see how that works for you.
Life needs more saving throws.
Although a lot of views have been represented, there seems to be a fairly general consensus that intellectual property laws do serve some useful purpose. That being the case, what can we actually do about changing them? I mean more specifically than just saying we need to change them, or we need to demand that they be changed. Who are "we," who do "we" make that demand to, and how do "we" do it?
an IP tax may help some..
But alot of the issue is Patents are not being used as they were intended.. They were initially to protect Research and Development work so that companies and recoup and profit from R&D work..
Now Patents are used to Gouge the market place by stifling/eliminating competition or just plain flat out extort companies.
I am sorry but anything that took less than 1000 man hours to Develop Does not need a patent.. with that little amount of work.. It should be about Quality of the product and beating competition to the marketplace that will give you return on your R&D investment.. (Hell it could even be 100 man hours.. as long as you don't count how long it took a lawyer to come up with wording that is generalized and wide sweeping)
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Property has specific characteristics and behaves in tangible ways that people understand. In fact, the characteristics of property causes it to be classified in different ways because even tangible property doesn't behave the same: personal property (personalty) vs. real estate (realty). One big example of this is what it takes to deprive someone of the use of their property - it's different for personalty and realty. Personalty can be moved while realty cannot.
The different characteristics of the property mean that they have different names to highlight the differences: personalty and realty. To simply call something Intellectual Property does not highlight the uniqueness of it in a significant way. In fact, it behaves completely differently than any other type of property:
What are the legal requirements for stealing?
How does this apply to personalty and realty? It's obvious that it doesn't work for realty and therefore there are different ideas and terms that describe how people are deprived of the use of their realty (think squatting).
How do the requirements of stealing apply to Intellectual Property? They don't apply too well. That's why there should be different terms that describe how it is governed.
To make things more clear to people you should pick a different term to describe the "thing". I have chosen Intellectual Creations. It drops the word property which because Intellectual Creations don't behave like any type of property with which people are familiar.
Words are very influential and evoke further thought, ideas and eventually lead to action and tangible manifestations. Don't underestimate the power of choosing the correct words.
The current mess we have with patents and copyrights and associated litigation
is by far the best argument against treating "ideas" as "property". They are
ethereal, have no intrinsic value and are rarely something that you could claim
"clear title" to anyways. This "clear title" issue is the real problem. It is
nearly impossible for any creative work to be entirely the "property" of the
creator. Inevitably to create anything you will need to "steal" quite a bit of
other people's work. This undermines the notion of exclusive ownership of the
"original" owner and interferes with the creation of new works.
This is the core of the "patent" problem. Trivial derivative works (Tivo)
suddenly become issues of massive legal liability.
Creative works are not property, they're capital.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The moment you can say "I am a $POLITICAL_LABEL" your mind has effectively shut off. I no longer need to listen to you, and I can just go to Wikipedia or some dictionary of ideologies to see how your self imposed mental algorithm will react to anything. Ideology is the mind killer and breeder of robots.
In short--let IP-based methodologies shoot themselves in the foot. None of them can compete with an effective model based on actually providing widespread availability on purpose. If any large software corporation, for example, started publishing a set sales cap after which their software becomes free(as in speech), or implemented some other realistic association between the cost of production and the cost to consumers, the marketing value of a company actually doing something for the general public would be unmatchable. Never underestimate the power of "Don't be evil". Marketing an image is far easier and cheaper when that image doesn't have to be faked.
The purpose of property rights in modern society is, at heart, to make sure that someone is not deprived of the fruits of his labor. If I take care of a farmhouse, if I work the land and make it productive, it is only just that I be allowed to keep the house and the lion's share of the food I produce; anyone can see the injustice if someone came along and took over my house and stole all the food I grew, because for all my work I am now homeless and starving.
It is fundamental to the nature of property that someone can be deprived of it, and that is the reason we have laws to protect it. It's not about money, it's about natural rights. However, natural rights for ideas go in the opposite direction. If I hear an idea, it is my natural right to think about it and try to apply it to my life in some way. The saying "Information wants to be free" is true insofar as there is no real impediment to an idea propagating itself indefinitely, and that once known it is not easily forgotten. Thus, information is actually the opposite of property.
Nevertheless, in order to make it economically feasible for people to come up with new ideas (books, music, inventions), the government allows an un-natural right to monopoly that is limited in duration so that the writer and the inventor can enjoy the fruits of their productive labor like the farmer does.
Really, it ought to be called 'intellectual un-propery', because that describes precisely what it is.
An interesting difference between 'intellectual property' and real property is that two people can create the exact same thing with real property and still each own it themselves and no one can say it isn't theirs.
With 'intellectual property', two people can create the exact same idea but no one can say it belongs to either of them until they prove who came up with the idea first.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Best. comment. evar.
I think there are two key concerns here, and they are quite different. One is intellectual property rights, and the other is the optimal state of intellectual property law for us to have a ____ (e.g., fair, equitable, functioning, orderly, free, wealthy, powerful) society.
There are also auxiliary considerations, such as the rights you have in protecting your intellectual property. Do you have the right to install rootkits on your customer's computer as part of the agreement in selling the product to them? Do you have to make sure that they know and agree before they are bound to it? Do you as a customer have a right to reverse engineer a physical or software product that you have purchased? Do you have the right to resell it?
Personally, I don't really believe in intellectual property 'rights', and I believe that intellectual property law needs to be scaled back considerably but not entirely (though I generally discourage drastic changes and would prefer to see it done in stages over a few years). Something like 10 years for copyrights, 15 with extension; 5 years for patents, 10 with extension.
Patents in particular are tricky, howeverâ"there's a need to provide incentive for entities to absorb the massive costs in developing breakthrough technologies without allowing the prices set on those technologies to undermine the ability of those technologies to benefit humanity. I have no solution (in part because I don't know enough about the domain), but it seems pretty clear that the current mechanisms are b0rken, particularly with regard to medicine.
Of course, this guy is absolutely spot on, as always. I don't understand why he posts at -1, and by that I mean I can't believe how quickly he gets modded down to -1 from whatever lofty height of karma he's posting from.
Just from these short paragraphs I already know that this guy is some kind of messiah. He is here to bring you wisdom, and save you from the evils of closed source and proprietary living. Yet, despite this lofty goal, he does not consider himself above you - as shown by the fact that he doesn't speak down to you at all. Every word is kindly and assumes that you, too, are as much of a genius as he, just misguided by the evil that is Microdollaroft (otherwise known as Micro$oft or even M$, if you want to be especially witty).
Bask in his warm intellectual glow and be enriched!
I'm Just Another Twitter Sockpuppet, and I approve this message.
To create and/or innovate requires the intellect of a human.
....
...) should be given patent/copy-rights. These property-rights must be non-transferable, except to public domain, and all other uses should be under specific (fairness arbitrated contract) Patent/Copy-licence purposes to protect the human ownership from exploitation and/or property theft.
... and freely used for innovation (RD&D). If the innovation is unique (non-derivative), then another Patent/Copy-Right can be issued to the engineer/research... people that provided the creativity. The purpose is to have industry/business retain and reward creative/innovative people, as well as the (C*O) business managers, for good "Open" Capitalist competition. [NOTE: The Chinese (or other) totalitarian government is (master/surf based) not a capitalist/economic model; Therefor, exploitation of creative/innovative people will never end until the totalitarian government ends.]
To replicate/manufacture requires industry and business.
The past (legacy-process) should be grandfathered to avoid legal a/o economic turmoil, but terminated completely from any legal consideration. Industry business can make money (contract agreed or arbitrated) off what they own and use productively , but no longer legally control, or obtain any future ownership-rights to creativity, innovation,
IOW: Business/Industry can only claim/steal creativity from a human. So, Edison (the company) was a great thief/plagiarist, but not a scientist, mathematician, or artist. So, Edison (the person) was not creative, but he was sometimes innovative and always a business/industry professional.
The creative individual (Writer, Sculptor, theoretical mathematician/physicist) is most commonly the least rewarded. Most innovators are unknown except as employees of a corporation. Artist could not sell their rights, but could lease/licence products (on commission/percentage) for replication/distribution, and present on tour to make personal income. All patent/copy-rights/licences enter public domain after the death of their siblings, spouse, and children or 10 years whichever is longer.
Therefore (IMO), Patent/Copy... Rights laws of today are of the legacy industrial age and anachronistic aristocracy dejure; So, at best Corporate Welfare is always providing significant disincentive to creativity and innovation by humans.
Only pure theoretical scientist and non-derivative artist (writers, musicians, sculptors
Any legally recognized and granted Patent/Copy-Right to the creative person (based on global DTG clock filing) would automatically allow Government publishing and posting to the Internet (Global Community) for all possible legal/idea vetting of issues for reasonable resolutions. The "Open" complete and detailed Patent/Copy-Right would be usable by any person, business, country
Businesses/Industry/Institutions can then proceed to binding arbitration with the Patent/Copy-Right holders/representatives for RD&D and Production/Marketing... cost. Businesses/Industry and financial institutions professional risk takers generate income when they make good risk assessments. If no money is made, then not even the Patent/Copy-Right holders make money (a risk that they hope to mitigate by gong with proven business/industry performers.
IOW: Reward must be based on creativity, innovation, and successfully performance, not speculation, mistakes, exploitation, and poor decisions.
Today the greatest enemy of Capitalism is Corporate Welfare.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Your opening sentence got me curious: how do we reconcile the idea of limited government with that of enforcing monopolies on ideas? More to the point, where do we draw the line between what should an should not be property?
Copyrights and patents are artificial constructs. Enforcing them is a form of government interference in business and public life - certainly not the sort of thing you think of when you try to describe anarcho-capitalism. But then, by that argument enforcing them is not unlike enforcing laws against theft of "real" property. Isn't "real" property just a constructs, too? Arguably the idea that a 1991 Chevy Cavalier is "owned" is just as artificial as the idea that being able to click a button only once to buy a product is owned. And the idea of land as a form of property was universally unrecognized in my neck of the woods (North America) as recently as 500 years ago.
In the end I'm left concluding that it's really an issue of costs and benefits to society: any form of property is good only insofar as it is beneficial for us to recognize it as a form of property. That said, I still don't like lumping ideas in with property, but this is mainly because I find it more beneficial to think of them differently e.g., as monopolies rather than as owned items). I do think patents and copyright are beneficial, but not necessarily in a property sense. In fact I've long found the term "Intellectual Property" to be very pretentious.
> You're right when you mean patents and copyrights, but trademarks make a lot of sense, as there is no advantage in letting someone pose as someone else.
Correct. Trademarks are 100% compatible with the core libertarian values of freedom from coersion, violence and fraud. Decorating a product with the distinctive marks of a competitor in order to deceive customers is fraud.
Patents and copyrights are a different issue.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I do believe that authors and inventors should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors for a limited time, in order to encourage them to be authors and inventors.
I do believe that traditional United States copyright law is fine, except that
(a) the amendments to the term of copyright are unconstitutional, because they exceed the authority conferred by the Constitution,
(b) "fair use" needs to be more clearly defined and expanded to provide some kind of safe harbor to creative people, and
(c) the statutory damages sections need to be amended to reflect modern technology which permits mass reproduction of inexpensive files and micropayments in such areas as peer to peer file sharing.
And by 'traditional United States copyright law' I would include the traditional customs and practices of copyright lawyers, who traditionally would seek to avoid, rather than precipitate, unnecessary litigation, by the use of cease and desist agreements.
The bizarre litigation campaign of the RIAA and MPAA and their European alter egos bears no resemblance to traditional United States copyright law.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I absolutely do not acknowledge the legitimacy of "intellectual property". I will further state that anyone who claims the existence of "intellectual property" is a thief who steals not only from me but from everyone in the world, as well. Ideas are not and cannot be property. This is quite simply because if I "take" or "get" an idea from you, you still have it. If I take your car from you, you do not have it.
If you are unaware of the eloquent statements of Jefferson, I suggest you look them up. He demonstrates quite clearly why ideas are different from physical objects. Further, I have a RIGHT to Free Speech. This means that if you say something, I have the RIGHT to repeat it. This right is necessary for all societies because if people cannot critisize the government, the government will abuse its power.
If you are truly an "anarcho-capitalist" as you claim, the concept of "intellectual property" is fundamentally at odds with your philosophy. You are basically saying that you lean towards anarchy in governance of the market, but then you claim that the government has the power to grant monopolies as the old European monarchies and autocracies were wont to do.
Finally, if you think that ideas should be property, where does it stop? How about the air that we breathe? Can we build fences around that and charge people for that, too? Would you suffocate someone for not paying you? Ideas are like the atmosphere: something we must all share, and something the absence or scarcity of which harms us all.
2 -- If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?Acknowledging the legitimacy of "intellectual property" is precisely the abuse that you are talking about. Just as Freedom is abused by allowing some people to be enslaved, our Intellectual Freedom is abused by allowing some information to be "owned". Once these things are allowed the world is no longer Free. As the concept has already committed the abuse, it is not hard to see that *AAs are just a symptom of the affliction, a pustule that conceals a deeper and more serious infection.
Supporting "intellectual property" is both amoral and monarchist. Nobody can reaonably claim to believe in both Freedom and "intellectual property".
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
There are plenty of anarchists (including anarcho-"capitalists") who have used natural rights to justify anarchy. Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard are two major ones.
Of course, imaginary property doesn't make sense from a natural rights perspective, either.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
tion...
If its property, TAX IT. Whatever the **AA says their sh*t is worth in lawsuits right now, freeze that value and tax it at 5% per year of that (plus inflation). As long as they pay, its theirs. When they decide its not profitable to pay anymore... public domain. Problem Solved.
You're misreading the term; "intellectual" is an adjective, not a noun. Assuming your equivalence between property and slavery is correct, enslavement of intelligence would be "intelect property". Intellectual property is property that is of the intelectual type, rather than of the physical type. Following your logic, intellectual property would be enslavement of soemthing intellectual in nature, it would not be enslavement of the intellect iself.
"Of course life is bizarre. The more bizarre it gets, the more interesting it is. The only way to approach it is to make
IP is not property because it conflicts with the basic justifications for property. The idea behind property in the first place was that just as you couldn't come along and deprive someone of their life you couldn't deprive them of the work of their hands or other goods they had improved with their effort.
Using IP doesn't deprive the originator the right to use their idea.
Now we want to adopt a pragmatic solution to encourage people to innovate and share ideas but that is about pragmatic incentives not property rights.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The issue with patents is not necessarily the idea behind patents. Patents come down to the concept, which someone has already stated, of "it being my hill" and protecting that hill which in theory help the small guy from having *new* ideas from being exploited.
I'd guess that this was something many people would agree with - surely someone who advances the knowledge of the human race should be entitled to some reward, The inventions shouldn't be swiftly gobbled up by someone taking credit for inventions that are not theirs.
No, the issue is based on the definition of that hill and the length of time people are allowed to keep the hill before it reverts to public ownership. If a hill is left alone, whether untouched or not and someone else occupies it, well, "finders keepers". If you desert your ideas you deserve them to be used by others.
In support of this we could look at common inventions - do you want to have manufacturer's to still pay licenses for light bulbs to the families of the many inventors whom history books have claimed were the creators? What are they doing to deserve it? All the technology is understood, some electricity and a filament will build it, just what is so deserving for them to reap reward from it? However, when the inventions/discoveries made a difference to the sum of knowledge there is reason to reward those who made the discovery.
I'd guess the point I'm trying to make is that, in reality, nobody owns knowledge or information - its simply out there to be discovered. Person X and person Y can discover the knowledge at the same time in completely different ways, however, there is usually something to be said in being first...
This runs into the idea of Intellectual Property. Intellectual property? I don't see how it exists - either its knowledge you know or its knowledge you don't. Lets face it, IP is a legal term and is a pure fiction to give value to someone's secrets (hidden knowledge) and hence prevent "stealing". Its a misnomer - you can't own a thought or stop others from thinking that thought or plant your tree on that thought. You can however, patent that thought and make money from taking the credit for that "discovery" - if you know it and other people would want it then it should be patented so that you can get the rewards. You are expanding the sum of knowledge and should be rewarded...
This would make knowledge open and more useful to mankind in general.
I think that we are entering a new period of economic reality and that, in terms of intellectual property, "something that was already solved for everything else" hasn't been solved.
The recent /. story of somebody taking off with a shared xbox Linux Webserver for their kids amusement is a fresh example of why we first need property delineation, second we need to collectively and professionally learn how to safely decouple not separate the Web content from all of the backoffice context, digital maintenance and upkeep. I believe only with those measures in place will American society control our virtual assets as single and parallel entities and employ intellectual property therein. You have to learn to crawl before learning how to walk..
>>... software and tried to handwave in the fallacy that they need completely other constructs, for something that was already solved for everything else. See, you need to _license_ software, because, OMG, otherwise you'd think you bought the rights to that program as a whole! WTH? We already had the distinction between buying a book, and buying the ownership of a novel itself. You didn't need to "license" a book, or a vinyl record, or a newspaper.
>> Even after the loophole of, basically, "yeah, but you need to copy the program to memory, which is making a copy, and you need a license to make copies" was closed, we got stuck with the same stupidity as a before. Nah, see, it's _licensed_, not sold
however, i am certainly smarter than you
you who believe that anarchy is somehow better
what do you expect except derision and laughter at such stupidity?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To answer your first question - yes and no. Yes, I do believe there need to be protections, but those protections do not (cannot, and should not) relate to physical property; nor do I believe they should be eternal or used simply as defensive mechanisms. (The very fact most companies get them for defensive purposes shows just how utterly broken the system is!) And to see why as well as how to to grant those protection one must first look at the intent behind them - all four categories - copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secret.
First, trademark goes a bit out of the field here as it is more around brand recognition and ensure that a competitor cannot dilute the brand or use it without permission to make gain on what is rightfully your, building upon what you did. So it is really in its own ballpark.
The other three (copyright, patent, and trade secret) break down into two groups - (i) keep a secret (trade secret), and (ii) make it public (copyright, patents), and with the intent such as to either enable one to keep a secret (category 'i') and thus not draw any benefit (or minimal benefit) from the public (usually to build upon something until someone wishes to draw such benefit), or to enable one to make it public (category 'ii') by being granted a limited period of exclusivity during which the producer can recoup costs and make some profits.
As Trade Secret is mostly about keeping it within the confides of "corporate walls" (or whatever organization you are working in), for this discussion it's not very relevant other than to say you won't draw public benefit (e.g. sales) from it easily, but the most you can do if it is broken is sue the people that broke it, possibly getting them criminally charged (though I don't know about that one) all namely due to breach of contract because you should have had Non-Disclosure and Non-Compete Agreements in place for protection.
So we're really concerned with the public category (copyrights and patents), which according to law (U.S.) break down into two categories: tangible (patents) vs intangible (copyrights), so it really is a case of never the twain shall meet, as much as some are trying to change that by getting some things (e.g. software) under patents protection, though (IMHO) they should then lose any copyright protection they would have otherwise been granted.
In either case, I think we could easily reach compromise by relating the length of the period granted to a business plan for (a) recouping costs and (b) obtaining some profit - a given percentage above R&D cost. However, the administrative overhead would have to be managed and could be a problem on its own; but it would be about the only way to really do it. The business plan would have to be submitted and approved; and the underlying idea is that something that is actually valuable to the public would recoup the costs and pay the granted profits quickly - thus pushing it out to the public quickly - and something that is not valuable would stagnate into obsolescence, likely being turned over to the public when the owner does not with to go through the administrative processes any further since it would eventually either (a) find value and thus end quickly or (b) not earn enough to make it worth it to continue in the process. One tenant should be that the rights could not be sold off to another, or at least that if sold the new owner must continue the same business plan put forth by the initial innovator. (I.e. it would kill off patent-trolls and the likes.) The business p
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Intellectual Property is an oxymoron. The rules of property have been designed to be a (minimally) acceptable compromise on how to deal with physical objects. They fail miserably when you attempt to extend them to cover information.
Of the approaches known, copyright is the best approach to covering information, but I would argue that if the publisher implements DRM then the copyright should not apply to his works, because he is reneging on the social contract ab initio (or at least attempting to do so). This could be dealt with via "libraries of deposit", but as far as I know it is not being so dealt. The stated purpose of copyright (and patents) is to facilitate the information currently held as secret becoming public knowledge. Attempting to prevent this from happening (e.g. via DRM) should automatically forfeit any protection from the law.
Trademarks are a separate issue. Here the issue is protecting the identity of an entity. The current law seems to work fairly well. It's got some rough spots that should be debugged, but they are relatively trivial.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
These are great questions. I share the perspectives and assumptions so I hope these ideas will be helpful to the original poster.
First let me say that the reason I believe in IP is the same as the reason I believe in P(roperty)! Property rights provide optimal usage of scarce resources, as shown by Coase's Theorem. This is as true in the abstract realm as in the physical realm. That is why abstract property rights such as pollution credits and water draw rights have been so successful in improving management of previously common goods.
So what do we do about IP? I think the central concept should be voluntarism. That is, users of intellectual property should voluntarily agree to the restrictions imposed by the property owner, or else they should forego its use. This is the same principle we apply to other forms of property. If I go onto someone's private land, I must agree to follow the restrictions and rules he specifies, or I should leave. It is the same with physical items; if someone lends me a book under the condition that I not mark it up, I should follow that restriction or not take the book.
The problem with IP is the difficulty of monitoring and enforcing restrictions. This manifests in two ways. The first is catching people who agree to the rules but disobey them anyway; and the second, the other side of the coin, is that people who fully intend to obey the rules have no way to credibly commit to doing so. I believe that the second problem is the more serious one, because I think most people are fundamentally honest and would be willing to follow the rules. Also, if you can solve the second problem, credible commitment, you solve the first, because cheaters will not be able to credibly commit (if they could cheat, their commitment was not credible).
There are two parts to the solution of this problem, one easy and one hard. The easy part, but still it is not being done today, is that agreement to any restrictions and rules associated with a given piece of IP should be voluntary and active. It should not just be implicit. You should be asked to agree explicitly to following the rules in exchange for accessing the IP, and you should take some voluntary, explicit action to indicate your agreement. Ideally, the rules should be expressed in simple language so you know what you are agreeing to, although admittedly in our litigious society this is going to be difficult. Something like the Creative Commons licenses can work here.
Taking this step will remove ammunition from people who want to excuse their cheating by claiming that they should not be bound by restrictions they never agreed to. Once they have voluntarily agreed to restrictions in exchange for access, they have to either follow the rules, or admit that they are cheaters. Since as I said above I believe most people are honest, I think that once faced explicitly with this kind of choice, people will be much less likely to cheat than they are today. I also see this approach as being more consistent with anarchocapitalistic principles of mutual voluntary agreement, versus the government-enforced regulations that are today the primary legal framework for handling IP.
The second part of the solution, then, is providing technical means by which people can voluntarily and credibly commit to following the rules for a given piece of IP. This comes down to DRM, in the end. But because it is being used in a voluntary framework, I believe the usual perspective towards DRM is turned on its head. Instead of being a bludgeon by which one party can impose its will on another, it becomes instead a tool by which two parties can come to a mutually acceptable arrangement. From this perspective, DRM assists both the creator and the user of the IP. It helps the creator by giving him confidence that his IP will not be misused. And it helps the user by allowing him to prove that he honestly intends to follow the rules, proof which would be impossible without DRM.
I believe that in the long run, one of the most useful
I never thought that.
The Internet was created specifically to do only one thing: to copy data in a cheap, convenient way.
This is totally antithetical to the goal of protecting intellectual property.
My prediction has always been that this will never be resolved in compromise. One will win, and one will lose.
Each day, we see the principle of "copy it" triumph over the principle of "protect it". This is no surprise, because for every person who wants to "protect it", there are 1000s of other people who want to "copy it".
In this environment, IP rights don't stand a chance against the masses.
There is no compromise "solution" to be had here. All that is left is for those who attempt to enforce IP rights against the masses to realize that the war is over.
I agree with the concept of taxing all forms of 'property'. Businesses are very careful to divest themselves of physical property which is not earning more than it costs to own it; 'intellectual' property should be treated the same; if you want to own it, you have to pay taxes on it.
A serious problem with the whole concept of 'intellectual property' is that it currently costs nothing to own it.
There is no equitable solution to this problem for the public. Either we protect valuable intellectual monopolies and allow parasitic organizations to exist, or we allow piracy to destroy the concept of copyright completely.
The core problem with the term "Intellectual Property" is that it includes the word "Property". Historically and legally, patents, copyrights, and trademarks have not been considered the "right" of the originator; rather, they are a license from the public to the originator for economic exclusivity to their novelty for the sole purpose of encouraging innovation and creating a market in innovation.
By framing public license grants as a property, and therefore as a property right, and therefore, as a right, we've changed the conversation from what the public will allow to what the innovator will allow, and with this sea-change comes this entire convolution of DRM--as typified by the very bizarre legal concept of the "end user license agreement" which is actually entirely reciprocal to the original intent: It is the end-users who grant to the innovator their license to the property, and with that an agreement not to copy it.
I like big-budget movies. I have no desire to see that market hollowed out and destroyed by piracy. Music, on the other hand, is something that people will do whether they get paid for it or not, and to be frank the quality of independent artists is just as high as bands constructed by labels--if not higher. So I have no problem seeing that market destroyed by piracy.
Because these two markets are fundamentally the same, and because what is best for the public is dimetrically opposite in these two very similar cases, there is no solution to this problem. We either allow movies to exist and accept the parasitic effect on music, or we allow rampant piracy and watch music bloom and Hollywood movies be destroyed.
The term "intelectual property" is used to generalise three things which have vague similarities but in reality are very different.
These three things are copyright law, patent law, and trademark law.
Copyright law was introduced as an incentive to creators of copyrightable things for them to create more of what they do. The incentive was that they could more easily make money from it, but the copyright was to last a short amount of time.
Patent law was introduced to encourage businesses to publish ideas and techniques but still be able to use them as a business advantage, in order to promote progress.
Trademark law was introduced to stop confusion arising between different products, if they accidentally (or deliberately) ended up with the same name.
The issue of copyright seems to be mostly what you are interested in from what you wrote.
Please consider watching this speech by Richard Stallman as I believe it will clear up many discrepancies and it also likely contains what you are looking for.
This is the first part of a 12 part youtube video
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
As a writer with several novels in print, I'm a great fan of intellectual property. As a techno-journalist who spends most of his days dealing with computers, security, the new media, etc., I'm also keenly aware of the limits on what can be protected. I've had stuff copied and posted on the web (in Russian, no less!) Am I happy about it? No. Am I going to lose sleep over it? No. Did it amount to stealing from me? Ethically perhaps, but practically no. The pirates didn't, as far as I can see, make a dime off it and I can't see that I lost any money either. The key to any effective protection of intellectual property (a phrase that leaves me somewhat queasy because of the way it is "applied") is to realize that some things are flat impossible to effectively protect. Let's assume someone (call him Satan) claims a property right in your immortal soul. Let's further assume that person is able to bribe Congress into passing a law recognizing his property right in souls. It would make no difference whatsoever because this person has no way to enforce that claim. This is almost exactly the situation the music publishers and movie industry find themselves in. Well, they can, with enormous expense, hunt down and punish individuals. But for everyone they catch hundreds or thousands more spring up and the copying continues. The law doesn't matter, morality doesn't matter, ethics don't matter. If you can't protect it it becomes effectively a free good. In general the key to protecting intellectual property is in whether someone is attempting to benefit financially from the property. If the pirates are trying to make money off copying they can be tracked down and thwarted by following the money trail. If someone simply copies something and posts it for free there's effectively nothing you can do about it -- except waste a lot of money and make a grand, braying ass of yourself. This gets lost because the hoorah over protecting intellectual property is not really about protecting intellectual property. It is about trying to protect obsolete business models. Publishing, music, movies, etc. are all locked into high-cost inefficient ways of doing business that make companies huge amounts of money while providing ever-decreasing benefits to the people paying for the goods. Not surprisingly, as technology makes cheaper, better alternatives available, those business models are being bypassed. I've discussed all this at some length in my blog Heresy Pornography and Treason in the "Whack the Gopher" URL:http://http://heresypornographyandtreason.blogspot.com/2007/09/copyrights-whack-gopher-and-sfwa-why-i.html series of posts and I return to the theme there from time to time. --Rick Cook
I am an anarcho-capitalist too. I have found the perfect and only feasible solution for IP legislation. You can find it at eBay ^^
To me it sounds like somebody who decides what gives him a monetary benefit regardless of any context.
Pretty much what USA is about, actually.
There's a fly in your soup. A serious problem in the example you used.
Monsanto patented a gene that was artificially inserted in certain crops. The crops then pollinated neighboring fields. Some of the crops in the neighboring fields had the trait. Monsanto sued the farmers who owned the neighboring fields to prevent them from growing their own seeds. The failure was clearly Monsanto's. They didn't keep the GM contained. This is actually a failure of the legal system and the patent system. A free market would not have penalized the neighbors. A monopolistic system (like any patent system) would. This is repressive monopoly in action. There is no real justice in it.
As for the argument of the lab scientist who 'needs' an income, error there too. The world does not owe him an income. If he does something that others are willing to pay for, then he gets paid. Otherwise, he doesn't deserve it. Suing your neighbors because you say you 'own' a gene that MIGHT be in some seeds is an abuse of the market. In a just society, Monsanto would have been fined heavily for the uncontrolled release of the pollen. You don't live in a just world. Hence the outrage.
You said if we don't pay him he'll steal from us. Well, he already did.
So, do you have any points that make sense?
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
First, copyrights and patents are designed to cover different kinds of "inventions", i.e., the written word, and mechanical and other devices. Other than that, though, they both cover "original intellectual works", and as such, I see no reason whatever why copyrights should last a lifetime when patents only last 17 years.
Further, copyrights, not patents, are also the proper area of "IP" law for software. Allowing software copyrights to extend a lifetime seems pretty ridiculous to me, and in fact contradicts what you said about the speed of innovation.
As for your final paragraph about copyrights, I disagree with almost all of it, for various reasons (because it encompasses several different concepts). For one thing, actual damages to a copyright holder are almost never anywhere near the "market value" of the goods. Take a software CD for example. When you figure in the costs of R&D, manufacture of the CD, printing, packaging, shipping, storage, wholesale overhead and profits (if any), retail overhead and profit, and so on, about all that is left of what you might call the "royalty" part of that $299 copy of Vista Ultimate is maybe around $5. If Microsoft only loses $5, why should a copyright violator be fined $299?
If you want to do that as part of punitive damages, that is another matter. But it does not reflect actual damages at all. And even if it did, those damages would be spread among all the many parties involved in the retail sale, not just the copyright holder.
Second, individual copyright violations (as opposed to commercial reproduction for profit) should never be a criminal charge. Why not? Because the actual damage to the aggrieved party is far too small! Imagine if you could be charged criminally for picking up a quarter you found on your neighbor's front lawn. Technically, you know it belongs to them, but what's the harm, right? Well, that's maybe even more "damage" than you might do to a corporation for improperly downloading a song. Now, one might argue that if a veritible fountain of quarters were to spring from the yard, with people grabbing right and left, that might be some real damage, right?
Except that these quarters are self-reproducing. They don't "cost" your neighbor a damn thing. Oh, he might be losing some theoretical profit, I suppose, but it is not "costing" anything.
And then it turns out that much of that lost profit is really imaginary. Because studies have shown that most cases of "illegally" copied music and software happen in circumstances in which there would not have been a sale anyway (often because the parties involved could not afford the product). So even the "lost profit" scenario is a gross exaggeration of the true situation.
It is exactly the kind of realities I describe that caused copyright violations to be legally distinguished from "theft" in the first place. If I "steal" something from you, but you still have it, have I actually "stolen" anything at all? Maybe some theoretical profit? But of course only if there would have been a sale in the first place.
So individual violations, not for profit (barter is profit), should never be criminal. That would be akin to putting someone in prison for jaywalking when there are no cars around.
Not-for-profit copyright violations are purely a matter of violating the theoretical economic gain of the copyright holder, not a matter of "harming society" in any way. So the remedies must be civil in nature, not criminal. Because such things should be discouraged, but the damages are minuscule (when there are any), I could see something in the nature of a parking ticket or (in Oregon) a civil ticket for marijuana possession.
I would also like to say that while the idea of tying patent duration to the speed of technological progress, that is probably not practical. One of the reasons for the speeding up of technological progress is simply an increased population. This has little to do with either the length of time it takes to obtain a patent (which has probably increased), or the length of time one should have control over their idea in order to profit from it (incentive to innovate).
Restricting ideas in a way where the many have to give something back to the originator is not the problem. We should look at the source of the real problem, which is a capitalist system that motivates the restriction of goods.
This of course, can be seen in the short term. In the long term, forcing people to invent alternative ways is a form of nurishing progress overall.
Trademark is a form of consumer protection that really lies outside this discussion. It's not so much a "right" as a consumer "convenience". That's why I think trademarks should never be allowed to contain real/dictionary words -- that destroys any real consumer benefit.
Patents and Copyrights are based on this line in Article I U.S. Constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html
Patents on drugs and other technology tend to extend beyond a single market generation -- a couple of years for drugs, and about 5 years for computer technologies, for example. So those don't fit the "limited times" standard at all.
Copyright lives well past a full market generation (about 30 years), and even past the author's lifetime. Journalism has an even shorter market lifespan -- it goes from current events to history within 5-10 years. Congress keeps extending Copyright so much, and so retroactively, that evidence of any "limited times" there is absent. "Limited times" does NOT mean "for as long as the Disney company wants to control Mickey Mouse"!
Any form of limited monopoly like this should be granted solely to the creators -- "to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;". The monopoly should not extend to any licensee -- no sponsor corporation nor post-invention customer should be extended the creators' monopoly rights. The monopoly only applies to the creator, the human, and that doesn't give them the right to sell their IP product to only one buyer. In fact "the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" prohibits them from granting this right to anyone else -- it's *exclusive*! Additionally, the creator should be able to pull out of any license contract where the licensee can't prove that they are providing correct compensation.
Fix these problems, and you fix most of the problems with IP law, that actually stifle "the progress of science and useful arts". In general, the "progress" requirement needs to be hewed to more closely. The current process should be abolished, if only because it goes directly against this requirement in its current form.
Intellectual property is not a physical thing. Trying to position it as if it is like a car or a home is wrong, and at least for now, not how the laws are written.
If I buy a CD, for instance, and I rip the songs, and then give those songs away freely, I have broken the law. But I have not "stolen" anything because the original (master) songs are still in the possession of the artist and/or the recording label. So either/both may still sell CDs made from the master. In other words, I have not "stolen" anything, because to steal something I would have to have taken possession of the "thing" from its rightful owner.
The problem with the term "Intellectual Property" is that it carries baggage with it that clouds the issue, and any discussions about it.
Woadan
You can't bend reality to meet your perceptions.
The government's enforcement powers are only forensic in nature. They have great difficulty actually detecting crimes which are eminent or in-progress. Even when they do know that a crime is occurring, they are often powerless to stop it.
For example, if there is a bugler in your house, and you call the police, they will not generally enter the house, even if they believe your life is in danger. This is because intervention can make the situation worse, and endanger the lives of police-officers. In reality, they are almost completely powerless to help you.
But once everything is over, they will investigate the crime scene and, hopefully, bring the assailant to justice so that he will do no more harm to society.
In the end, it's going to be up to you weather you (and your family) live or die when faced with such a situation. If that ever happened to me, I know I'd feel a lot better owning a gun.
-- or --
Corporations, associations, unions, etc., have organized, pooled money, time, and effort (resources), formed lobby groups, and hired lobbyists. There are so many of them, and issues to deal with, that our poor congress can't keep up, so they grease the squeaky wheels- they cave in to the lobby pressures.
We the people have no voice! We need a people's lobby, or, my preference: abolish lobbies.
If you support the idea of strict IP, then the world will increasingly concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
You know, we already have plenty of mechanisms to keep the poor and the powerless in misery.
We do not need Intellectual Property rights.
I would like to point out, that the way society progresses, is to NOT have IP of any kind.
The internet, and its success is built upon that assumption.
This sort of IP, that we have now, is based on the idea that a bunch of "Fat Kats" sit around all day long and do nothing, except collect a check for royalties. They contribute nothing to society because they do not make anything with the ideas they posses and keep locked up. In FACT, it is bad for business to have things materialize from "ideas". You should only license one time you know. So you want to insure you VERY slowly license ideas and at the same time make it very expensive.
I see IP as people blood sucking on society plain and simple. It sort of brings back the days of Louis XIV of France. Check that out for details.
For a more productive view of IP, all IP should be open and unrestricted. The ideas people take, are then given form, and the labor to do that should form the basis of the economy in my opinion.
That way a sort of "its important to be first" drives innovation, and it must be a continual one of innovation as some people will inevitably try and make a short buck, by just copying the product.
Obviously technology, science, society advances VERY quickly in this sort of context.
But, back to the present, things move MUCH more slowly. I still get a kick out of people on the street sometimes. Wow, Toyota America is introducing a car called the PRIUS that gets a whopping 60 MPG!!!
What a big advance.
LOL
Anyway, I would like to point out, besides the blood sucker part of this idea of "owning intellectual property" rights the worse is the fact nobody can drive innovation except those that have all the cash.
Why is that you say? Well, because by definition, if you cannot afford the license to purchase the idea, you can't make whatever it is you want to make legally.
So we have this definition of "innovation" in the computer industry right now.
30 years now from research to everyday use we have been doing the graphical ICONS and MOUSE thing with pretty much NO ADVANCE in interfaces between humans and machines.
Why do you think that is? Here is a homework assignment for you. Go to the library and study the history of user interface design from about the time of Xerox Park, to now and pay attention to the patents issued in the trail you follow. Pay also close attention to the touch screen patent history.
Then ask yourself this question: "When could we have had a better user interface like touch, that everyone is going crazy about in just the past few years."
That should be most enlightening.
In fact, if we had the same Intellectual property laws as we did at the time Newton published his Principia. We would probably still be running around in horse and buggies as anyone who read it, would be put in jail for not having a license for duplication or use.
Sort of like what we do to people who copy DVD's today. Imprison members of society because they copied a DVD.
EBooks are next of course....
This is the direction these E-Book sellars want us to go in. Buy one of our nice E Book readers so it becomes popular like Windows, and you cannot read anything, eventually if you do not buy one.
Well, not read anything "legally" in fact without a proper license.
But the reason why we have these laws in my opinion is this:
1) People believe that if they could just stop working, and not do anything except wait for a check in the mail, they would achieve some sort of Nirvana and be happy.
That is of course a fallacy.
2) People are inherently lazy. Laziness extends from not doing what we want to do because we have
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Should I, A: construct each post in such a manner that the logic is absolutely air-tight, and able to withstand the slings and arrows of even the most rabid pedant with too much time on his hands, taking a considerable ammount of time to do so, and carefully explaining what most people would simply infer or B: spend a reasonable ammount of time on each post, knowing that most people will get the general idea, and that those who are pedantic and/or hell-bent on their position will always find a flaw no matter what you say.
Guess how I tend to resolve that dilemma.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The way it is SUPPOSED TO work is: the government is given the privileges necessary to govern by the people. Rights, all rights, belong to people. The government has no "rights" at all, by definition.
The privileges given to government ("given" is the proper word... if you and your ancestors didn't vote right, it's your own fault) do, however, come from exactly the same basis as our own rights do: the point of a gun. Anyone who claims otherwise does not understand history.
However, the point you are missing is that is exactly why we have claimed and insisted on keeping the right to own guns! We have the right to overthrow an oppressive government, with force if need be. And if enough people do it, there will not be very many Wacos or Ruby Ridges. Those two in themselves came near to starting a revolution, and I think the government knows that. That is why they have been trying to use more subtle approaches.
That won't work either, in the long run, but that has seemed to be a difficult message to get across.
Quote: I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual. For an Ancap intellecutal property rights should be highly suspicious, as you can easily read in "Machinery of freedom" from David Freedman. There is a very very easy and incredibly cheap way to protect your "intellectual property": keep it for you and don't disclose it! All the beneficiaries of "intellectual property" need the state to protect their "property" and the taxpayers money for the incredibly high cost of defending their "intellectual property". The rolling stones make Millions when they tour the world. Do they really need taxpayers money to make sure nobody sells bootlegs from they CDs? There are few ways in this world how you can become filthy rich. Most of them are: * "intellectual property" (Rock bands, Software companies like Microsoft) * work with FIAT money like Banks (government issued paper money) * Real estate (shortage of land by government regulations. You can't just start building a house where space is available) All this areas where disproportionate amount of money can be earned are highly government regulated and resources are artificially limited, money and wealth gets distributed from the bottom to the top. I wish this would become true: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/05/seasteading?currentPage=all
In an ideal world, there would be no need for IP laws. In this world, I'm not sure. Artists have a tough life, they can certainly be ruined if someone stole their art. Same goes for inventors, creative minds, hard workers, everyone really. There are bad people, people who will not play by the rules, sometimes even if it isn't in their own interest. Some form of protection for artists and creative minds is needed.
The problem with IP laws is that they allow someone to become rich without working for it. And they deny some people their creativity. And it doesn't always protect those it is supposed to protect. The law is not always fair, and can be bent. That how laws are, they're not perfect. There is no perfect law. Do we need IP laws? Yes and no. We need some laws to protect intellectual and creative work from becoming unprofitable, dangerous or impossible to do. But these laws need not be like current IP laws or like properly laws at all.
Calling it property is not the answer. Its just confusing. 2 - If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system? Since the name IP is rather confusing, instead of IP holders I would rather call them creative people (which includes almost everyone). Or companies. The point is, creative work is good and we need to protect people doing it.I believe we need to protect creative people, because creativity is good for humanity.
At the same time we must ensure that society can benefit from that creativity. Both creators and consumers must be protected from abuse by one or
the other. And that will also require some change in our attitudes towards work, money, property, etc.
So how do we protect them ? Few and simple laws. Laws that stimulate creativity and protect creative people. Laws that are not too much limiting our freedoms. Laws that do not contradict natural laws and human nature (information wants to be free). Laws that cannot be abused too much by the lazy, wicked or crazy.
But this all very idealistic, theoretical, and not very practical talk. I say, lets get rid of some laws first, like the lumbering beast called DMCA. Certainly don't extend patent and copyright durations. No criminal charges, only realistic and fair damages. Get rid of the term IP.
Last note. I'm not scared that less legislation will hurt creative people and innovative companies. I think creativity will find a way to express itself. By definition.
assignment != equality != identity
Back when resources such as land were plentiful, such as after the New World was discovered, discovery was considered tatamount to invention. Stick a flag in it, and it is yours. And why not? Nobody was harmed that way. (Except for the indigenous populations, of course, but those "did not count"... they were barbarians, to be ignored.) Just as with reasonable patent and copyright laws, discovery was thus encouraged, and everybody (of the discovering society) benefited as a result.
So what you state is simply not true. You need only go back a very short way, in fact the last few decades in America when homesteading laws were eventually chipped away, to find a period where it just wasn't so. Discovery was a difficult, dangerous, and expensive proposition, and in order to encourage it, the discoverers were rewarded. This made simple economic sense then, and it makes just as good economic sense now.
The difference now is that the rewards have been distorted out of proportion to the difficulty, and largely relegated to the corporations that can afford to get the patents and copyrights in bulk. That is not the way it was supposed to work. We need to go back to the system as it was when it DID work.
Pam Samuelson has a fantastic compilation of IP law papers.
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers.html
Good class, if you can get your hands on the reading list or notes.
The solution to intellectual property is to understand the roots of copyright.
;-). Over time it became accepted and we no longer question it.
I provide a link to the grand oracle of Wikipedia to backup my memory of history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#History
In short copyright, as the historical headwaters of intellectual property, came about due to the advent of the printing press. Logistically governments and big interests were upset because they no longer had control of what they perceived they had control of before. Nobody likes change.
So why do I bring this up?
You are looking for a workable solution for Intellectual Property from your viewpoint. There is none. Much like the origin of copyright (which we now take *TOO MUCH* for granted) the carrying force for intellectual property is the entrenched interest of media producing monopolies much like the *AA you referenced. They are willing to move logistical and legal heaven and earth to maintain their revenue stream.
There is no such thing as intellectual property for the individual or the small company. A small company does not have the money or the resources to defend or logistically use a patent if a bigger company wants to use it. They either sell it or find some other way to logistically make money from it. A bigger company will find a way around the patent and use their larger resources to do so. The money wins in the long term.
Intellectual property is a creation of vested interests to justify their monopoly and continue to make money. There is no middle ground. Much like copyright was first adopted by the British government and supported by printers (the folks who owned and ran the printing press, not a contemporary desktop printer
Your attempt to find a middle ground is worthy and I can understand the temptation but since the driving force and creation of intellectual property is a continual monopoly by the powers that be, a small company or individual will not be able to effectively and reliably count on intellectual property. Nor can you much influence its development. Copyright wasn't created for the average citizen, only over time could the average fellow use its precedents, the same is true for intellectual property. Right now intellectual property is an attempt of vested interested to get a greater return on their investment through political and legal means. Nothing more.
Much like artists in the old patron system (where you had a well moneyed or aristocratic sponsor to support and protect you) you can only wield the "laws" if you have the "resources". So the point of intellectual property for the standard fellow is quite moot. RIAA/MPAA won't steal your stuff since its not in their economic interests to cross their own precedent and work against their interests for now. And if a well money'd interest (deep pockets) infringes your "intellectual property" rights then you have impetus for a lawyer to work on contingency. For the bulk of us who make less than $100,000 intellectual property means... Nada.
There is actually a new form of jurisprudence that is looking into the idea that all laws for the last 100 years or so are no longer usuable by the "common man", but only rich folks or corporations since only they have the resources anymore to actually take anything to court or participate in the legal process.
To directly answer your questions:
1) Intellectual property is a figment. Copyright law is established. You should be focusing on existing copyright law, not intellectual property. Much like you should look at hot dogs or sausages, not oscar meyer wieners. You can use copyright precedent to defend your rights and garner money. Intellectual property at this time DOES NOT EXIST.
2) The truth is in the economics. For a person making less than $100,000 the new frontiers of copyright, or intellectual property if you insist, is of no concern. If you have something that will make $20k to $50k no one is going to care. If you start to make six
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
Rice Patent (the story behind the second led me to this interesting brief.
n/t
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
Of course there is a balance somewhere between the people who own "IP" and the rights of people who "consume" it.
The problem is that nobody can agree on that balance and each side is always trying gain the advantage over the other. Such is the way it has always been with humans.
Add trade secrets.
I'm actually writing a sci-fi short story right now about the creation of a device sort of like a "replicator" from Star Trek. Basically, it s about the invention of such a device and how society reacts. The premise is basically that it would follow the same lines as IP laws, where all the people with power to get laws passed (industry) uses that power to keep the device from undermining their ability to make money, even though all their manufacturing is now obsolete. Have you ever seen that idiotic RIAA commercial about "You wouldn't steal a car would you?" I always think, well probably not, but I'd sure make an exact copy of one if I could do so for a few bucks. I think if you could do just that, it would be made illegal so fast it would make your head spin, probably by extending IP laws even further and introducing huge "product safety" fees to prevent new entrants from creating free alternative products.
I'm fairly well convinced that any huge, disruptive scientific advance will be outlawed to ensure revenue for the powers that be and maintain the status quo.
The purpose of property rights (IP or other) it to limit the ability of bullies to take your stuff. Of course, bullies find ways around it and take most of your stuff anyway. Yes, it's hard living in a frying pan, but that's not reason to jump into the fire.
On the subject of everybody is on land that once belonged to someone else, so nobody has right of ownership- OK, if it bothers you so much, cloning tech is coming along nicely, maybe you should resurrect the Neanderthals and give all your land to them. But if you try to take my property, I say you are just another thief. If you tell me you must take my property because your high ethical standard demands that it be transferred to someone else (with, as always, "carrying charges" for the transferrers), I say you are a thief and a liar.
Bye now.
Anarcho-capitalism is inherently broken, so the question is meaningless. A-C believes in property rights, but disbelieves any mechanism to protect them. Or rather, they believe security should be provided by private firms who compete for your dollar. While this does lower the cost of defense, it also brings up the other problem with A-C:
While A-C claims each soul has value (the whole "self-ownership" thing), building the system on capitalism means only the dollar has value, and a soul only has value for the dollars they bring. The only way to protect yourself is to buy security, and you can only buy security if you have dollars. No dollars, no security, and thus no property.
The question is further broken in that "intellectual property rights" are not true rights, but rather a simple pragmatic agreement. There's no natural solution to the "problem," since IP doesn't evoke any natural rights.
The reason we perceive IPR as broken is because those who hold IP don't subscribe to any -ism at all; they are simply self-interested. The current system is not meant to create a level playing field, or even to reward creators, but merely to strengthen power where it already exists.
After all that blather, here's my solution: We need a constitutional amendment that defines "intellectual property" and the "rights" that go with it. Both the government and industry have a vested interest in a warped system; they will never come up with a balanced law. Only the public can devise one, and the only way the public can impose their will on the government is with an amendment.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
personally, i think ideas should only be protected for a time lengthy enough for the developer to earn back the original cost of development, as long as they 'are' using it, or 'can profit' from it, after that it should go into the public domain.
the original developer can still continue to make a profit, but others can also freely modify or use the idea for a profit.
however, i don't believe any idea should ever be limited so that it can not be used, shared, duplicated, or modified for NOT-FOR-PROFIT reasons... nor should anyone be sued for duplicating something or sharing anything ever, as long as they're not earning a monetary profit by doing so! no matter whether or not they could produce the item in question entirely on their own or not.
neither SHARING nor PHILANTHROPY should ever be punished (so long as you're not sharing/giving a disease, or something destructive, like plutonium with Iraq)!
it's simply a question of civilized behavior! how anyone could consider the act of sharing what they have with others to be an unacceptable act, in a civilized society, is well beyond me.
however i could totally understand how a selfish barbarian would react if their neighbor started duplicating their wares and giving them away for free... they'd obviously threaten and then attack their neighbor to protect their ability to profit.
notice i said their ability, not their right... how could one consider it their right if another person can so easily build the same wares and give them away for free? or perhaps even for less?
Good artists copy, Great artists steal.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Screw progress and people getting paid for their creativity and spirit of invention! Frame everything in the context of software, where this clearly does apply! I am obsessed with the make-believe world of infinitely reproducible bits! HYAAAA!!!
It's not a question of belief in IP, but of laws. Good legislation must possess several properties, including societal benefit, fairness, and enforceability. The government lacks the ability to compel self-incrimination, and technology enables secure communication, so though a musician or moviemaker owns intellectual rights to their works, but let's stop law enforcement from wasting time catching the "dumber" criminals who share for personal use.
When it comes to claiming intellectual property as one's own for purposes of claiming academic credit, or having the right to sell and profit by it, enforcement is reasonable.
It was never considered a God-given property right until recently - it was always a government grant "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." It was always "limited", too, meaning 14 years or so, not 80 years past the author's death and repeatedly extended to get around the limits of the Constitution.
It amazes me how conservatives (even the anti-Bush paleoist ones) support intellectual "property" and claim to be in line with the Founding Fathers at the same time.
1) the individual idealist should be compensated.. so that he is encouraged to keep doing what he does best: ideas. To say that incentive is unnecessary is to say that Creators-of-Worthy-Ideas are to die a martyr's death, unknown, unheard, with their whole lives, families, etc sacrificed for their Idea because the market was owned by the MegaCorps.
2) Not all ppl are creators. Some, however need to be developed. (See Investment * "bottom-up")
Purpose
2) social benefit is the end goal: even the idea-maker should have a lower income if (a) he's not making more ideas (b) is society is crapping out. The problem is if society is crapping out, then he will either (a) be scared of losing his income & will work harder to come up with a good idea or (b) be disillusioned about losing his income and won't create anymore.
If ppl wanna be an idea factory, great. they should be encouraged to do so for everyone's benefit. If tehy just wanna for their own benefit, then they're a sycophant.. no good to society.
Investment
As for idea!=product, any .com which decides to INVEST other ppl's lives & $ into the idea/creator, should be allowed to. More ideas= (See production)
Investment will occur directly proportional to (a) how stupid ppl are (not knowing their own good) and (b) if ppl are able to. Ppl freely giving if they have their needs met is a societal-benefit, which sohuld be invested in. Give more? Get more! That's the point of investment.
Personal sacrifice is a bottom-up thing.. and if ppl don't value something, and if Marketing (see below) can't convince 'em, well, nothin' we can do.
Production
1) Always requires investment. 2) Is the major hurdle is idea-generation. Thus, any average-joe SHOULD be allowed the rights to owning the idea (upon buying the product), knowing that he won't be investing to produce it. Or if he does, ppl will still trust the Official-Producers over average-joe. And if average-joe DOES have a better means? So be it. See.. "Owning Ideas".
I doubt that ANY product should only have a 1yr life-span WITHOUT a decent (a) FREE & AVAILABLE recycling program for the product whereby the producer is responsible for their product's life-span (b) 'customer loyalty' program, whereby investment is much more like a co-op.
In fact, it's a good "automatic" test/judge. it's market-governance... that is, their idea fails/rises based upon consumers being HONEST about what they want/need.. (that is, if the market isn't listening to marketING!)
Marketing
If they lie to consumers, then it'll be bite-back from the consumers. That's fraud. If they tell the truth to consumers, "yes, you don't think you need this product, but be convinced, it's a great product.." and if they are convinced? it's fine. society moves forward. If they're not, well, such is the market.
Privacy
And anyone who doesn't wanna hear about new ideas shouldn't be forced/bill-boarded. Nothing's wrong with a little marketing, but when "getting the word out" infringes on ppl's (natural NEED!) for privacy & their own non-contrived thinking.. there's a problem.
Availability of Product
Does owning the product == owning the idea? I think so. Any piece of music I listen to spins out other musical ideas in me. It's an investment I make into myself.
Availability of Ideas
Ideas and fluid, and to hold them captive (generally, on first assumption) holds production and societal good captive.. that is, if market-saturation is a good idea. Some products shouldn't be saturated. They're wasteful, filler, lied to us by marketing.
Patents/Owning Ideas
Owning the "right" to an idea is a worthy thing. If a patent were not held, then any company with more investment could beat-out the original producer by producing faster. That's competition, and it's good, but not when it wastes ppl's lives & energy. Why not auction off ideas/patents as they come in to the top 3 production/investors? That'll keep ideas in the pub
Copyright or IP is not about protect author's rights.
It is about encourage information production and exchange.
If you just focus on the property side or profit side of the problem, you also hurt the goal that people got more and more difficult to produce and exchange information. If you publish an essay, you will be afraid to accidentally sued by someone, how do you feel wanting to write? Blog?
If there is still people wanting to produce, do not tighten the control. If people feel copyright is too big a problem for them to produce, loosen.
The society is now in my opinion that copyright or IP protection is over protected. If you look at what search engines, news, databases are doing these days and how many law suits they receive you understand that control is serve. The IP laws have hurt the production of information. It is working against its goal.
If IP is important, it is time for us to loosen the laws.
So how exactly does the busy anarchocapitalist define and protect intellectual property without recourse to legal structures and statutes?
more seriously, this points out that there's more than just money to consider. authors/artists/whatever frequently want to make sure that the image of their work isn't tarnished by awful knock-offs (no offense; i'm sure your Young Gandlaf story would be pure art!).why's that? you say this like it's obvious, and certainly those with a vested interest in them want you to think it's obvious, but it by no means is. i say this as someone with my name on a pending patent.
the fundamental problem is that patents and copyrights exist explicitly to provide enough incentive for people to do interesting things. we've seen patents get stronger and cover more stuff, while copyright gets stronger and insanely longer. this is exactly backwards. the economic value of each - the incentive they provide - continues to rise, in relative terms. once you understand that, it becomes clear that we should be providing less to offer the same incentive. a copyright for ten years today gets you more money - in contemporary dollars - than a copyright for twenty years a decade ago. terms on both of these should be shrinking.
personally, i'd just dump 'em both. yes, there are some people like yourself who might (you might find it different when actually in that position) reduce their artistic output, and yes, that is a real cost to society. but i think that cost is dwarfed, several times over, by the costs of abuse of the patent and copyright systems. most photographers are still going to make about the same money (do you really think there's a big market in resale of wedding photos?), because they make their money on the product, not the reproduction or use rights.
note that this isn't about being anti-IP at all. for one thing, i think trademarks are handled pretty well (sure, there's some abuses, but the system's not bad) and trade secrets get pretty good treatment in law (i think they might be a little forgiving of disclosure, but that's not fundamental). this is strictly economic. copyright and trademark are government-granted artificial monopolies on reproduction and use rights. they exist only to provide enough incentive to motivate people to do interesting things. as the "interesting things" become more and more valuable, the required incentive drops. i believe we're pretty darn close to zero now, if we're not there already. the Constitution gets this right: the legislature should have the power to set the terms appropriately. it's just that the legislature's botching it because they're bought.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
As a fellow anarcho-capitalist, I'd encourage you to read what Murray Rothbard has to say about this topic:
http://www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/lacs/7patents_copyrights.pdf
"It is true that a patent and a copyright are both exclusive property rights and it is also true that they are both property rights in innovations. But there is crucial difference in their legal enforcement. If an author or a composer believes his copyright is being infringed, and he takes legal action, he must prove that the defendant had 'access' to the work allegedly infringed. If the defendant produces something identical with the plaintiff's work by mere chance, there is no infringement."
"Copyrights, in other words, have their basis in the prosecution of implicit theft. The plaintiff must prove that the defendant stole the former's creation by reproducing it and selling it himself in violation of his or someone else's contract with the original seller. But if the defendant independently arrives at the same creation, the plaintiff has no copyright privilege that could prevent the defendant from using and selling his product."
"The patent is incompatible with the free market precisely to the extent that it goes beyond the copyright. The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevents a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the state and are invasive of property rights on the market."
"The crucial distinction between patents and copyrights, then, is not that one is mechanical and the other literary. The fact that they have been applied that way is an historical accident and does not reveal the critical difference between them. The critical difference is that copyright is a logical attribute of property right on the free market, while patent is a monopoly invasion of that right."
Very good points. I, myself, often find my arguments getting lost in my emotional vigor about the issues. Sometimes, everyone needs reminded to argue more logically and less emotionally.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
The government theoretically serves the people and realistically does to some degree. Private industry theoretically and realistically serves only the shareholders.
Theoretically a corporation serves the common good or public good. When the first corporations were granted corporate charters, their one purpose was to improve the common good. The first corporation to be chartered was the Dutch East India Company in 1602, and the second, Honourable East India Company. Both were shipping companies and shipping was a dangerous business to be in. A ship could be hit by a storm like a hurricane and sink. Or it could be attacked by pirates or another nation's navy, actually nations paid pirates to attack the ships of other nations. When the ship's cargo, or the ship itself, was lost the owner of the ship was liable for that loss. The owner of the cargo had to be compensated for the value of the cargo, and if any crew was lost the family of the crew had to be compensated as well. Not many investors were willing to risk everything they had on an investment in ships. So the British and Dutch crowns granted those who wanted to invest in a ship a limited liability. Investors could get together to form a corporation that owned one or more ships. Then if anything happened the most a stockholder could loose is what they invested.
The problem today is that governments have not held to the requirement that a corporation serve the common good. Instead, as Thomas Jefferson warned of, "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations, which dare already challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country", corporations have gain control over people and government.
and all of them have access to it instead of the huge numbers of people in the US who are without access
Many of those in the US who do not have medical coverage do not want it. When did it become good to force those who don't want health insurance to pay for it? Or those who lead a healthy life style pay for those who don't exercise, do smoke, and have poor diets?
FalconShould there be a Law?
First, glad to see I'm not the only A/C on /.
Back on topic, IP in the digital age is rapidly becoming irrelevant because anything which can be created and stored in digital form can be copied. Anything which is meant to be accessible to anyone else, especially to the public is ipso-facto public domain because even copy protected DVD's which can be viewed can be copied simply by copying the decoded image, audio, etc... There was a public debacle around the time the internet was beginning to be used by the public in which copy protection of diskettes was defeated rather easily by various means. You'd think they'd learn but they never do.
Far better methods are available for protecting IP such as the "activation" required by Microsoft products and various install codes made necessary by shareware creators.
No IP laws are really necessary to protect these products and the code keys are much more effective anyway.
Has anyone been to TPB lately? I have.
Most Anarcho/Capitalists simply see no need for IP laws or any other laws for that matter. But that's a discussion best conducted elsewhere by people who are intellectually open minded about such things and are more in tune with reality than most.
Back on topic, IP laws just don't work well across national boundaries and usually don't work at all. (See reference to TPB above.)
How effective do you think complaining to a Chinese LEO would be after a PC trojan stole all your personal info and emailed it to an ip address in China?
To protect an E-Book with some sort of cryptography I'm sure is possible, ask a cryptography expert, but then copying the decrypted version would be simple so why make the effort?
By now the reader should be getting the idea.
As for the moral aspect, try to understand why some things can be produced and sold and others are free such as air and water. The reason is that some things are difficult to reproduce while others are so easily obtained by anyone that there is no point in trying. Of course conditions are not the same everywhere. There are places where air and water could be sold for very high prices.
However, if anything in digital form can be copied at essentially no cost is it immoral to do so? Because water is easily found is drinking it immoral? Is breathing immoral?
I'm sure some will consider their works to be property and it is as long as it is under your control. The second you post it on the internet in digital form it becomes public domain. Just because a law may say it's IP doesn't alter reality. However when enforcement of a law becomes impossible it ceases to be a law.
Yeah, I know. Reality bites.
And before you say something like "Water costs money. Just look at my water bill." I maintain that you aren't paying for the water you're paying for its purification and delivery to your tap. The same goes for bottled water, which I also pay for. You could very easily collect rain water and pump that to your system as many people do. My grandparents did just that.
All that being said, if you feel morally bound to pay for something which is "free", I am perfectly OK with you doing so. I often "pay" for freeware because it's so valuable to me that I wish the maker to be compensated, even if he did it for fun. I also code for hire and I consider what I write to be the property of the buyer. But that doesn't stop me from reusing code. This is because I sell solutions for problems, NOT software. If somebody reuses my code I consider it a complement that somebody thinks my work is good enough to copy. However trying to track down this person for prosecution would be silly IMHO. I am hopefully too busy coding for someone else in order to get paid for that. The only thing I have to sell aside from the objects which I posses because nobody considers them worth the effort to steal given that I am fully capable of preventing the theft by a number of ways which include homicide, are the products of my mind and other physical effort
No, in other words Might Makes Right.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and a huge supporter of property rights, both physical and intellectual."
I do not think that word means what you think it does.
"Intellectual property" (by which I'm assuming you're talking about copyright, patent, and trademark law) is nothing less than a state created and enforced monopoly. I'm curious how you can reconcile being an anarcho-capitalist with being a "huge supporter" of a state created and enforced monopoly.
Are you really an anarcho-capitalist, or are you just looking for something more edgy sounding than "moderate libertarian?"
If you really want to be an anarcho-capitalist, the answer should be obvious: there is no state sanctioned intellectual property law. If you want to protect your ideas, you force people who buy copies to sign a contract in which they promise to not make further copies. Retalion for breaking the contract is built in. Of course, too many contracts would be a mess, so likely standardized contracts would be created, and private companies could handle them in bulk.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Food is non scarce today. Plenty of food is grown so nobody has to starve.
It's all about money and power over others when it comes down to it.
This is why so many people die from lack of food daily. There are 3 things working against the hungry, all rooted in money, politics, and or power. First there's conflict, such as in the Congo. Farmers take risks farming in conflict zones, if they themselves aren't killed they may find it hard to grow food. Then if they do they may find it stolen from them. Politics has damaged a lot of farming areas as well. Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, now it's a basket case. When President Robert Mugabe came to power he kicked a lot of farmers, many Whites, off their farms. He then gave those farms to his cronies, and those cronies didn't know how to farm. So the farms sat fallow, little if anything was grown on them. Next is money. Europe, Japan, and the US have subsidized their farmers to the tune of billions of dollars. In the US alone, congress approved a farm bill that would give US agricultural businesses almost 300 Billion US taxpayer dollars. With the large subsidies they will get, companies like Archer Daniels Midland, ADM, and Cargill can ship corn to Mexico and Central America and sell it cheaper than it costs farmers there to grow corn. And the US isn't the worst offender, the EU gives it's farmers a lot more whereas Japan gives them a little more.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Copyright worked as long as the material that was copyrighted was associated with a physical medium. Without that association to something tangible, any laws are unenforceable in practice. The first companies to sale recorded music, also had to sale the devices to play the music. For the music and movie industry that's probably the only answer. i.e. proprietary high-fidelity analog recordings and proprietary players are the only way to prevent widespread piracy.
Fixing the patent system is easy. If it isn't a tangible object and the entity seeking the patent can't display a working model - no patent. Give 30 years to exploit the patent - no extension. Having a government that works to enforce the patent holders rights on trading partners is a plus.
BTW - If you believe in any type of property rights, you are, by definition, not an anarcho-anything. In the future you should do some research about the nature of political movements before declaring yourself to be a member.
Property is to intellectual property as gold is to fool's gold.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
If you're an anarcho-capitalist, then you would believe and approve that the best way to capitalise on anything that is "property" is to steal it where you can, thus transferring it's benefit from someone else to yourself. Since you don't believe in laws and believe morality will balance itself through anarchy, you should be fine with this. After all, you accept that others are free to do the same to you. In the case of intellectual property, especially so, as no harm comes to you or other parties by it's free dissemination.
Therefore, you are not a firm believer in property rights. Or, you don't know what anarcho-capitalism really means. Either way, you've disqualified yourself from posting the article you just did.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
"In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all."
Not to be pedantic (which, of course, means I'm being pedantic), but these things are not inversely proportional. Otherwise every do-nothing who should be sleeping in a cardboard box would have a mansion, a yacht, and many dedicated servants.
I would suggest that for the average person from the gutter through the upper middle class, their wealth is proportional to their effort. I'll concede that the situation changes for the exceedingly rich.
What the heck is wrong with you? There *is* no such thing as an "anarcho-capitalist" and you're not one either. You're either an anarchist, in which case you oppose capitalism as the oppressive system of exploitation that it is, or you're a capitalist, in which case I want your head on a stick with some buttermilk pancakes. Get your political philosophy straight before posting! Just because Eric Raymond says something silly on his website doesn't mean it's actually worth even a fart in space. Back to the drawing board people.
Nothing "has a flag on it" indicating ownership by its nature. All "property" is acquired and kept by force. Your cave is "yours" because you guard it. Now people get together and decide that instead of everyone guarding everything they want to keep they would agree to share efforts guarding each other's "property" so they can go about doing other things that interfere with the necessary guarding of "property" without which the concept cannot exist. All this relies on everyone benefiting from it, or at least on that those that don't find it useful being to weak to do something else. As time passes things become more and more complex.
All of this is obvious. There is no difference between various kinds of "property", "real" or "imaginary". It's all "imaginary" and dependent on that enough people agree to imagine the same thing. It's not perfect. People don't always play by the rules even if they think they are reasonable. How many people strictly obey the speed limits? Most agree that they are basically good rules but drive a bit faster.
So it's all about balance. People obey rules because the rules are basically good for most of them. They don't obey rules that they don't think they benefit from. What currently happens with "IP" rights is that "IP" law is committing suicide. People understand that the very long term copyrights are really there to allow taking out of the market of older content so that it doesn't compete with new products. With stricter laws people will not drive slower and will not restrict themselves to what they can find in the store. They will get a radar detector and since they have one they will stop thinking about what's right and what's not so right in "IP" laws - if legislators cannot differentiate than why should those that elected them do?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Maskin#Software_patents Maskin suggested that software patents inhibit innovation rather than stimulate progress. Software, semiconductor, and computer industries have been innovative despite historically weak patent protection, he argued. Innovation in those industries has been sequential and complementary, so competition can increase firms' future profits. In such a dynamic industry, "patent protection may reduce overall innovation and social welfare." A natural experiment occurred in the 1980s when patent protection was extended to software," wrote Maskin. "Standard arguments would predict that R&D intensity and productivity should have increased among patenting firms. Consistent with our model, however, these increases did not occur." Other evidence supporting this model includes a distinctive pattern of cross-licensing and a positive relationship between rates of innovation and firm entry. [4]
Land is without value until a human does something with it.
Land has value before humans do anything to it, whether any one recognizes it or not.
Moving a boundary stone was punishable by death!
A boundary could also be something else, say the distance a horse could travel in a set period of tyme, or the area an ox could plow in a day.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's possible to conclude that 1) intellectual property is legitimate, and at the same time 2) it is not possible to restrict its distribution any more than it is possible to be half pregnant. The reality could be that the only way to legitimately keep intellectual property secure against unrestricted distribution is to not distribute it at all.
It sounds like you are shopping for a workable compromise. But just because there is a market for something, that doesn't mean that something necessarily exists-- there's a market for perpetual motion too. I suspect similarly there is ample opportunity for fraud to be perpetrated on intellectual property owners by those who purport to have a solution to their income problem...
I have always felt that laws must be sensible - at least in the sense that one can argue logically for it, so that it should seem reasonable to most people, once they understand it well enough. The problem with IP legislation now is that it doesn't make sense - it isn't balanced, it only takes into account the interests of one party.
In my opinion IP rights should be governed by active use: If you patent an invention, you keep the exclusive rights for a while if you use the invention to produce goods. This should hinder patent trolling and the situation where a company buys up a patent in order to stop a competing product from being marketed.
The same goes for copyright: it should not be possible to hold on to a book or record for generations without producing it. There are many very good books that are impossible to find because the producers don't think there is a big enough market for them or because they want to earn money on newer books and don't want the competition. If they don't keep them in production, they should forfeit the copyright after a short time - say a couple of years - so that it would be legal to go to your library and make a copy to take home. That would create quite a lot of small businesses, I think.
The purpose of IP was never to create a situation where big companies could stifle progress and competition by getting frivolous patents or by holding on to patents; or a situation where big publishers and record labels could control most of what the public were allowed to read and listen to. The purpose of IP should be to allow the artist or inventor to profit from their creative work, simply, and that should be a personal right, not something that could be transferred; after all, if I wrote a book, then I am the author, even if I didn't publish it myself; only the author should have any IP rights over their work.
... an anarcho-capitalist?
I come up with a design for the better mousetrap. Unfortunately, I don't have the funds to build it. I try to sell it to the two remaining competing (ok, cartellizing) corporations that build mousetraps, but both refuse to pay me to build it. Why should they? Just wait a year and they can build it for free.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The US Declaration of Independence declares rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Rights are tricky to define, but I think one facet of them is that they apply to everyone equally.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence that's what he wrote, that every had the same rights even slaves, of course he opposed slavery, and women. Unfortunately some who were going to sign the DOI believed in slavery and some thought women's rolls was to do what they were told to do. So he had to remove those parts in order to get the signatures.
FalconShould there be a Law?
But maybe this could be turned into a poll? Maybe the first sensible poll on /. in... I dunno, years?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are stupid or just an idiot?
You want to convince anyone one here that 90% of the people in the US *aren't* willing to work?
Check my sig -- where do *you* fall in the US percentile's of wealth? How many record stocks do you think the average household owns? You think they don't work? They should pay $200,000 or more for the great "making available" nonsense?
I've worked decades writing intellectual property -- one of the products I worked on was developed mostly on my own time...but my sin -- I was a newbie out of college. I was trying to get ownership of the project that had been left fallow. I revitalized the product - running development on it as an internal 'Test' version -- interviewing coworkers (other software developers) and asked them what features they'd want to see.. came up with a coherent and flexible implementation that ran 10x the speed of the original. I *only* gave it to my coworkers in my department in my building in Santa Clara. Next I heard, I was on the carpet because customers were demanding it as a product and marketing managers were asking the management who was sitting on the product why it wasn't on the roadmap and why I wasn't even listed as working on the product). It was no secret that I'd done the work -- as I'd done all the interviewing and gathering of feedback -- fixing old bugs -- making sure I didn't create (or at least didn't release to my 'customers' (coworkers) bugs (this was back in the day before products were expected to have bugs in them at release and bugs were fixed at the company's expense). But not only was I not given the project -- but they didn't want me making more internal releases, because they were making them out to customers (this was back before the internet).
Same company -- next debacle, some more of the marketing types approached my management and wanted to know if I could adapt my DnD game to be run with their voice recognition hardware. I was willing -- it was a 'test' project -- and fun. But upon completion, they and their management liked it enough to want to use it to demo the product to customers. Minor snag -- they'd have to arrange some compensation to me for use of the game (another project on my own time -- but this one was clearly mine -- I'd even listed it under 'prior inventions' when I came to work at this company. Now I was naive -- a 500 or 1000$ bonus would have been ecstatic for me -- and peanuts to them -- marketing had no issue with the idea -- they were used to the concept of paying for work to be done -- or paying commissions. But because I was an "engineering grunt", excuse me, a 'software engineer who exercised creativity and considerable control over the way I did my work' -- which has been the reason why software engineers are lumped in the same "exempt" category as performance artists and managers instead of being hourly and eligible for overtime. This meant that engineering management refused to consider any extra payment over my base salary for my 'creative work'. But on top of it -- they tried to give the rights away - telling me that their employment contract gave them rights to anything I created while I was employed with them. At that point, I was more than a little pissed. I pointed to my employment contract that my 'invention' -- the 'game' was listed as a prior work to my employment at Intel. So they cancelled the project and told the marketing types it was a no-go.
Now we're not even talking recurring royalties or per-copy fees...at MOST we were talking a 1 time
bonus in the 500-1000 range. That's how "valued" I was taught intellectual property was.
I left the company soon after a very *average* review that my manager quite clearly was uncomfortable giving -- in pre-review writing time periods he was saying how I had been doing excellent work -- exceeds on all counts -- but the upper engineering management that didn't like customers and marketing demanding my products -- multiple times -- they didn't even want to give me my own project to work on (my main job
So sell your photographs ... once, get paid, and the person you sold to gets the right to do what they like with them (usually publish them)
....
.... why?
Why should you sell them and still own the right to them?
This is the problem with IP
You take a photo, sell it to me but I have to pay you to copy it, publish it, sell it on, and the people I sell it to have to pay you as well
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Trademarks stops people claiming to be you
...
Copyright stops people copying your product
Patents stop people copying your design
The problem is that patents are nowadays too general and are applied too strictly so that they actually cover ideas and not designs
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
The early warez scene was quite a politically charged atmosphere rich with enthusiastic, educated, talented & mostly altruistic patrons. Without any forethought or discussion a sensible rule to live & prosper by was adopted by all... the golden rule was/is: if you benefit from it, buy it.
Many of today's big software companies benefited hugely from this special relationship.
Many of today's biggest criminal elements benefited hugely from this special relationship.
And so the escalation continues, with extremes on both sides proliferating a cacophony of ideals. Bang on schedule, in walk the lawyers and we find ourselves in the fine mess we are in. What to do now...?
I contest that this is not a problem to be solved with ONLY rules and empirical measurements. The current rabbit hole down which all legal efforts have tumbled is bottomless.
The "catch-22" nature of this issue will ultimately conspire to thrust the scope of discussions to a point where words like "honor" and "balance" are forced have real meaning,... again.
The answer is simple.
Its understanding the question that needs work.
The very term and concept of "intellectual property" is a contrivance of the corporate/legal establishment to expand the reach of the distinct concepts of copyright and patent law by conflating them with physical property (land, buildings, possessions). We can readily see this confusion in the posts here. Thought should not be patentable (e.g. business processes-"one-click shopping"). Einstein could not patent the Theory of Relativity. Intellectual discovery is not the same as invention since what you have discovered is "out there" and just awaiting discovery. You have invented nothing. Genetically modified seeds should not be patentable, only the specific hardware or software unique to the process and developed by you. This would more properly come under propriety information. Encoding the human genome should not be patentable but any specific invention produced to do it might well be. The solution is to go back to the very basic principles of patent and copyright law i.e. a unique physical invention or creative product; a limited duration monopoly to encourage and reward invention; and the use it or lose it principle. Patent and copyright protection is one thing: enforcement and penalties for violations is another issue. When does the public interest trump blind enforcement of individual rights? e.g. the music industry where technology has made obsolete one business model and the industry is resisting a new one. When the public has no respect for a law or deems it obsolete, in this case rights to recorded music, then the law has to change. The first line of defense for the public interest is to be very cautious and sparing in granting monopoly rights and to keep them very limited in scope and duration.
The anarcho part is there to get the chix0rz. This guy probably used to be a libertarian, but when he'd take his stand at a co-ed party, those who heard him properly would back away warily, and the rest would think he works in the library. Now, he can leech some anarcho cred, differentiate himself from his dad's tired old brand of capitalism, and on occasion wear a black hoodie. Just don't look for him on the streets at the next WTO meeting. He'll be inside with the interns.
Fixed that for you. If those who value a land with no government are really serious about what they say why not move to such a country? No such place exists. Areas not claimed by "legitimate" governments are claimed by groups that act as governments. A government is just a mafia with flags, and conversely, a mafia is just a government without flags.
Even if such an unclaimed territory existed, what good would running away to it do? The governments of the world would carry on killing and exploiting just the same. Anarchists seek to expose these brutal organizations for what they really are, and to attack the double-standards that allows them to operate in the first place. Afghanistan for example is always looking for bright people to help build its economy and infrastructure. Seriously? Afghanistan has (at least) two governments. How is that an improvement?
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
Your statement is emotionally quite loaded, so that I couldn't refuse and had to create an account in order to answer you.
Maybe I start with the answer first:
- Yes, property exists for real life things.
- No, not every real life thing can become property.
- No, there is no such a thing like Intellectual Property (IP).
When I have a look through the responses I see answers that exactly play around my statements, but normally it is very hard for regular people to answer this hard question properly. I had to read a lot and do lot's of thought, before I really understood.
In legal terms, property is not really well defined. Legislature makes use of stomach-felt intuition about it and makes single rules and exception in how to deal with it. You guess it: it is always very dangerous to use undefined words. Property is also used in an attribute-of-something sense, which adds to confusion, but has no relationship to what we mean by property here. The result of this intuition-based approach is that every country has different rules for it and especially with immaterial property the discussion really heats up. But I think completely unnecessarily.
Property is the right to control the use of objects (entities). From an ethical point of view that kind of property concept arises, when the question comes up about who decides, what happens with the fruits of your work. Therefore, correctly, many people associate property with (hard) work. Unfortunately, in capitalism, work and property are set to be equal, to be kind of the same thing, instead of being just related concepts (work produces property). The laws in all capitalistic countries protect this unjustified "equal sign". The work of property is the "interest". This is the extra amount of work you have to do in order to make the other guy work less. You know it from the bank, but you also know it as the dividents to your company's owners or any kind of rent. The result of this is that you can acquire more property by owning property. I abbreviate this statement here and come right to the point: The result of the wrong equal sign is, that Adam Smith's "Magic Hand" doesn't work! The Magic Hand, expressed in terms of Systems Theory, is a negative feedback loop that makes a system converge to a stable (and by the way distributive) state. By allowing property to behave as if it was work on the market you convert the negative feedback loop into a positive feedback loop. Therefore, in capitalism everything has to go faster, bigger and bolder. This seems like a nice thing, but a positively feedbacked system also amplifies all negative economical and social developments in a unsolvable way like the problem of the rich and the poor and resource exhaustion. Capitalists are people, who favor the system of getting some extra property, without having done some useful work for it. Economy looks then not like a serious matter of using resources to provide people with things they need but like a nice game of chances where you can earn some extra score. In capitalistic systems there never arises a trade off between limited resources and gain. The very rich people do no do useful work, but their property "earns" the riches for them. And it does it, basically, with no limit, since doing less than nothing is not much of trading-off argument. From the statements posted here, I guess, that none of you guys is a capitalist, because everybody favors the principle of property as a result of work.
But doing work is, ethically again, not the only criterion to be fulfilled, when it comes down to the decision, if something can be property or not. Without getting into very long details, property must fulfill ALL these criteria:
- result of (human) work
- identifiable entity (i.e. not a class of things)
- quantifiable (can be counted or limited resource)
- has no will (no slaves, no animal property)
- was not obtained at the expense of others
- does not harm others
That means, that for most of the things
Which is why we have a State.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Oh good, then I'll use your language.
Sort of. I wouldn't call it "intellectual property" but I do differ from real anarcho-capitalism and take a more "leftist" attitude, in that I think it's ok to use the force of law to artificially manipulate the market and create scarcity where it otherwise would not exist naturally, in order "to promote the progress of the arts and .. sciences." So that probably puts me in the pro-IP camp, and to the left of many anarcho-whatevers.
I differ from the "Hollywood-style" IP people, though, and take a more conservative and anarcho-capitalist attitude, in that I don't think of it as property. Maybe some information was property when you kept it a secret, but as soon as you shared, sold, or otherwise disclosed it to other people (especially under the terms of copyright), then it's no longer property. I think of property as something that essentially lasts forever (or as long as possible, and for information, that means forever), and I do not favor eternal copyrights. The whole reason for promoting arts/sciences is to eventually get that stuff into the public domain. If the information never enters public domain, then there's no reason for The People to give up anything in order to encourage its creation. So, to me, it's not about "property"; it's about "quid-pro-quo." Copyright is a contract, where the two sides give up something for mutual gain. We'll give you a monopoly for a while, if you get your creation "out there" so that it can be enjoyed and eventually fall into PD. That probably puts me to the right of Hollywood (but still to the left of the Randites ;-).
Go back to "Copyright Classic." This worked for hundreds of years. Whatever laws were on the books in 1808, would still be damn close to perfect, today. Maybe just amend 'em a little:
As for "predatory abuse of the tort system" I wouldn't view that as necessarily falling within discussion about copyright, even if such abuses happen to have been topical lately. Whatever solution ends up stopping RIAA from suing people who didn't infringe copyright, should also work for dealing with a polluter who SLAPPs someone who squeals on their dumping. I think most of the abuse should be punishable by the courts, somehow. As for the details of "somehow," I'm not sure. "Loser pays" generally sounds like a good idea, but I'm sure people can come up with examples where that policy would fail. Still, it might be an improvement.
Another really obvious thing to do, is get rid of whatever the government is doing, which is causing the l
To use a technique that has given us food for thousands of years!
The iniquity!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
(i'm sorry, i could be more polite, but you're really so deluded there is no other polite way to address you than moron):
human nature is a static unchanging condition. you do not change human nature. instead, human nature changes and destroys your naive ignorant wishful ideology. do you understand how that works? you do not skateboard into a brickwall and wishfully think the brickwall will just disappear as you approach. no, you hit the brickwall, then you fall down. in case the analogy is too much for you: human nature=brick wall. your ideology=skateboarder. apparently i have to hold your hand on these kinds of comparisons
your ideology must conform to human nature in order to be successful. you cannot form your ideology IN WILLFUL DDISOBEYANCE OF HUMAN NATURE AND EXPECT ANYTHING TO WORK. based on hoping people will suddenly start behaving in ways no group of human beings has ever behaved in 1 million years of our existence, in any culture, in any time period. understand? is that too complicated a concept for you? moron?
reference: communism. if you want more wikipedia references tro start your stunning edumacation on human nature, try, oh, any utopian society set up anywhere in the world over the last 500 years, started by the same clueless wishful naive thinkers like you. and then follow the results
good day, fucktard
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is a scarcity of intelligence applied to create Intellectual Property. The intellectual property is a form of currency which is used to purchase a patent. The patent allows you a set period of time to create manufacturing capability, create sales capability, manufacture, and sell products for a profit without having to compete with the people who do not apply their intelligence to create intellectual property but have pre-existing manufacturing and sales capability which gives them an unfair advantage.
a little simplistic, but not too bad, actually; a nice first pass. the problem is that it entirely neglects the cost to society of preventing these things: locking ideas away. trademarks do a pretty good job because they have none of that cost.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
I'd have put it a bit more nicely.
;-)
Ahh, but then you'd end up at +5 insightful rather than 0 Flamebait with many responses, mostly positive. I just find the latter more amusing
Scott Adams said everything I wanted to say.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Without law or society there isn't any property. So how does an 'anarcho-capitalist' assert ownership over the means of production, or over anything? (A: Guns)
"Following your logic, intellectual property would be enslavement of soemthing intellectual in nature, it would not be enslavement of the intellect iself."
interesting. thank you for pointing this out. both are the case. both are equally abhorrent and have significant detrimental consequences.
The native Americans were not poor, like most native people they had no concept of money or individual land ownership, but had all they needed so were not poor, they had plentiful food, clean water, shelter and all they needed
Ah, romanticizing the noble savage and the missing the stone ages. How quaint! Unfortunately, its not true at all. Food and water and shelter were not plentiful by any stretch of the imagination. And, most importantly of all, they certainly had land ownership, because, tribes used to war among each other to retain it.
go and ask all those office workers who long for the simple life
Yeah, the simple life. Those retards want to trade sitting in an air conditioned office stuffing your face with all the possible foods and drinks you could eat imported from around the world, in exchange for watching your children die during a harsh winter because Uncle Bob got gored in the thigh by a wild bore and so the animal that everyone was going to eat got away. People that long for the "simple life" should try it some time.
This is my sig.
No. I'd suggest you are conflating nihilists
with anarcho-capitalists. Anarcho-capitalists
believe in the efficacy of capitalizing your
owned assets, both for yourself, and for the
general welfare, they just don't believe in the
efficacy of coercive government enforcement
of property rights.
You might object to this on the grounds of
practicality, but I don't believe you can
reasonably call this inherently conflicted.
Anarchists of a serious bent like to argue about
natural rights vs. granted rights--arguing that
what you have wrested from nature, without
materially diminishing the natural supply of
resources, is yours by commmon consent of the
tribe--a philosophy so primitive that other
social mammals have been observed to exhibit it.
On the other hand, if you think this naive, than
you are allied with that famous humanist
philosopher, Mao Tse-Tung: "rights grow from the
barrel of a gun".
No I am NOT using two words to refer to the same thing. They are very different things, even if you only look at them in the context in which I used them.
First, "rights" are something that are INHERENT and may not be taken away by government. (If you disagree, go research some historical legal texts.) Privileges, on the other hand, can be taken away.
Second, as was said more eloquently than I can in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution: government exists solely at the sufferance of the People being governed. The American principle is and has been: if the Government becomes insufferable, it is not only the right but the DUTY of the citizens to remove that government from power.
Rights belong to citizens. The government only has privileges allowed them by the governed, which may be taken away if necessary. And if you doubt this, you have not been reading your history of revolutions. You can say all you want about theory, but this is the reality.
And no, I am NOT confusing "right" with ability. Our own Declaration of Independence states quite clearly that we have not only the right, but the duty. YOU are the one who is confused here. Why don't you read some history, where you might gain some insight into these definitions?
As for your final paragraph... well, all I can say is, if you read about the actual circumstances and what came to light eventually, you might change your tune. And your assertion that in the United States, the number of guns has been the CAUSE of crime... man, you really don't know your facts, do you? Here is a fact for you, which you can look up for yourself if you care to. I will not bother to cite references because you obviously have not bothered to do your own homework; why should I do it for you? Ah, shit, I will give you this one for free: the United States Department of Justice -- which has in interest in showing MORE crime rather than less -- clearly documents that the number of guns owned does NOT correlate to crime. If anything, there is an overall negative correlation.
I am not going to bother with you further until you learn some facts. At this point, either you are totally clueless or just trolling.
I'm somewhat embarrassed to make this comment here (partly because this Slashdot thread has some very good discussion on intellectual property), but I've seen this signature (or something like it) a few times and wanted to respond somewhere.
;-)
Re your signature: 'For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"'
Did you really mean "intensive purposes"? The original phrase, to the best of my knowledge, was "for all intents and purposes". Not to say you (or someone) might really mean "intensive purposes", but then I'd ask you what you mean by that.
I guess this is particularly ironic (I think that's the right word)--to comment on the use of a phrase (or word) in a comment that is already about the use of a word.
In retrospect, in the last line, I should have included the word "different" (in parenthesis), i.e.:
;-)
I guess this is particularly ironic (I think that's the right word)--to comment on the use of a phrase (or word) in a comment that is already about the use of a (different) word.
To each his own, dear friend. :-)